Datto’s previous boxes consisted of an on-site (in your home/office) NAS that uploads its contents onto a server for safekeeping. This Box2Box consists of two boxes, one at your place and one at your friend’s, that synchronises between each other. This way there’s no subscription fee for online storage, but you still have to transfer the files between the two boxes—a time-intensive task the first time you do it over a cable modem connection.

Although there’s no subscription fee, you still have to pay for the box itself, and prices are quite high.

Two 250GB boxes come at $US620, two 500GB are $US660 and two 1TB are $US850. If you’re somewhat familiar with Linux, you could build a cheap homebrew version yourself, but for small businesses that don’t have much of an IT staff, it’s not a bad choice. [Datto]

The Price:

The Verdict: Good, but expensive. The Z-series has all of the online features as the previous version, but improves the hardware with a few important changes. Most notably, the really loud fan has been swapped out with something that doesn’t annoy the hell out of you. There’s also Gigabit Ethernet (real nice), and RAID (only on some versions). The web interface is also refined, allowing you more options to tweak backup times and how much bandwidth you’re allocating so you don’t slow down everyone else on your connection.

So yes, it’s a pretty good setup, but that price point is really high. You can get a standard 1TB NAS elsewhere for about half the $US1149 Datto’s charging ($US899 if you don’t want RAID). But the real draw is how easy the online backup is. You don’t even have to think about it—the unit just takes care of everything right out of the box. While the unit cost and relatively high monthly fee may be too rich for regular consumers, businesses and professionals who really need to keep their data secure might just think it a small price to pay for peace of mind. [Datto]

It also looks nicer, with that new white finish. The downside is that it’s quite costly (it is a home office/small business solution), with a price starting at US$499 for the 250GB model up to US$1149 for the 1TB model with RAID. That’s not including the monthly fee. But if your data’s important enough that you’d actually go and pay for a data-recovery specialist to get it back, you should get one of these and save yourself the hassle. [Datto]

The Price: US$599 for 500GB, US$399 for 100GB. Monthly service is US$24.95, US$249 for 1 year, US$499 for 2 years, and US$998 for 5 years.

The Verdict: It works. The network interface is only a 10/100, not Gigabit, so transferring stuff to the drive isn’t all that fast. However, that’s not the point of the Datto. You’re not using this as an extra storage drive that you move stuff onto or off of every day, you’re using this as a backup for your more important documents and files. Storing your home business docs, tax records, or whatever irreplaceable (vacation pics?) files you’ve got lying around so that you can get it back in case your kid sets fire to your house.

The only possible problem with this is that uploading 500GB of data takes a long time on a standard cable or DSL connection. It’s not an issue when all your data’s already on their servers and you’re just updating a file or two here or there, but the first upload can take days, if not weeks, depending on your internet speed. You can have them do a roundtrip shipment of the device, manually doing a dump of your drive into their servers and sending your unit back.

If your device fails, Datto will ship your data back to you in under 24 hours. It may not be for everyone, but if you’ve got some important data or you’re running a business at home, you should definitely consider it as an easy offsite backup solution. [Datto]

If your unit goes down, a backup can be delivered in under 24 hours. The units are US$399 and US$599 respectively, and come with a US$99 and US$249 annual fee. At this price, it’s cheaper than rigging up your own backup solution on Amazon’s S3 storage, but it might be a little steep if you just want to keep your vacation pics and music safe. Unless of course your name is Christina Aguilera and those vacation pics are of yourself nude, and that music is your next album. We have a server for you to put those onto. [Datto]