Cloud technology (computing on remote servers) is getting trendy nowadays and it is reaching the consumer market with brands like Iomega, which paved the way at CES 2011 with the launch of its Personal Cloud Solution. Hitachi is catching up today with the announcement of the Hitachi Touro family which includes the Pro Desktop and Pro Mobile. Both are external hard drives that are bundled with a cloud service offering.
The new addition to the Hitachi backup offering ensures that the consumer gets both a local backup and a cloud solution. That’s two layers of protection. The idea is that cloud backups are very resilient and can survive things like theft, flood or fire. However, they are a pain in the neck to restore from because if takes a while to retrieve GBs of data (it’s still better than no backups!). Local backups are handy and fast, but they obviously don’t survive a major disaster.
Hitachi Touro really aims at giving you both, but you should know that the cloud storage is free for only 3GB of data. A paid account will be necessary to use 250GB, and remote access to your data.