Hard drive + cloud backup

When I first saw an advertisment for the MyCloud drive this is what I assumed it was, and was a little disappointed when I found out it wasn’t, so I wanted to share my idea because I think it would really add value… I’d want to buy it.

It could work for either and internal or an external drive, but it would probably be better targetting to externals. Basically you buy say a 4TB external drive and it comes bundled with 4TB of cloud storage space for the life of the drive and softwhere which automatically mirrors the drive to the cloud. Ideally it would offer something like 30 days of previous versions allowing you to restore files you’d previously deleted. Users would obviously be able to pay a subscription for premium services like longer version storage.

This would mean that the owner’s data was protected even in the case of a hard drive failure, and since the software and account would be bundled it would be incredible easy for the non-technically minded to set up. Additionally as well as being able to access or stream files from their own internet connection a la MyCloud, they could stream / access files from the cloud sever so ideal for people with slower internet access.

And here is your USP. If the drive fails while under warranty the user can send it in to be repaired / replaced and WD will restore the contents of their cloud account to the new / repaired drive before sending it back out, meaning the user gets ALL their data back, without having to spend weeks downloading 4TB over a home broadband connection.

You can obviously estimate a price based on average drive lifetime and average drive utilisation over time (you could also factor in the ever decreasing cost of cloud storage, and you could potentially use deduplication to vastly reduce storage costs)

Another option would be to sell the drive at around the same price as any other external drive and package it with a 3 month trial followed by a monthly or annual subscription which also provides warranty cover for the drive indefinitely, for the duration of the subscription. If people ordered online and bought an annual subscription at the same time you could subsidise the cost of the drive, in effect the user would be renting the drive as part of the service.

You could market it as a drive for life. You have the benefits of fast, immediate access to your data plus zero fuss bullet proof backup, a drive you can truly trust with all your important photos, files and documents.