Over the past few years when discussing O&O DiskImage I have often been asked the same question: will you be backing up in the “Cloud”? My answer to this question is “no”, to which many respond by asking why not? Surely it’s the market of the future?
I cannot judge whether that is the case or not but certainly more and more manufacturers are integrating their “own” cloud service into their solutions. The reasoning behind this in my opinion is twofold: added business, as they are charging a monthly or yearly fee for this service, and they increase the customer’s “dependency” on them as changing manufacturers would bring with it complications and the loss of their online backups. Such systems are very much closed shops but can be seamlessly integrated into the existing data image or backup solution.
I don’t think much of this for several reasons. There are already a range of companies offering good online data storage services. Be it Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Dropbox from the United States or Strato HiDrive from Germany. All have similar features at similar prices, with some offering maybe a little more, others a little less. These services can also be used to store your own (local) data images and backups, so why reinvent the wheel? You as a customer decide which provider you want to choose, and indeed you probably already have a provider should you store your data in the Cloud.
For these reasons we have actively chosen not to integrate our “own” solution into the new version 8 of O&O DiskImage. We will continue to image and backup your data locally onto your computer, external hard disks, servers or network storage. Indeed, the latter can also be called a “private cloud” as the space belongs to you and can only be accessed by you and the people you authorize. We consider this more than reasonable and sufficient.
And as I said, if you would like to have the backups or images from O&O DiskImage stored in the Cloud then you simply select the folder that you sync with your Cloud provider as the destination directory. That way your image lands in the Cloud. No additional settings required from you or in O&O DiskImage itself.
On that note I sincerely hope you have fun using the new version 8 of O&O DiskImage!
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