You don't make any sense, but thanks for playing. They describe several mental strategies in your given example.

Yes, I'm targeting more of the low bandwidth households that can't back up to the cloud and those smart enough not to trust the crowd, but not educated enough to roll their own solution. I don't see an offering from Iron Mountain that caters to the new mom with 10GB of baby photos.

Data security is something I will have to deal with. I think offline encrypted volumes will be pretty tough to snoop.

I am spinning up an offsite backup/archive company. I plan to offer annual data backup plans. I'll bill you and send you a flash device for your data, which will be loaded to a server that hashes it and uses some other processes to protect the data integrity.

I am considering offering an escrow service where data can be released to a third party when certain criteria are met. The site is empty now, but check back to find out more, http://www.o2ark.com./

That depends on the state in some states a safe deposit box is the best place for a will and the law has special allowances to search for one. I think Pennsylvania is this way, maybe Indiana.

Yes, my plan is to move the data to offline servers to perform the checks, probably two to begin with. I would love to avoid both file indexing and storing encryption keys. Which I will try first, that way I can avoid any warrant issues. I don't plan to support incremental backups. I will store multiple volumes, but what's in them is your business. Ideally I would like to rotate out the old volume when a new volume comes in, that's why I am marketing this as archival backup. I suppose I should plan for some multiple set system. Ideally the multiple sets would be onsite and archives would go offsite less frequently. I'm not targeting the backup every week crowd, although I should make an option available.

I think Hanlon's razor applies here:
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

but continue your witch-hunting.
Seriously, if this happened at a company it would be bad, but slap on the wrist, wink, and a small fine sort of bad. If it happened to you, you might end up in jail on a contempt of court charge for 14 years.
Yet another reason corporations aren't people and shouldn't have rights.

I'm thinking what your describing is a small part of the market, which I will probably pursue also. My main thrust is going to be for archival type backups, family photos, legal documents, etc. Things that are stored for years and rarely looked at. I want to start with annual and quarterly plans. I see alot of potential customers in the sub 32GB market, judging from past restores I've done where clients have almost lost data.

I also want to offer something for larger data sets, but it would be expensive and hence a limited market.

Thanks for your feedback. I am working on a pilot site at http://www.o2ark.com/ (probably won't be up for a week or so, but check back if your interested).

one online, one backup, on archive if it's important

Pretend your Noah, god has commanded you to take 2 copies of all your data and put it on an ark.

maybe glacier?

I'm considering starting an offline/offsite backup service using flash media and mail, with some other options. Storage would be encrypted and hashed to prevent bitrot. Just curious if anyone has some constructive criticism.

Don't hold back with the reference or contact number.

Look, if Jeffry Dahlmer shows up at your diner and tries to sell you a load of meat, your more suspicious then if it comes from someone else.

rule #1: never assume competency.

Six months is pretty bad. At the very least they should have a rotating set of annual backups going back several years. That's best practices. Year/month/week. It doesn't take too many sets.

The blame for this falls squarely on Exchange. It's limit on mailbox sizes forced people to archive to local pst files. This is something that has only been addressed at many organizations over the couple years. They've been planning and testing for about 5 years, but I don't find it difficult to believe that emails could be lost. Decentralized storage of old emails used to be the norm.