These days everything is digital from home movies, to baby pictures, to music collections. Having all those files sitting around necessitates a backup solution that is safe, secure, and redundant. LaCie's CloudBox will offer you safe, secure, and redundant but they'll do so at a bit of a steep price.
The cheapest, fastest, and arguably easiest solution is to put an external hard drive (or thumb drive depending on your data needs) on your computer, back up all the files, and tuck that device away in a safe or a drawer. While that works, it doesn't protect you from a house fire or even a robbery. So while simple, it's not particularly ideal. LaCie's CloudBox combines the idea of just plugging in an external hard drive with the redundancy of backing up to the cloud.
For $199 you can buy a 100 GB CloudBox external hard drive to back up your various files quickly and easily right from your home network. The bonus is that anything saved to the CloudBox itself is automatically backed up to a 100 GB cloud storage server. Before your data is sent off into the ether, it's encrypted which gives you the security you so desperately want in this age of hacking and internet tomfoolery. If your computer dies, is stolen by ninjas, or otherwise implodes in a doomsday-like scenario, you can just download your files back from the cloud server and decrypt them.
Right now you're thinking, what's the downside? Well, the $199 price tag is incredibly steep for only a 100 GB external drive. These days you can pay that much for 1 TB or more depending on how savvy a shopper you are. The real issue is the yearly fee associated with the cloud backups. When you buy the device you get a free year of storage, which is fantastic, but after that you're going to be paying $100 a year to maintain cloud backups. For that kind of coin you could just buy an extra external drive each year, back up your files, and ship them to a remote destination.
The idea here is brilliant though. Everyone wants to keep their data secure and redundant without having to even think about it. Hopefully LaCie's solution will either drop in price or some competitors will enter the market and makes this kind of thing more affordable for the average consumer. For now we can dream about set it and forget it local/cloud backups.
