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LaCie offers hybrid cloud storage service

Editor's Note: This story is excerpted from Computerworld. For more Mac coverage, visit Computerworld's Macintosh Knowledge Center.

LaCie CloudBox

LaCie has announced a hybrid storage product that combines a desktop hard drive with a cloud storage service.

The new product, called CloudBox, automatically stores a copy of your data locally to what is basically a network-attached storage (NAS) device and then securely replicates that data to an online storage service.

The company said all data is secured using 128-bit AES encryption before it is are sent to the cloud, meaning no one but the user can access it.

LaCie attained its online backup service with the purchase of Wuala two years ago.

But CloudBox doesn’t come cheap. For $200, a consumer gets a 100GB desktop box and a one-year subscription to the online cloud service. For every year after that, it’ll cost $100 to renew the cloud service.

By comparison, a 1TB external hard drive can be had for less than $100 via sites such as Pricegrabber.com, and online backup providers such as Mozy’s MozyHome charge $5.95 per month for as much as 50GB of storage capacity.

LaCie makes secure backup easy with its new service. There’s no need to configure a drive with encryption and then set up a separate online backup service. With CloudBox, files selected for backup are automatically stored locally and to the cloud.