How can online backup be unlimited?

Many people ask us how it is possible that some providers offer unlimited online backup for their clients. Of course this seems rather suspicious to some of you and rightfully so! How great would it be not to worry about space anymore storing everything you like in the cloud. It can even be a great relief if you don’t know how much space you really need and just want to get your data backed up like this lady of 87 here.

It is about the business model

Online backup services do have a certain business model that allows them to offer infinite cloud storage and backup. However, nothing is infinite, neither is storage. So providers like to advertise with their service being unlimited but they would obviously go brooke if you really had unlimited files to store. That’s why you could call that a soft lie. But in the end that’s what we’re used to in advertising in general. There are lots of promises out there that are not entirely true, shampoo commercial say they give your hair more volume, shavers overpower themselves with a ridiculous number of blades etc.

So how do those services make money?

Unlimited online backup services make money off of the low end users. Those are users who only store a couple of gigabyte on the companies’ servers. They lose money on the other end with high end users who store way over a terabyte of data. But as numbers show, there are more low end users that make this business model quite profitable.

Plus, storage prices decrease constantly, while 1TB of data cost thousands of dollars to host ten years ago, today it is only a fraction of that cost.

Unlimited online backup services have their own data architecture

Many online backup and storage services use Amazon to leverage their data infrastructure to offer highly available storage to their customers. While that is pretty effective the downside are the relatively high costs compared to an own data infrastructure. That’s why Backblaze for example developed their own storage system. Thus making it possible to deploy unlimited online backup for as low as 5$ per month.

What’s the future?

So where are we heading? In my opinion, we’re going to see less providers that offer fixed gigabyte data plans. Companies will realize that people don’t want to think about backup or storage they might need. So a general shift towards unlimited online backup is foreseeable.

For consumers this is a very good sign as competitions is good for innovation and pricing. With storage getting cheaper every year we will see how providers fight over customer by lowering their prices. Also, demand for backup and storage will likely increase as our lives get more and more digital.