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No Platform-Agnostic Online Backup?Writing in
his InfoWorld weblog,
Chad Dickerson happens to step into the topic of backups.
Specifically, after some of his readers take him to task for using an
online backup service that supports only Windows,
he says he wishes someone would point out a platform-agnostic backup service
that handles both Windows and Mac.
Color me as clueless as Chad's readers. Like them,
I would have thought the woods would be lousy with
multi-platform online backup services. After all,
it's the same Internet you're backing up to,
whether the data is coming from a Mac, a PC, a Linux box, or whatever,
right?
A little reflection shows why there are few, if any,
truly multi-platform online backup services.
These folks often have to invest a fair amount of smarts
in the client software that is responsible for getting the
backup data shipped across the network.
Because bandwidth ain't free, there's significant motivation
to make these clients do things like compression, checking to
avoid backing up data that hasn't changed, and things like that.
That all adds up to a non-trivial amount of development work
to create the client software, so multiplying that by 2 to add
Mac support could quite reasonably be a low priority for some
services.
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