Newsletter Vol 64

Can you use the Internet to back up data?

Internet service is getting faster and cheaper ... but is it now fast and affordable enough to be used as your primary backup system? Backing up files to a USB external drive is different. By using USB 2.0, you can transfer files up to 480 Mbps - I will explain.

Transfer speed is measured in Mbps (Megabits per second). Using a 1 Mbps connection, you can send 125 kilobytes every second. This is not fast enough to receive streaming video in standard resolution. To receive HD (1080p) video streaming, you should have a 20 Mbps connection.

One 2 hour / 1 GB movie uploaded using a 5 Mbps broadband connection can take about 20 minutes or 1.5 hours with 1 Mbps speed. Given that a terabyte has 1,048,576 megabytes, if you could achieve the theoretical 60 Mbps transfer, you could do it in slightly over 4 hours and 45 minutes.

I am designing a system that allows people to back up a huge amount of data for safe storage. The key to this is speed and ease-of-use. The first step is to create a testing method for the file transfer rate. It is a challenging but interesting problem to solve.

Who is Ken Uchikura?

Kenichi Uchikura
President / CEO
Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

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PSPINC CEO Kenichi Uchikura's Blog

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