Comments on: SmugVault – Store everything for next to nothing.

By: mod converter

mod converter — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:03:01 +0000

Love it! You got me so excited to get one and start shooting video!

By: Jeff

Jeff — Mon, 04 May 2009 19:15:48 +0000

Are the jpg previews automatic? I am checking during my first upload right now and seeing only a 'smugmug archive' icon

By: Don MacAskill

Don MacAskill — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 03:48:43 +0000

@Paul

Optical disks, like CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Ray, have very short shelf lives. The plastic runs and distorts over time, and various inks and dyes have a limited shelf life, too. I know *lots* of people who’ve lost all their photos because their CDs now fail to read.

~10 years is sorta the expected norm, but I’ve seen people have problems in far less time than that.

I’d be careful relying on optical media…

By: Paul

Paul — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 01:29:13 +0000

While this may be great for some users, I’m hoping to see 1TB optical discs someday soon that I can store in a bank safety deposit box

By: Don MacAskill

Don MacAskill — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 04:19:21 +0000

@Jacob

SmugMug isn’t charging $1/GB/month. We’re charging $1/month (flat, no matter how many GBs you have) and then $0.22/GB/month. Big huge difference there.

By: Television Archiving » Blog Archive » links for 2008-06-25

Television Archiving » Blog Archive » links for 2008-06-25 — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 22:32:44 +0000

[...] SmugVault – Store everything for next to nothing. (tags: backup hosting s3 storage tools) [...]

By: Don MacAskill

Don MacAskill — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:20:19 +0000

@Mik

The transfer fees have us at break-even. (We have to pay our bandwidth providers for the bytes you upload to us, then we have to pay our bandwidth providers to send the bytes to Amazon, then we have to pay Amazon’s upload fee. 3X as much as Amazon would charge). Only the storage fee is marked up so we (hopefully) make some profit.

Given that we invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into making the product already, and that there’ll be significant engineering, operations, development, and customer service costs going forward, I think it’s only fair we mark things up a little – otherwise we lose money (as we will do for many months at least, if not years, already). Pennies take a long time to add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If the extra features of being integrated with SmugMug and our UI aren’t enough for you, you’re free to use S3 yourself. No-one’s stopping you. Choice is good.

By: Mik

Mik — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:54:38 +0000

It’s a nice offering to the smugmug line but why have you marked up Amazon’s underlying fees by almost 50% or more?

By: Erik

Erik — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:31:10 +0000

To all those discussion SmugVault vs. JungleDisk…IMO you’re trying to compare apples to oranges. There are different use cases for each. Obviously SmugVault is very photo and video-centric. Yes, you can back up your documents to SmugVault, but I’d bet that the *vast* majority of SmugVault customers will use it primarily for photos and video, and that they’ll be either Pros or non-techie amateur photogs that want to be able to back up their raw files within the same workflow as they’re using to upload their media to their Smugmug galleries. For photog enthusiasts, the ability to have SmugVault automatically associate jpg and raw copies of the same photo (and have one-click access to them through their Smugmug galleries) is quite compelling, especially if they’re of the non-technical bent.

Jungle Disk, on the other hand, is a much more flexible, general-purpose backup tool. You can pretty much throw any file at it (up to S3’s file size limits), and it’ll gladly back it up. Sure, you can pay extra if you want web access to your files, but the UI and tight integration will be nowhere close to what you get with SmugVault. For most Jungle Disk users, that doesn’t matter – they just want to be able to restore files if needed.

So – like I said initially, I believe the use cases (and intended audience) for SmugVault and Jungle Disk (or the latest online backup tool of the week) are quite different. They’re both amazing tools, and are both very good at what they do.

By: GBTV #381 (small) | GeekBrief.TV | TechTV Update

GBTV #381 (small) | GeekBrief.TV | TechTV Update — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:19:22 +0000

[...] SmugMug has a new service for unlimited storage of any type of file. The service is called SmugVault and it’s built on Amazon Web Services. Storage costs pennies per GB. [...]