I would work more on the value proposition; Why would I send the drive back if I can just put it somewhere in my home? I don't think bandwidth and processor power are huge constraints these days?
Because if you put it somewhere in your home, you are not diversifying the geographic risk.
There is a solid argument to be made with backing up your hard drive and shipping it across the country, or to another continent.
If you get hit by a earthquake or a hurricane, you can be sure you have at least 1 copy of your data safe. It's the same advantage to why you would want to do 'cloud backups'.
Except that this doesn't require huge broadband and tying up your connection for days/weeks.
Sneakernet is actually a pretty common technique used by large companies, but they use tapes instead of hard drives (although I am sure many now use hard drives).
Upload speeds are actually not great for most people (even with Comcast).
Trying many backup solutions, it's frequent to see it chugging 20-80% of my CPU. For anyone doing audio, video, or compilations frequently, I'd imagine they would appreciate the extra speed on their computer.
I personally do superduper backups every 2 weeks on my calendar and was really wanting to have a service that both reminded me and stored my data offsite (for long term, reliable backup).
There is a solid argument to be made with backing up your hard drive and shipping it across the country, or to another continent.
If you get hit by a earthquake or a hurricane, you can be sure you have at least 1 copy of your data safe. It's the same advantage to why you would want to do 'cloud backups'.
Except that this doesn't require huge broadband and tying up your connection for days/weeks.
Sneakernet is actually a pretty common technique used by large companies, but they use tapes instead of hard drives (although I am sure many now use hard drives).