$17,000 a year for a terabyte??? You're kidding right

I definitely understand your concerns about the price, but comparing SPN to a standalone (or internal) hard drive or some of the "unlimited" services is really not the best model to understand the value. I'll try to outline some below without turning it into something that sounds like a sales pitch :) 

Offsite storage: One of the biggest differences obviously from a local hard drive is the extra (some would say essential) protection you get from having an up to date copy of your data separate from your primary location (to protect in cases of theft, fire, natural disaster, etc.) 

Enterprise class storage and datacenters: hard drives can--and do--fail. Some providers use things like simple RAID to protect data (and some use even less sophisticated methods); even in those scenarios you achieve better protection than with a single hard drive. SPN takes it to a significantly higher level.

1. When data is ingested, we always have at least two copies of the data, ensuring that we never remove a copy until it is stored in deep storage.  
2. Data is stored in "deep storage" using a special form of RAID that is higher than typical RAID redundancy.
3. Deep storage is replicated to a completely separate data center (not another rack in the same data center) in near real time (again following the at-least-2-copy rule). 
4. This ensures that there is virtually no chance that your data can be lost once protected by SPN.

Version history: When backing up to SPN, you get automatic version history (at least when using Online Backup; Online Storage works slightly differently) that can include many (potentially hundreds) of versions of files that are protected. This comes at no additional cost to you.

No software license fees: You can include as many computers and users as you need in your plan without additional fees. Contrast this to having to buy a new hard drive for each user, or a new unlimited account for each user or computer (or even a different copy of backup software or license for each user). This in itself is a very popular savings area with our customers. 

Encryption: Technically this one doesn't typically cost you extra as a consumer (unless you need to buy software for it) but it is included at no additional cost. 

Implementing all of the above features definitely has a material cost to Symantec, and we do (and will continue to do) our best to drive cost and prices lower.  

 I could go on and list other usage related advantages, like recovering data to different computers, integration with new services like Remote Access (and more to come), etc, but I'm sure you've done your research on it as well. The value we are trying to bring to market with Symantec Protection Network suite of services is to really have a new class of protection and availability made available to the small business customer. Different solutions will always have different costs, and we'll definitely continue to listen to our customers around pricing and value, and try to strike the best balance possible.

Richard Goodwin

SPN Product Management 

Hopefully Richard's response helped you understand our pricing relative to the value of the service.   I wanted to clarify our pricing for an annual subscription of Online Storage is $12,650 or $1.05/GB/month.  We really appreciate your feedback as we are consistently assessing our pricing model.

Darren Niller

Symantec Protection Network Product Management

Thanks for your replies. Have you looked at services like Jungle Disk and their features/pricing? Using Amazon S3, they also have extremely reliable servers, version history and encryption, at $0.15/GB/Month.

Also, iBackup.com charges half what you charge, at $5999 for 1 TB per year.

I'm not saying they are better or worse, just that I think your pricing is pretty high for simple online backup, unless you do offer some unique features that justifies being as much as 7 times more expensive than other similar services.