I believe that your assertions are not correct. Most cloud backup services, such as Carbonite, only transfer the changes you make to your files. In other words, in your example most of the Outlook database would remain unchanged, so most of the Outlook database would not be copied even though it's only one file. This strategy is what Carbonite calls "deduplication" but is called "delta encoding" in Computer Science. This comes with the added advantage of being able to store a file history without requiring space for every version of every file. This is known as "file versioning" or "revision control" in Computer Science.
As for advice for our users - since we cater mostly to novice and intermediate users, I would provide the general guidance to use a cloud backup solution rather than a homegrown solution ALWAYS. Far too often I've seen even advanced users lose data and find out the hard way that their backup set was broken, incomplete or stale. Managing your own backup is as complex as managing your own server, and we should be discouraging our users (especially the novice ones) from trying to do it themselves.
--David
On 11/25/2011 06:49 PM, RogerX19 wrote:
>
> Hi David,
>
> And a person using Outlook may be happily backing up their email to the cloud, not realizing that Outlook stores all mail, calendar, contacts etc. in one large file. An incremental change to that .pst file would require that the whole file be uploaded to the cloud anew.
>
> Each person who is considering backing up to the cloud vs. backing up locally needs to weigh the advantages / disadvantages of both, and see how they apply to their own situation.
>
>
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