Having been a part-time contributor to one of the world's worst backup tools, I can appreciate what goes into making one that doesn't actually suck. It is fundamentally a hard problem because the state space is inherently a nightmare: You have to try to support umpteen different SKUs of software and hardware. For an ideal product: you have to support the fact that linux file names have no encoding at all, they are just bytes; You have to keep it affordable vs. the competition; You have to deal with idiot users; You have to support versions of the OS that even the manufacturer doesn't support any more (ahem Apple jerks); You have to deal with things like the app jailing on mobile devices; You have to deal with the fact that while you are examining the data, it is liable to be modified; You have to test your restore feature; You have to document things; You probably have to have some REST APIs; You have to consider encryption; You have to consider de-duplification; Etc. ad nauseum ever and always, amen, world with out end, amen.

So I really do appreciate the technical details that go into such a venture.

But (and there's always a But, Virginia) no matter how good your tech is, if your customer support sucks then I believe all is for naught. Case in point: as much as I wanted to like iDrive, they completely and utterly failed when it came to, you know, actually working. At all. For the machines I actually have. You know, the real world scenarios of real users with real data they really want to back up, and right now.

The level of customer support failure was pretty epic. Things like, "If you have additional questions or information regarding the issue, please reply to this email" but then it turns out that their email originated from <noreply@ticket.idrive.com> ha ha I see what you did there.

Of course when I go and research the alternatives, they all suck dirty donkey cohones in other painfully obvious ways. Which always brings me full circle back to wishing I had the balls and money and brains to create yet another startup for doing backups - because I have the feature set in mind, nicely fleshed out -- a service that didn't actually suck, as if it isn't a universal truth woven into the very fabric of space-time that such a thing is by definition impossible and cannot ever actually exist.