Last month I wrote about my investigation of on-line data backup. I’ve moved on from Backblaze and SpiderOak is my current favourite. The only way SpiderOak may fall to the wayside depends on testing Des is doing. He’s checking out software that allows one to back up data to a friend’s computer. If this works, we’ll back up to each other…without the monthly fee. I hope it works, but we shall see.

In the meantime, it’s SpiderOak for me. But my topic is more general. It’s related to the amount of data you’ve got to move to actually make use of an on-line backup service. The National Capital Freenet provides a simple bar graph to give you a relative idea of your bandwidth consumption. These are my figures for the year, ending yesterday at 9 p.m.:

So there you go. My average was between three and nine gigabytes per month, until the on-line backups started. Then it was 85 GB for the last half of April, and almost 44 GB for the first week of May! Jeez.