How much should you pay for a website backup?!

[ata.online]

i would like to know how much should you be expected to pay for a website backup on CD?
The website is about 193mb (compressed). Some files were trash. If extracted from homedir/public_html, it comes to under 500mb.
The chap charged me $35 for postage, packaging, CD and his time! Is this reasonable?

How much did you have to pay for your backup?

Hope this is the right section for posting thread as the other sections were not relevant to the topic.

Thanks.

 

[adamparkzer]

i would like to know how much should you be expected to pay for a website backup on CD?
The website is about 193mb (compressed). Some files were trash. If extracted from homedir/public_html, it comes to under 500mb.
The chap charged me $35 for postage, packaging, CD and his time! Is this reasonable?

How much did you have to pay for your backup?

Hope this is the right section for posting thread as the other sections were not relevant to the topic.

Thanks.

Your backup should be free. Can't you do it yourself?

 

[jtwhite]

Well, you could have made that backup for under $5 yourself if you have a CD burner. I personally prefer to do my own backups. The price does sound outrageous but I've never used a company to do my backups.

 

[ata.online]

Thanks for the responses. I did question him about the charges and to just send me cpanel username/password but his reply was in the lines of....

'...When your account was active it was possible for you to make a full back-up then--for free.
Now several years later, because I like to handle my accounts responsibly, there exists a backup, but in order to get it to you will take my time and resources. Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part, therefore the fee.'

'The site's not on my server. I removed it over a year ago. The backup is on a storage drive in my home. I have a 500g mass backup drive connected to our home network, where I store back-ups of sites I host (as well as our own back-ups). In order to get it to you I'd need to transfer it from the back-up drive to my work computer, burn a CD, then mail it. Uploading it would max out our bandwidth for quite some time, and take more time than burning it to a CD.'

I don't wish to mention his name, in case he tries to sue me. If this price is overcharged, then i will have to dispute it with him and take it up with paypal.

 

[Livewire]

Thanks for the responses. I did question him about the charges and to just send me cpanel username/password but his reply was in the lines of....

'...When your account was active it was possible for you to make a full back-up then--for free.
Now several years later, because I like to handle my accounts responsibly, there exists a backup, but in order to get it to you will take my time and resources. Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part, therefore the fee.'

'The site's not on my server. I removed it over a year ago. The backup is on a storage drive in my home. I have a 500g mass backup drive connected to our home network, where I store back-ups of sites I host (as well as our own back-ups). In order to get it to you I'd need to transfer it from the back-up drive to my work computer, burn a CD, then mail it. Uploading it would max out our bandwidth for quite some time, and take more time than burning it to a CD.'

I don't wish to mention his name, in case he tries to sue me. If this price is overcharged, then i will have to dispute it with him and take it up with paypal.

There's a key point here that's changing the whole argument - your account isn't active anymore. That makes a big difference because obviously now you can't do it yourself; he could've charged $1,000 and it'dve been fine because you can't get it yourself anymore.

Don't bother trying to dispute it - he will win, because your account isn't active anymore so it's down to him to get you the backup. In all honesty, you're lucky he can even get it in the first place.



EDIT: realized this sounds a bit sharp, that's not supposed to be the intent. So far all of us were under the impression your account was still active, in which case you can do it yourself, but if the account hasn't been active for a year, he has to go find it, burn it, and send it, which I can easily see being $35+ anywhere.

 

[ata.online]

Thanks Livewire,

I wondered if i should put that in the first post. But i thought let me start off this thread and see what answers i get. In a way, i am relieved i was not overcharged and the price is reasonable.
Do other readers of this thread agree that i was not overcharged?

 

[Mr. DOS]

I agree. I'm surprised that he even still had the site backed up.

--- Mr. DOS

 

[ata.online]

I agree. I'm surprised that he even still had the site backed up.

--- Mr. DOS

Yeah, i guess some people back up most things! It was on his server which wasn't used much ( i don't think).

 

[garrettroyce]

It sounds pretty standard, albeit a bit high. I don't think the guy is trying to pull a fast one on you, but he's not doing you any favors either

The bottom line is, how much is it worth to you? It's your data and it's completely worthless to everyone else, unless you have winning lotto numbers or Pentagon secrets

 

[kinley3]

I would agree with the other guys as well. He could've been nice and done it for free, but that's not how the world works. He's not going to go through his personal backups to find it, transfer it and burn it onto a CD for nothing just because he feels like a good Samaritan. He has a business to run, and he also knew that he was in possession of something you wanted, however badly.

Seems to me $35 seems like a legitimate price to pay for such a thing, especially if the files were relatively important. When I first opened this thread, I was expecting some astronomical price.

 

[Gouri]

Yes He can be nice and can do it free. Anyway for users he is taking backup and he has to seach and write it to CD and send to you.

