On-line backup services

Ghery

Ghery

Touchdown! Greaser!
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Ghery Pettit
Too many computers and all my backup systems suffer one common fault - they're in the same house as the computers. I'm covered for computer failure, but what if I lost the house? My safe deposit box is too small to hold CD-ROMs and that requires a trip to the bank when they're open.

What have you all had for experiences with the online backup services? I've heard of Carbonite (good advertising?), but has anybody used them? Any others?

Thanks. I'd appreciate your experiences before I pull the trigger on one of them.
 
I use Mozy Home, and have had occasion to use it to recover files when the home desktop crashed and burned. The initial transfer of files is slow -- can take weeks depending on how much you have to back up -- but after that it's only a couple minutes a day.

There's also a 1-TB external hard drive that's stored in my hangar as a doomsday back-up back-up. Every few weeks I'll get it out and copy files over to it.
 
I also have Mozy which is in addition to my in-house Western Digital external hard drive. With my thousands of photographic images(many 16 to 25 MB files) and other space-hogging software I thought the initial Mozy online backup would take forever. And that amounted to several weeks, primarily because the island where I live, though only a couple miles from the mainland, has only up to DSL but no wide band cable(Comcast) that I had when I lived 20 miles from here. The DSL is head and shoulders above Hughesnet satellite but it's still slower than preferred for my uploads.
 
I've used (either for myself or clients) Mozy, Carbonite, and FilesAnywhere. I'm satisfied with all three.

For what it's worth, my brother works for EMC (Mozy's parent company), and he uses Carbonite.

-Rich
 
Thanks for reminding me -- I just installed Carbonite and started the backup on the free 15-day trial.
 
I just use 2 external drives and swap them between home and the office - encrypted backup every week using EMC software
 
I back to raw Amazon S3 with Duplicity. It's my understanding that most of the backup solutions use S3 in reality, and just add a Windows driver in front.
 
Thank you for all the replies. I've got Carbonite working on its initial backup on the 15 day free trial. Mozy looked interesting as well, but for the amount of data I need to back up Carbonite was less expensive. In fact, two Carbonite accounts (one for my laptop and one for my wife's laptop) would be less expensive than a Mozy account with enough space plus the second computer.

In addition, BTW, I have a 2 TB drive hanging off a computer on the network that I copy all pictures to, and there is a network storage system with about 750 GB of space (RAID 5 configuration) that also gets files sent to. So local backups are multiple. It was the off-site backup that was lacking. And having missed the earthquake in Japan by 3 days (came through NRT on Tuesday, would have been at the airport when the quake struck had it been Friday) and being in a seismically active area myself, this seems like an overdue action.
 
I've been using Carbonite for about six months and it works as advertised. I also have the Carbonite apps on my Iphone and Samsung Tab. It's come in handy quite a few times when I just wanted to look at a PDF or show someone an old photo or two. I haven't needed it for a full restore - yet:yikes:.

I also use microsoft's synctoy to back up from one computer to another everyday. It was a bit tricky to get it to run automatically.
 
Crashplan. You guys can back up to each other for free. I have mine backing up to my NAS. You get emails with the status of backups. The kid's laptop is getting backed up and she doesn't even know it.
 
RJM62 said:
I've used (either for myself or clients) Mozy, Carbonite, and FilesAnywhere. I'm satisfied with all three.

For what it's worth, my brother works for EMC (Mozy's parent company), and he uses Carbonite.

-Rich
Click to expand...

I would STRONGLY suggest not using Mozy. At the end of the day, all you are paying for is the ability to get your data back after an event. Well, after about 4 hours on chat help and a week of exchanged e-mails, the best they could do for me was to have me break my own data into about a dozen backups and manually download, unzip, sort and save. They advertise a one button retrieve that simply doesn't work and I've got a handful of e-mails from them to prove it.

In my opinion, MOZY SUCKS ... use anything else.
 
RJM62 said:
...For what it's worth, my brother works for EMC (Mozy's parent company), and he uses Carbonite.
Click to expand...

:rofl: Looks like my old boss did as we expected when he went to Mozy to straighten them out.
 
iflyforfun said:
I would STRONGLY suggest not using Mozy. At the end of the day, all you are paying for is the ability to get your data back after an event. Well, after about 4 hours on chat help and a week of exchanged e-mails, the best they could do for me was to have me break my own data into about a dozen backups and manually download, unzip, sort and save. They advertise a one button retrieve that simply doesn't work and I've got a handful of e-mails from them to prove it.

