Data Backup Digest

Forever.com is a brand new cloud storage service that is currently only available via private invitation. Users can input their email address on the website to be notified of when the service goes live, or be in with a chance of using it before the general public.
You’d be right in thinking that there are a lot of cloud storage services out there on the market. What makes Forever.com so different? Well, they have a big claim: sign up and they’ll store your data for your whole life and one hundred years on top of that.
Forever.com also offers another pretty neat service. You can send them a box full of various things like photos, letters and tapes and they will convert all of these and upload them to your cloud account. This is, of course, something you can do at home with the right equipment, but it can be a time consuming process and a lot of people just don’t understand how to go about it.
Again, you’re right to think that sounds crazy! It remains to be seen whether or not Forever.com are going to be able to fulfil this claim – indeed, only time will tell. But when you consider that half of new businesses fail within their first year, it’ll be very interesting to see how the company fairs over an extended duration.
The service has something called a guarantee fund, which is an amount of money put aside in order to support the storage in the future. Technology is a fast moving thing and file formats are bound to change. Forever.com promises to convert all your data to future file formats and ensure that is readable by generations to come.
So, let’s turn our hand to the question of the moment: is this service going to be worth it? As with so many things, it probably depends on a variety of factors.
First of all, the hard fact is that each GB of costs you $100. If you wanted to store 20GB of data, for example, then that would set you back $2000. It’s not a cheap amount, but then again your data is supposedly being stored for a very long time.
This is a one off cost and, unlike other cloud services on the market, isn’t charged on a monthly basis. So if you really did want to use this service for your lifetime and beyond then it probably is worth it. 100GB of data on Dropbox currently costs $99 a year. Assuming the price stays the same, storing that data for 50 years will cost $4950. On Forever.com, the same amount will cost you $10000. Only if you use Dropbox for 100 years will the prices begin to match… so you need to be sure you’re going to be using Forever.com for a long time to get real bang for your buck.
Now, there’s no doubt about it that if you’re after a backup service then it would be much cheaper to run it yourself. Some hard drives, a RAID setup and perhaps a fireproof box: that’s a pretty decent backup plan and it’ll cost you far less.
Then again, perhaps this service isn’t for people who know how to do that. Forever.com offers a peace of mind, if it fulfils its claims. In concept, your account can be passed down through generations and all those family photos can be viewed forever!