They have to be doing something sneaky, because the math just doesn’t add up.
Amazon Glacier is $0.004 per GB per month.
5TB of Amazon Glacier will cost PolarBackup $20 a month. (5,000GB * $0.004/mo = $20/mo). That is not sustainable if Polar Backup is charging $69.99 for lifetime 5TB subscriptions and people actually use them.
Polar Backup was registered as an LLC in the UK just last month to Muayyad Fahed Shehadeh, who also founded Zoolz, which is an Amazon Glacier-based backup company and claims to use 256 bit AES.
So, based on the shared CEO and technology of Zoolz and Polar Backup, this incident reported by Torrent Freak is perhaps germane (cribbed from my post on a previous zoolz-based lifetime backup offer on BBS) :
This zero knowledge claim has been called into doubt recently as one of Zoolz’ customers, Ryan Gallagher, had his account terminated after the company found several .torrent files in his backups. Gallagher didn’t store any infringing media, but just 1 Megabyte worth of old metada.
Zoolz wouldn’t let Gallagher recover any of his 1.3TB of back up data because he had some .torrent files in his back up - just the pointer files, not any actual copyrighted content. They said they couldn’t separate them out, so they destroyed all of his data.
Surprisingly, their extreme measures concern over copyright only applies to “home” accounts (like the one offered at the time in the BB Store). If you paid Zoolz more money, instantly copyright is no longer a concern.
Zoolz noted:
“The flagging system is a deviation of the zero-knowledge policy only applicable to abusive home user accounts, not business users.
And if that doesn’t seem like a dichotomy that applies to Polar Express Backup, then note this from their website:
Could Polar Backup pull this kind of “When we said zero knowledge we didn’t really mean it” BS? Seems likely. The files may be encrypted but Polar Backup may, as you note, be de-duping them based on hashes, which means that any report of a copyright violation of one hash could result in every account with that hash being terminated. Is there an internet meme on your HD? Then you could loose your “lifetime” account and all of your archival data.
Further, your usage of your 5TB account will be terminated if your usage “greatly exceeds” the customer average, a vague, constantly changing secret number rather than an actual amount you can know and limit yourself to. And, conceivably, uploading 5TB of data to a 5TB account could be a TOS violation if that exceeds the amount uploaded to 5TB accounts by “average” customers. And you’ll have to take Polar Backup’s word for your use exceeding the rolling limit. Once your account is terminated for “excessive” use you’ll have 14 days to retrieve your data once, so better hope you aren’t on vacation at the time…especially given how it can take days to get access to the files to download, and who knows how long it would actually take to download 5TB of files via their systems and your ISP (and you could be dumped by your ISP if you have to do an unplanned data dump all in one goe for exceeding their bandwidth quota).
Polar Backup says such terminations are “infrequent”, which isn’t very reassuring from a company that’s a month old.
You could sue them if you had a problem with your account being unjustly terminated but it will have to be in Finland, as per the TOS, and you’ll have to pay all their costs and even the any judgement against them since, in that same TOS, you agree to indemnify them and pay all of their costs in perpetuity.
So, hard pass on this since the Amazon Glacier fees Polar Backup would have to pay to maintain a 5TB back up of unique files means I’d cost them $240 a year. Based on their costs exceeding their income, it’s tempting say Polar Backup is unsustainable and is the Movie Pass of backup deals, except I don’t think Polar Backup has any intention of loosing money on Glacier costs when they can just terminate inconvenient “lifetime” account customers instead.
And just as a kicker, the Polar Backup TOS states:
Polar Backup has a zero tolerance policy and will immediately terminate accounts that violate the law in any way, including storing, publishing or sharing material that’s fraudulent, defamatory, misleading, or that violates the privacy or infringes the rights of others.
I wonder if storing Boing Boing Store ad copy in a Polar Backup account could get it terminated? 
