Zettabyte zBox automates off-site backups

The good news is that Zettabyte is shipping out these zBox backup units of their absolutely free of charge, the bad news is that if you want to do any backing up with 'em, you'll have to fork over at least $49 a month. See, the zBox doesn't do any storage on its own, it only has 128MB of RAM to buffer data that it pipes off to Amazon's S3 storage service. That means you'll have a truly safe backup of your data, but for the hefty cost of $49 per month for 30GB of storage, ramping all the way up to 690GB for $299 a month. Sure, with that kind of money you could probably just buy a new drive every month and do your own off-site backup, but the zBox provides a good bit of convenience, security and geek-cred to the procedure. The PowerPC-based device features gigabit Ethernet connectivity, just in case you've got a crazy fat pipe for sending out your data, and includes AES-256 encryption, web-based administration and automatic updates. It's not for everyone, but if you're tired of lugging those commodity hard drives or DVD backups off-site, the zBox's hourly backup service just might be the ticket.

[Via MobileMag]

UPDATE: Turns out the box does house its own local storage, acting as a plain ol' NAS, but backing up the data along the way. There's also a pro version with RAID-1 for the ultra paranoid. Thanks to everyone who figured this out before we did.

[Patrick @ Oct 25th 2006 8:11AM]

Very cool!

Looking at the documentation, it does appear that the zbox device does include HD storage and acts as a local NAS. The pro version also offers RAID 1 on the local box.

Unfortunately, it doesn't offer automatic sync of existing local shares yet. Once it does that, it will be about 100x cheaper than a similar service I'm using right now with all the features, and I will happily start switching my clients over.

[Patrick @ Oct 25th 2006 8:25AM]

Also, after looking at the larger picture of the zBox device in the Mobile Mag article, you can see it's just a rebadged Buffalo Linkstation NAS, which most definitely has local storage. I wonder if some of the features of the Buffalo device are retained, like the ability to add USB HDs, printers, etc? It would be nice to have yet another HD attached to the device that backs up what's on the internal HD to take home nightly.

[Matthew Flint @ Oct 25th 2006 8:36AM]

Yeah, it does look like a modded Linkstation / Kurobox. Shame that you need to return the free unit when you end the backup subscription, otherwise it'd be a very nice free hackable box!

[ananda @ Oct 25th 2006 9:32AM]

hmmm, Kuro box would be nice.. That would be neat for hackers but would cost the company money if they gave it for free. But have to return it after subscription ends. Still, the Kuro Box only cost $150.. I wonder what they would do if you sent your zBox back with Debian or something on it.

[Arone Similaria @ Oct 25th 2006 10:19AM]

Yes, it would be nice if you could keep the box - because I really don't want to move to amazon S3 as I am concerned about privacy/LEO issues ...

I would very much like to use it with my rsync.net account offsite backup account - they make me feel warm and fuzzy with their warrant canary:

http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt

[Vietor Davis @ Oct 25th 2006 5:54PM]

If we only shipped the data off to S3 it would hardly be a safe backup, we're not Amazon, and have no control over the reliability of S3. By keeping a local copy, if anything bad ever happened to S3, we could find some other location to host the off-site backups, and avoid loosing your data.

The gigabit connectivity is there for getting data onto the zBox, and to facilitate it's role as a simple NAS device.

Automatic sync to local shares on on the TODO list, and should only be another few weeks before it's deployed to all of our end users.

Concerns about Amazon getting your data are unwarrented, as only you, as we (Zettabyte Storage) have the encryption key. We're also working on a version in which only you have the encryption key, and the local filesystem is also encrypted with another key which only you have. This somewhat complicates the restore process and so we've not deployed it yet.

If you shipped your zBox back with Debian on it we'd wonder what you had against the perfectly good (though missing some stuff to conserve space) Gentoo install we gave it to you with. ;-)

The Canary is brilliant, because it relies on NOT doing anything to notify that there was trouble. Perhaps something for us to think about doing.

Vietor Davis
Zettabyte Storage
www.zettabytestorage.com

[evo @ Oct 25th 2006 8:18PM]

Vietor--

This is a cool product and I would certainly buy it if it weren't so overpriced. Amazon S3 storage costs only $0.15/GB-Month, and $0.20/GB transferred. For the low-end plan, that's $4.50/month for storage, and $6.00/month for transfer (assuming a full 30GB refresh). I find it hard to justify spending 5x that amount per month, or $600/year, for the hardware plus convenience. Better to charge for the box up front and then charge a reasonable per-month charge based on actual usage. Sorry, but I'm not going to pay $50/month just for peace of mind when I could get many times the peace of mind with not much more work on my part and for much less money.

[ZPhobe @ Nov 3rd 2006 3:18AM]

Re: Evo

Hmm, didn't find the 49$ price tag that bad on a month to month basis, but then again I wouldn't be using it just to back up my own private data, but for my work stuff as well (Compared to the electricity bill, It doesn't seem so daunting).

In any event, paying monthly does have an awkward feel for HOME use. If I'm buying a 'thing' like this box, why do I pay each month? I understand a service is involved, but there may be a better package for personal use.

I'm curious, if anyone else even reads this ;P, but would an 'up front' payment, followed by much smaller monthly payments feel more reasonable?