 

[ata.online]

It sounds pretty standard, albeit a bit high. I don't think the guy is trying to pull a fast one on you, but he's not doing you any favors either

The bottom line is, how much is it worth to you? It's your data and it's completely worthless to everyone else, unless you have winning lotto numbers or Pentagon secrets

You mentioned the price is a bit high. How much would you had paid if you were in my situation?
When you say:
'but he's not doing you any favors either '
Do you mean the high price charged, as some people on this thread thinks it is reasonable?
Edit:
Also, how much do hosting providers normally charge for a backup CD for 'inactive' accounts?

Any approx figures based on compressed website files of 193mb zipped. When extracted it comes to over 455mb of public_html files.

 

[Livewire]

You mentioned the price is a bit high. How much would you had paid if you were in my situation?
When you say:
'but he's not doing you any favors either '
Do you mean the high price charged, as some people on this thread thinks it is reasonable?
Edit:
Also, how much do hosting providers normally charge for a backup CD for 'inactive' accounts?

Any approx figures based on compressed website files of 193mb zipped. When extracted it comes to over 455mb of public_html files.

I'm still thinking $35's reasonable more because the effort involved of digging through the backups to locate the backup in question. I've heard of prices being more, but we're also talking things like HDD recovery or multiple gigabytes of backup data.

As for what providers normally charge, no idea. Most don't actually -have- a way to retrieve data on an inactive account, because they destroy the backups to save space for their current customers.

 

[ata.online]

Interesting point. Having said that some readers on this thread assume he should have done it free of charge.

The chap who sent me the backup did mentioned in his email regarding other hosting provider's charge at $50:

'....I'd have to burn it to a CD and mail it to you. Most hosts charge $50 for back-up restore. I'd be willing to do it for $35, to cover my time, material, packaging and postage.'


So there seems to be a disagreement on here regarding the fee charged.

 

[Livewire]

Interesting point. Having said that some readers on this thread assume he should have done it free of charge.

The chap who sent me the backup did mentioned in his email regarding other hosting provider's charge at $50:

'....I'd have to burn it to a CD and mail it to you. Most hosts charge $50 for back-up restore. I'd be willing to do it for $35, to cover my time, material, packaging and postage.'


So there seems to be a disagreement on here regarding the fee charged.

I'm guessing the ones who thought he should've done it free were thinking that -before- it came out that the account wasn't active anymore, cause I was in that group too until you posted part of it where it came up that it had been down for over a year and wasn't an active account anymore.

I'm not sure what hosts he's saying charge $50 but honestly even $50 sounds reasonable; most places won't even go near the backups once the account is dead (even the great and mighty X10 won't go to the backups once the account's been erased).

 

[garrettroyce]

You mentioned the price is a bit high. How much would you had paid if you were in my situation?
When you say:
'but he's not doing you any favors either '
Do you mean the high price charged, as some people on this thread thinks it is reasonable?
Edit:
Also, how much do hosting providers normally charge for a backup CD for 'inactive' accounts?

Any approx figures based on compressed website files of 193mb zipped. When extracted it comes to over 455mb of public_html files.

I would have paid the $35 but I wouldn't have been too happy about it :biggrin:

I haven't had this problem because I have multiple redundancy in my backups for the really important stuff.

1) Files hosted on X10
2) X10's backup through R1Soft
3) SVN Repository (free!) at http://xp-dev.com (only for source code though)
4) Original files on personal computer
5) MozyHome (free!) backup of personal computer at https://mozy.com/?code=V92KTM (please use my referral link if you decide to sign up)
6) Work computer
7) MozyHome (again) with a backup of work computer

Barring a nuclear apocalypse, I don't think I'll ever lose my data :biggrin:

 

[ata.online]

I'm guessing the ones who thought he should've done it free were thinking that -before- it came out that the account wasn't active anymore, cause I was in that group too until you posted part of it where it came up that it had been down for over a year and wasn't an active account anymore.

I'm not sure what hosts he's saying charge $50 but honestly even $50 sounds reasonable; most places won't even go near the backups once the account is dead (even the great and mighty X10 won't go to the backups once the account's been erased).

Yeah, 2 readers think it should be free, that is after the post about being inactive.

 

[Gouri]

Yeah It should be free. Generally nobody keeps the backup that long. You are luck that he had backup. So he can offer it free or even if he thinks that you are inactive he can ask for nominal price like less that $5 for packing and shipping. Not for time because the time to copy the file and write to cd takes 5 min not more than that.

 

[apoorav]

i would like to know how much should you be expected to pay for a website backup on CD?
The website is about 193mb (compressed). Some files were trash. If extracted from homedir/public_html, it comes to under 500mb.
The chap charged me $35 for postage, packaging, CD and his time! Is this reasonable?

How much did you have to pay for your backup?

Hope this is the right section for posting thread as the other sections were not relevant to the topic.

Thanks.

No Charge for backup!

 

[ata.online]

No Charge for backup!

Maybe, but i was inactive and not hosting website for upto a couple of years. Therefore he seems to justify his fee based on the time it takes him to burn to CD and post it. Other readers seem to agree it is a reasonable price.