In my opinion, MOZY SUCKS ... use anything else.
Click to expand...

I've had quite a few clients who used Mozy for restores that went very well. But a couple of years ago I had a few clients who paid for additional storage when their backups grew larger, but kept getting error messages about inadequate space.

The problem (which frankly, I thought had been corrected, but maybe not) was that by default, additional storage purchased by an existing user was not actually assigned to that user's backup. It was theoretically available, but had to be manually assigned by the user to a backup job.

In other words, if you had 10 GB assigned and purchased another 5 GB, the additional 5 GB would exist in a sort of limbo on your account until you logged in and went through a somewhat convoluted set of steps to add the 5 GB to the existing 10 GB. After that, it would work fine.

These problems, however, always showed up before an actual data loss event, because Mozy would keep complaining about insufficient storage space despite the user having purchased more storage.

That was the only problem I ever had with Mozy. I'm certainly not saying that there weren't (or aren't) other problems, but I never happened to encounter them.

-Rich
 
Well, I signed up for the 15 day free trial with Carbonite. At present rate the initial upload will take longer than that. :D
 
Ghery said:
Well, I signed up for the 15 day free trial with Carbonite. At present rate the initial upload will take longer than that. :D
Click to expand...

Would you believe that the computer is still doing the initial upload? I'm sure Comcast is the reason, but this is ridiculous. :D :D
 
Ghery said:
Would you believe that the computer is still doing the initial upload? I'm sure Comcast is the reason, but this is ridiculous. :D :D
Click to expand...

How much data is it backing up? You do know there's a throttle setting that you may have set?

My initial backup took like 3-4 days and was around 35GB.
 
Ghery said:
Would you believe that the computer is still doing the initial upload? I'm sure Comcast is the reason, but this is ridiculous. :D :D
Click to expand...
Sure I'd believe that. How much data are you trying to back up, and what sort of upload speed are you getting? Do you even know which tier of service you're subscribed to?

Assuming you're in the Performance tier, with 2Mbps upload speeds--and that the link between you and your backup service will support that full 2Mbps rate--then let's do some math:

(Note for the nit-pickers: I'm ignoring the difference between 1000 and 1024 when converting between bit/kilobit/megabit, etc. I'm also assuming a simple 10 bits per byte to include transmission overhead.)

2Mbps = 2,000,000 bits per second.
Divide by 10 for approximately how many bytes per second: 200,000 bytes per second, or 0.2MB/s

0.2MB/s = 12MB per minute = 720MB per hour = 17.3 GB per 24hrs

Got 500GB of data to back up? That's a month's worth of non-stop, full-speed uploading.

I have not used any of these backup services, but hopefully they apply some good compression to the data prior to upload. Unfortunately, for things like photos and video that are already compressed, you're not going to achieve much by trying to compress them again, so it kind of depends on what you're backing up as to how much benefit you'll get from compression.

If you had 1TB of data, and were able to achieve 25% compression, so you had ~250GB of data to actually upload, then per the math above, that's about two weeks of max-speed, non-stop uploading.

BTW, Comcast recently imposed a 250GB per month transfer limit, so you might want to lay off the Netflix instant streaming and other high-bandwidth usage during your initial upload. Might also be a good idea to time it so that it starts near the end of the month, and finishes up at the beginning of the next one.
 
70-80 Gbytes to upload. Finally should finish today or tomorrow. There's a throttle setting on Carbonite? Would be nice if they provided a manual with their service. I guess I'm a dinosaur in that respect. :D
 
Ghery said:
70-80 Gbytes to upload. Finally should finish today or tomorrow. There's a throttle setting on Carbonite? Would be nice if they provided a manual with their service. I guess I'm a dinosaur in that respect. :D
Click to expand...

Yeah, but the default is not to throttle. You'd just throttle if it was slowing down browsing or something else.
 
mikea said:
Yeah, but the default is not to throttle. You'd just throttle if it was slowing down browsing or something else.
Click to expand...

OK. Thanks.

Oh, and it finally finished the initial backup last night. 80+ Gbtyes. :D
 
Mozy update.
I have Mozy on home and work computer. Home computer crapped out and Mozy wouldn't download backup. After multiple efforts with support, all they could do is break my 33GB into 500MB chunks and I downloaded them individually.

