Data Backup Digest

Forever.com is an upcoming online storage service that aims to stand out from its competitors with a big hook: all your data will be stored forever. According to the company, they are the world’s first to offer this.
Of course, saying that all your data will be stored forever isn’t to be taken literally. It’s highly unlikely that all your data is going to be stored until the end of the world, but Forever.com say that they’ll preserve everything for your data plus 100 years. Their goal is to store for 1000 years and beyond, but at the moment they only guarantee the three digit sum.
Still, 100 years is a very long time. When you consider that half of new businesses fail within the first year, you have to wonder how they can be making such a bold claim. There’s no surety that Forever.com won’t go bankrupt in a few years and have to shut up shop. Then what comes of your payment and their guarantee? That much isn’t known at the moment, but if you’re thinking of signing up when the time comes it’s definitely something worth investigating.
But let’s not be doom and gloom and instead take a look at what precisely Forever.com offers. This seems to be a service aimed at those who aren’t extremely tech savvy, or perhaps don’t have a lot of time on their hands.
An advertising pamphlet says that if you’re like most people then your valuable data will “live in shoe boxes, drawers, files and on your computers”. Forever.com offer the ability to send them a box full of your photos, films, tapes, letters and documents and they will then scan, digitize, transfer, upload and edit all of this to your account. Media conversion isn’t new and can be done yourself if you have the kit, but it’s a neat idea for Forever.com to offer this.
The company is based out of Pittsburgh, America, and they invite you to join them and work with one of their Digital Archivists in setting up your account, should you wish. This media service comes at an additional, currently unspecified, cost.
Speaking of costs, this isn’t, as you can imagine, going to be a cheap affair. Each GB will set you back $100 if you want to have it for life. For example, 100GB will cost $10000.
But maybe having that storage “guaranteed” for life is worth that for you? It’s much cheaper to set up your own backup plan, but if you’ve no idea how to go about that then Forever.com might be a good service for you.
Additionally, the company have something called “the Forever guarantee fund”. All of the funds from the permanent storage purchases are invested in this fund, which supports the storage of your data and also with future digital migration (technology changes quickly with time and Forever.com will migrate your content to future file formats to ensure it remains readable).
Forever.com promises to keep your data safe, not to sell your data and to let you retain all the rights to your digital assets. The company is stored using Amazon S3 and Rackspace, which means it is in line with competing services like Dropbox and SugarSync in regards to security.
It will be very interesting to see how Forever.com fares and whether it lives up to its promises. At the moment the website just has an email registration field, allowing you to signify your interest and join the waiting list for a private invite.