The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Consumer Cloud Storage

The promise of automatic data backup into the cloud is alluring. Off-site backup offers protection against a whole class of catastrophic risks (fire, flood, etc.) that on-site backup solutions cannot. Data can be backed up into the cloud automatically with little or no user involvement. Incremental backup software running detects the latest changes, encrypts the data, and sends it into the cloud. Files can be restored on demand and some services allow copies of files to be downloaded through a web interface to other machines, providing a form of file sharing. With costs dropping to ~$60-$100 per year for unlimited storage, it is not surprising that many home and small business users are signing up. In this paper, we evaluate four popular consumer cloud storage offerings – Mozy, Carbonite, Dropbox, and CrashPlan – to determine if they live up to the benefits users expect. We document wide variations in backup and restore performance, the type of data that is backed-up, no liability for data loss, and problems with data privacy. From our experiments, we derive a set of lessons and recommendations for consumer cloud storage that if followed more uniformly, could substantially improve the cloud storage experience for many consumers. 1