So, last month the Mozy on my work computer stops backing up. When I open, it says my account is expired. This began mid-March. So, mid-April, I open my debit statement and guess what, Mozy charged me $65.89 for another year. I've been travelling a lot and just got around to contacting them today. I get online and My Account says my account is current and I'm good through 2012. Pop open Mozy from my tray and ... nope, it is expired. I contact Mozy and this is what they say (copied from the chat session directly):

Jessica B: Thanks! Your account is just fine - and you should be able to run backups. The message you're seeing is just a cosmetic error in our system that we're working on getting resolved. That message should go away within 2 weeks.

A COSMETIC ERROR - they are a backup service that stops backing up, tells you it won't back up and it's a COSMETIC ERROR!

So, they stop backups, charge me and the application says the account is expired. If you manually hit backup, then it will backup. After cancelling my backups and having the application say it has expired for a month and a half, they offer to give me a "free" month of service.

I've said it before and I'll say it again - MOZY SUCKS. I'd strongly suggest you use ANYTHING other than Mozy for your back up needs.

mikea said:
:rofl: Looks like my old boss did as we expected when he went to Mozy to straighten them out.
Click to expand...
 
Tough to do online backup with 2 TB of data..... Much of that is static (photos in raw/tif format) but it's still too much for the online services.
 
A related question:

What is a good software choice to do backups to a local hardrive? I have a 1TB Seagate "Black Armor" external drive hung on our LAN. And not opposed to getting additional units if more space is required to do backups for our office primary workstation computers (5 of them).
 
AggieMike88 said:
A related question:

What is a good software choice to do backups to a local hardrive? I have a 1TB Seagate "Black Armor" external drive hung on our LAN. And not opposed to getting additional units if more space is required to do backups for our office primary workstation computers (5 of them).
Click to expand...

I have been happy with Acronis. And a blazing-fast SATA-3 external drive.

Though the nagging emails offering upgrades for $$$ do get old.
 
This looks pretty interesting:

[ link removed -- company appears to be having serious problems ]

512GB for free on the most basic service.

I'm trying it out on one of my Windows PCs. Once the backup is complete, I'll simulate a few data loss events and see how it works. Could take a while: My Frontier DSL connection out here in the middle of nowhere is wonderfully stable and reliable, but it's not the fastest connection I've ever had (although it always performs as provisioned).

If Megacloud works as advertised, the price (free) would be hard to beat. But looking at the comparison chart, it seems that although the data is encrypted in transfer, it may not be encrypted on the cloud. If that's the case, it might be a better solution for non-sensitive but nonetheless bulky data than for anything confidential or sensitive (although I suppose the latter could always be encrypted and compressed prior to upload).

-Rich
 
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wsuffa said:
I have been happy with Acronis. And a blazing-fast SATA-3 external drive.

Though the nagging emails offering upgrades for $$$ do get old.
Click to expand...

Yep, It works well. (what I use) And I just reported their spam. so I should get no more of their emails.
 
I run 3 physical drives. 2 small ones. one for backup of the other. and one large one for file storage.
The OS, and the apps don't require much space, so about 80g is enough.
the storage drive holds about 500g.

In my case the drive that gets hammered hardest is the one to fail first. So I run cheap WD drives for that. But usually it's boogers that cause me to decide to format a drive. In that case I just swap drives, and format the one with boogers. Then use it as the backup.
In nearly 16 years, I've only had one HDD failure. (seagate) And was able to retrieve the data by putting it in the freezer for a while.
 
I have a 2+2TB RAID1 mirrored array. Once a week, I break the mirror and remove one
of the drives. I place it in the floor safe ... and [re]install the prior week's hard disk in
the array, and re-establish the mirror. A few minute later, everything is full mirroed,
and the copy is tucked away safely.
 
rainsux said:
I have a 2+2TB RAID1 mirrored array. Once a week, I break the mirror and remove one
of the drives. I place it in the floor safe ... and [re]install the prior week's hard disk in
the array, and re-establish the mirror. A few minute later, everything is full mirroed,
and the copy is tucked away safely.
Click to expand...

And no monthly fee. :D
 
backblaze backup

Ive started to use and recommend Backblaze. Its reasonably priced and unlimited storage. The main thing was its fast backup an the restore tests ive done were quick.

