Online backup

[Rat]

I've been using Mozy for the last couple of years, and been fairly happy with their service. They've just sent an email, however, to point out that with their new pricing plan, their service is useless to me, so I will have to cancel as soon as the term is up.

I can't really hold this against them, since I always wondered how they managed to offer such a service at that price. Nonetheless, I must move. Does anyone have any experience of online backup services, and can anyone give reviews from that experience? I have to back up at least a terabyte, and preferably about three. It wants to be at byte-level, of course, so that I don't have to re-back up large files when a tiny part of them has changed.

 

[nimzov]

Have you looked at Amazon S3 ?

http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/aws-solutions/

Edit:

Quite expensive for 3 TB

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing

 

[Ripley Twenty-Nine]

I use Carbonite which I've been very happy with. There is no limit on your backup space, though it will only back up around 3GB per day. It works out to be around $55 per year which is well worth it for the piece of mind.

It does do byte-level backup as far as I know, only file-level.

I've actually had to do a full restore from my online backup, and it was seemless.

Highly recommended.

 

[SkepticScott]

The problem with offsite backup is that you have to trust the company you've contracted with to have implemented security properly and you also have to trust whatever company buys their assets when they eventually close. I prefer doing my own backups.

 

[Rat]

Oh, I do have other backups as well. My hard drives are backed up to external drives, and all my photos are on both Kodak (free) and Flickr (cheap). This is a third solution in case of real disaster, so I can just pull down everything that's not backed up twice elsewhere in one go.

I had a look at both AWS and Carbonite. AWS looks a little too much for my purposes; Carbonite was very tempting until I saw about their bandwidth throttling when you get over a certain quantity. At the moment I'm doing a 30-day trial on both LiveDrive and CrashPlan to see how they pan out. I won't actually cancel Mozy until I have a significant amount of my data elsewhere.

 

[mortimer]

Oh, I do have other backups as well. My hard drives are backed up to external drives, and all my photos are on both Kodak (free) and Flickr (cheap). This is a third solution in case of real disaster, so I can just pull down everything that's not backed up twice elsewhere in one go.

I had a look at both AWS and Carbonite. AWS looks a little too much for my purposes; Carbonite was very tempting until I saw about their bandwidth throttling when you get over a certain quantity. At the moment I'm doing a 30-day trial on both LiveDrive and CrashPlan to see how they pan out. I won't actually cancel Mozy until I have a significant amount of my data elsewhere.

I'd be interested to hear who you finally decide on, as it sounds like we have similar requirements.

 

[Elaedith]

I use Carbonite and I haven't had any problems apart from a glitch over renewing the subscription.

 

[JoelKatz]

The problem with offsite backup is that you have to trust the company you've contracted with to have implemented security properly and you also have to trust whatever company buys their assets when they eventually close. I prefer doing my own backups.

You don't have to trust their security if you encrypt before you backup. And you don't have to rely on their stability if you retain a copy of your backups. Both of these things are things you should do no matter to what extent you trust your backup company.

A single off-site backup should never be your only backup. Backups should always be encrypted.

 

[The Central Scrutinizer]

I've used SugarSync for a couple years now. Works flawlessly.

Although I have no where near 3T of data. Have you stolen that many movies or is this legit?

 

[Rat]

Very little of it is actually movies, and pr0n doesn't really need backing up anyway. Most of it is legal, and the proportion that is increases faster than the total volume does, meaning I'm gradually replacing the stuff that is buyable. The music (two of the three gig) is not vital, but I'd hate to have to rerip/redownload all of it, so I just add a little of that to the backup set every now and then.

The core stuff that really needs backing up is the photos (both in RAW and JPG) and various odds and sods like musical score PDFs and stuff. Not huge amounts of any one thing (apart from photos), but it all adds up.

Anyway, it looks like SugarSync is another I'll have to give a trial, as long as they do go above 250GiB. It's more expensive than LD or CP, but I'm happy to pay more for a better service, just not the $2500 that Mozy's new pricing would cost.

 

[The Central Scrutinizer]

Very little of it is actually movies, and pr0n doesn't really need backing up anyway. Most of it is legal, and the proportion that is increases faster than the total volume does, meaning I'm gradually replacing the stuff that is buyable. The music (two of the three gig) is not vital, but I'd hate to have to rerip/redownload all of it, so I just add a little of that to the backup set every now and then.

The core stuff that really needs backing up is the photos (both in RAW and JPG) and various odds and sods like musical score PDFs and stuff. Not huge amounts of any one thing (apart from photos), but it all adds up.

Anyway, it looks like SugarSync is another I'll have to give a trial, as long as they do go above 250GiB. It's more expensive than LD or CP, but I'm happy to pay more for a better service, just not the $2500 that Mozy's new pricing would cost.

Looks like SugarSync is $40/mth for 500G.