What am I getting at? This: a plethora of potentially fly-by-night or unproven backup services have gone live over the last year or two and require a bit of investigation before subscribing. Most of these services will be able to stay afloat for quite a while due to the low overhead, but my warning is to beware of the little guys until they have a track record. There is little investment on their part, often just a few lines of code and the payment system. Usually there is no mention of data security and a lack of welcome features such as having data restore to DVDs and mailed to you.

I’m not saying avoid S3 backup services, I’m recommending confirming there is a history of quality support and updates. JungleDisk is one such candidate. But you might just want to stick with inexpensive non-S3 services such as Mozy, Carbonite, and so forth.

Here’s a list I compiled of some backup titles and services leveraging Amazon S3 storage:

• Backup Manager
• S3 Backup
• S3 Solutions
• Sync2S3
• Brackup
• s3DAV
• Duplicity
• s3sync
• SetS3t Synchronize
• DropBox
• JungleDisk

Happy uploading!

(Above I’ve charted the initial cost of the iPhone + setup fees + monthly service over 2 years, including taxes and fees. I’ve added a $5/mo text plan and calculated the totals using California sales tax (8.25%) – so the bottom line in different states may be slightly more or less.)

More after the jump, plus another chart of TCO without a text plan…

The result seen here is that even given the lower initial cost, the iPhone 3G costs more to own than the original iPhone at 14 months and after 2 years is a little under $200 more expensive. This is due to the monthly 3G service plan being about $15 more expensive for unlimited 3G data + 200 texts.

If you are one of the few smartphone users that really, truly never use SMS text messaging, it takes until about month 20 for the cost of a iPhone 3G to surpass the original iPhone. Here the price is much more closely matched, though as mentioned earlier the original iPhone service includes a 200 SMS plan and the iPhone 3G plan has none.

Personally, GPS and 3G make it compelling enough for me to upgrade. Plus I suspect the original iPhones will still be worth a pretty penny (easily $200+) on eBay even after the iPhone 3G is available.

Mac and Windows

Right off the bat, we can see that Mac OS holds about 30% of the desktop and laptop OS market and Windows approximately the other 70%. I have left Linux out for now (see below) because it is nearly impossible to determine whether it is being used for a desktop computer or server.

Windows

If we explode the 70% Windows market share, things start to get a little more interesting. We can see that Windows XP commands 79% Windows market share. Vista has only been able to penetrate 10% of the market, barely statistically greater than the 8% being possessed by 8-year-old Windows 2000.

It’s also notable that Vista has about 10% market share despite something like 1/3rd of computers on Stanford campus having been purchased since the release of Vista. That means the vast majority of new computers are being ordered with Windows XP. Clearly Vista’s market penetration leaves much to be desired. Additionally, 10% is actually fairly representative of the entire US penetration of Vista, through the causes may be different (Stanford users have a higher average turn-over rate on computers than the rest of the US).

I could explode the particular flavors of Windows once again into each individual edition (Vista Business, Enterprise, Ultimate, etc.), but I’ll just mention that Windows XP Profession holds about 95% of XP editions and Business is the majority of Vista. Usage of “Home” editions of Windows is discouraged at Stanford University by being largely unsupported by the internal IT infrastructure.

Linux

As I mentioned earlier, I chose not to include Linux in the first “desktop/laptop” OS market share because it is nearly impossible to differentiate usage of Linux for servers versus desktops without enormous statistical effort. However, if you include all version of Linux, about 16% of computers (including servers) at Stanford are running Linux – a large portion are email, storage, web, and various other servers.

Linux flavors with very low representation (e.g. Gentoo’s nine installations at Stanford) are excluded from the list. And unfortunately, nearly 1/3rd of Linux instances are reported generically as “Linux”. Lazy Linux users…

Final notes

Stanford is a great look at a free-market edu computing environment with strong Mac and Linux usership. But perhaps most importantly, its low Vista penetration shows that average educational users, whether student, faculty or staff, are still very resistant to Vista and go to extra effort to purchase XP even with new computers. Vendors, such as Sony, choosing to move away from XP earlier than most may be less attractive in this sort of environment.

In the future I may do a report on computer vendor market share (Apple vs. Dell vs. Lenovo vs. HP vs etc.).