Ive come from mozy, carbonite, and by far this is the best one ive used so far.

The interface is too basic but you can specify your own encryption key to prevent anyone from getting your data. Im not sure if mozy did that or not.
 
Exactly how much do all these different services cost? I'm wondering if I have few enough files that I could use a free service. Then again, I pay for Yahoo (email) and Flickr (pro), so I'm not against paying for something.
 
Megacloud costs nothing, although it's also bare-bones and not as secure as I'd like it to be.

BackBlaze costs, like, $5.00 a month or something for unlimited backup. I just became an affiliate of theirs, by the way. Easiest affiliate program I ever joined. I can give you a link to a free trial from my affiliate account, but I think you can get a free trial from their site, as well.

Another service that looks pretty good is SafeCopy. I just signed up with them on behalf of a client. 200 GB for $50.00 a year. It also works on Windows Server editions, which most do not; and you can back up multiple computers to one account.

-Rich
 
I went with Carbonite after asking about this. About $59/year with more storage than I need. They have a 14 day free trial, but it took more than 14 days to do the initial upload of around 80 GBytes of "stuff". Cable is good for downloads, but isn't all that fast for uploads. :D

Carbonite has been working fine for me so far. The external drive solutions are great, but if the house burns down they die with the computer. Carbonite gives me the off-site storage and I can access it from any computer, anywhere.
 
There has to be some way for my neighbor and I to back each other up over our home wireless networks. We can both see each other's routers. My house would have to burn pretty hot to destroy a backup at his house.

Be careful with offline backup services if you have a monthly data cap. You may not even know you have one - At one point, Comcast was imposing a limit in the fine print of its "unlimited" home service, and applications such as peer-to-peer movie bootlegging would trigger it.
 
Neighbor?

Buy a USB drive, put everything on it, encrypt it heavily, and walk it next door with a six-pack of beer.

Why make it difficult? :)
 
denverpilot said:
Neighbor?

Buy a USB drive, put everything on it, encrypt it heavily, and walk it next door with a six-pack of beer.

Why make it difficult? :)
Click to expand...

If I want daily off-site backups that beer is going to be expensive. :wink2:
 
PW_Plack said:
There has to be some way for my neighbor and I to back each other up over our home wireless networks. We can both see each other's routers. My house would have to burn pretty hot to destroy a backup at his house.
Click to expand...

There are any number of ways to do that, with or without putting the data over the Internet. Here's how I would do it, assuming a strong signal:

1. Buy a wireless external hard drive / NAS device. They're out there.

2. Configure said device to my router and map same as a network drive.

3. Carry the drive to my neighbor along with a six-pack, and set it up in a convenient location.

4. Test the connection from my place to make sure it's stable.

5. Use my current backup software of choice to create encrypted backups, and store the key in multiple locations (some obscure location on my Web server, my gmail account, my parents' safe, a flash drive in my safe deposit box, etc.).

6. Send the backups to the drive on an automated basis.

I suppose this strategy could also be used if you had secure outbuildings on your own property that were within WiFi range, but still far enough away to be safe from house fires and so forth. It wouldn't help much in the event of a flood or forest fire, however. (But then again, neither would stashing the drive in your neighbor's house.)

It's a creative idea, though. It brings up other creative ideas that would involve the Internet and remove the geographic restrictions, but would introduce new concerns (such as bandwidth caps and dynamic IP addresses). I'm thinking about incorporating it into my Backup Nut site, more as a way to stimulate creative thinking about backup than for any other reason. Getting people to think about backup is nine-tenths of the challenge. Blissful ignorance still prevails among many ordinary users.

I'm also considering it for my elderly parents. They use satellite Internet and would rapidly reach their cap if they did online backup because the only data they actually care about happens to be media files (mainly pictures and videos of the grandkids). But they do have an electrified shed that I think would be within WiFi range. The problem is that it's unheated, and I wonder if any drive would operate in the extreme cold. Nonetheless, it's an idea that would get around the caps.

They do have a neighbor whose house is too far away for conventional WiFi, but that might just connect using exterior directional antennae (or other, shall we say, "novel" methods)... Buried coax is also an option...

See? You've got me thinking.

If bandwidth caps aren't a concern, however, then I find it hard to justify something like this when commercial online backup services are so inexpensive (or even free) nowadays. Nonetheless, it's good, creative thinking that could work very well in some cases.

-Rich
 
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