oops! made a mistake: Over 5 years it would be $516.25 vs $599.40 factoring electric costs properly.

It's cheaper for me because 1) I didn't have to buy a new computer for the setup 2) I'm in a building with inclusive utilities

I see you didn't read the rest of the comments in this thread.

$20/m is insane. Try $47.45/year at 1kwh/day * 13c/kwh

I'd never use raid in this kind of setup - too much room for failure. Just independent backups done at separate times. $120 worth of drives is far different than $600 worth of service over a 5 year period. You can mitigate the batch issue by purchasing drives from different manufacturers or using price match and buying from different stores.

Again, you'd have to have those failures occur at the same time as the main drive failure which is unlikely. Internet is always on and paid for regardless. Power is a cost but we're talking $100 a year if you were drawing 130W constantly, for me that's offset by the fact that it's used for other services as well. A basic system from 3 years ago will draw 30-60W under moderate usage. The cost of the system itself is zero as there are so many old desktops floating around that you can get free it's scary. If you really want to factor it in, without doing much research (single website, 5 minute lookup for lowest cost items that would be compatible): $159 (PSU: $15, MB $45, CPU $45, $30, RAM $24) + $120 for the drives. We'll split the difference and say you consume roughly 1kwh/day (~42W constant draw) at 13 cents per kwh (much higher than I pay). Total cost over a 5 year period: $326.45 vs Google's $599.40

Those remote chances must also occur at the same time as a main drive failure.

It's not that much time investment if you know what you're doing. Took about 2 hours of configuration and very little ongoing maintenance. The biggest limitations I've found are the scheduling of P2P away from the backup times and backup failures due to misbehaving routers. It definitely helps that we're both in urban areas that are well serviced by ISPs. It wouldn't be possible without the 10Mbps upload speed on either end.

That is true, the servers were already setup for other reasons so that wasn't a cost factor for me, but if you don't have those already they would be part of it. Not a major part though, the server they're on now was an old system that lost it's usefulness as a desktop. You don't need anything significant, just something capable of interfacing with the extra drives. They need an odd reboot/security updates but most of that is automated/can be done remotely. Maybe once every few months I'll call over and get them to reset manually. It's very much setup and forget.

10Mbps SSH - works beautifully.

In our situation 3 drives would have to fail to lose the data. We're each responsible for our own backups, I'm pretty bad for testing them (read: never) but the last time I needed it everything worked perfectly. We both had secure remote networks setup for other reasons so it seemed sensible to backup each others data. The way I've setup mine is that the main drive is backed up on drive 1 on Mon/Wed/Fri/Sun and drive 2 is updated on the other days. We do it between 2am to 8am so that the data transfer isn't counted against our monthly caps.

Internal drive does not mean that drive is located in the same place as my main drive. See my other post about where it's located.

No, because the 2nd drive provides redundancy - if drive 1 fails then you restore from drive 2. There's a slight possibility that both drives fail at the same time but that's a very remote chance.

Aside from the fact that I have 2 such drives that I carry around with me, the ones I was referring to are setup on home servers accessible from anywhere.

I have a server and my brother-in-law has a server. 10Mbps pipes on either end (upload), offsite automated backup (basic software handles this) with built in redundancy (again, software creates an image of the main backup drive) for both of us. We'd both have to be robbed/have fires at the same time.

Works pretty damn well and the only costs are the drives themselves and a little bit of electricity.

I can pickup a 1 TB drive right now for ~$60 which means I could afford 2 of them at Google's prices. Instead of 1 year of service I can expect 5 years out of a SATA drive typically. So if nothing goes wrong, I've saved myself $480, if something does go wrong with both drives, I've saved myself $360.

Seriously. This "article" reads more like an ad. $120/year for 1 TB is more than 9 times what I'd pay for 5 years of a 1 TB internal SATA.

They did finance a couple of the ones involved in the suit (some crappy one with Segal and one other random one)