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Dieter
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Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Thu Feb 03, 2011 1:29 pm

I've been a happy customer of Mozy since 2006. How can you beat $5/mo for unlimited storage? And it worked; I did regular test restores from other systems and never had a problem.

Got an email the other day from them that they're raising their prices to $6/mo. For 50GB. If you have more than that, like me (I'm at about 71GB right now on my primary system), the best option is the family plan at $10/mo for 125GB. That's a big price hike for a lot less storage. To be fair, the family plan is for up to 3 computers, so maybe I'd backup some stuff on my Media Center, but I'd still prefer to just pay $5/mo.

I'm OK with paying more for backups if there is value in it. I actually also use KineticD (formerly Data Deposit Box) for client data and I use iBackup.com to securely share and receive files. Both are more expensive than Mozy, but I didn't need crazy security or features to backup my 10,000+ digital family photos (from the past 12 years), home movies, and Outlook. I'd guess there is about 1GB in changes on the average day.

So, I'm looking for a solid (reliable), relatively inexpensive, and web-accessible online backup solution.

Right now, Crashplan (their family plan) is looking very attractive, but I've also heard good things about BackBlaze, iDrive, Carbonite, and LiveDrive. Crashplan seems to be the most feature-laden (about $10/mo for unlimited backups on up to 10 computers, plus all sorts of extras), so I'm leaning that way. I've heard Carbonite throttles you pretty heavily once you reach some threshold, but I'm not looking to upload my entire Media Center (about 3TB) or anything.

Does anybody have any experience with these or other providers? I need a decent amount of space for a decent price, and be able to retrieve files over the web. I would just stick with Mozy, but storage is cheap these days so them arguing that photos & videos have gotten larger just doesn't work for me. We're an EMC customer at work, and I think this is just EMC (they own Mozy) charging more because they can (though I love their stuff!).

What does everybody recommend? Thanks!

Edit: There's also TrendMicro's SafeSync. It's now only $30/year for unlimited storage (I think per account?). It looks like it may have formerly been Humyo, which I've never heard of. Any experience with this one?
 
mmmmmdonuts21
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Re: Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Thu Feb 03, 2011 1:58 pm

Interesting you brought this post up today. I noticed this on lifehacker today. http://lifehacker.com/5749845/the-best-alternatives-to-mozy-for-big-or-unlimited-backups

Hopefully this helps.
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Dieter
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Re: Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Thu Feb 03, 2011 2:10 pm

Thanks for the Lifehacker link. It's also on Spiceworks (which I'm a member), but I usually get much better answers through TR.

http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/126775

Thanks,
Brian
 
Dieter
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Re: Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Sat Feb 05, 2011 12:54 pm

I'm trying CrashPlan. So far, so good. I've uploaded about 20GB so far; it seems faster than Mozy, but I haven't done any benchmarks. I went ahead and signed up for the 4 year family plan. Got the 15% off for Mozy switchers, and at less than $6/mo for up to 10 computers and unlimited storage it seemed hard to beat. Even though I signed up for 4 years, you can cancel anytime and get your money back (prorated after the first month, of course!).

I have yet to do any test restores, but so far I'm happy with it. I also like that I can create different backup sets and have individual backup schedules and retention periods for the different backup sets. I don't need it to monitor all of my photos all the time; just every couple of ours is fine.

I'd still love to hear other's feedback, if any.

Thanks!
 
astraelraen
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Re: Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Sat Feb 05, 2011 1:06 pm

I think we are going to face this issue at my office this coming year.

I want to move away from tape based backups. My main problem with them is that they are a hassle to keep up with.

I like that online backup services only backup your changes and this limits the backup sizes significantly, unlike most tape backups.

Our main constraint is that we are bandwidth limited and during our peak seasons we probably have at least 1GB of file changes daily. Currently we have roughly a 1Mbps upload connection. That speed is fairly maxed out unless we step up to significantly more expensive internet service plans.

I don't think that our upload is robust enough to support the size of file changes that we have throughout the day during our normal busy season. Our office also supports the exchange server for our other 2 satellite offices - so we have additional up/down traffic coming from that server.

I'm thinking we are going to need to step up our internet service before tackling the backup problem. Gotta get that cost past the 4 principles in charge, which will probably be difficult seeing as they don't see much value in the increased speed.
 
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Re: Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Wed Feb 16, 2011 10:28 am

i have used carbonite for about a year now. i am satisfied. it easy to use and i like the remote access. the problem i have is the upload speed. carbonite seriously throttles upload speed. i was recently married and my sister took all the pictures. she ended up with 30gb of .NEF raw files. carbonite uploads at about 100 megabits per sec so it will take close to a month to backup those pictures.

does anyone have a faster recommendation? I have about 250gb of info worth backing up. yes, that excludes the bit-torrent out of copyright educational matterials
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Dieter
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Re: Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Wed Feb 16, 2011 10:55 am

I had heard good things about Carbonite as well, with the exception of their upload throttling, so I skipped them.

So far I'm happy with CrashPlan. I have multiple backup sets created (with different schedules and retentions), and upload is definitely fast. It's my home connection, so I don't have the fastest upload, but I've averaged 1.75-2.0Mbit upload. So I now have about 80GB stored with them. I've done numerous test restores, and their restore process is MUCH faster than MozyHome. After the restore is ready for download, I also get full bandwidth when downloading at work (30Mbit). One thing I wish they had is search of your backups. You definitely have to know where your stuff is to restore it! But, I'm happy with it. If it stays constant, I'm going to stick with them.

In summary, my vote so far is for CrashPlan.

@astraelraen: We've been totally tapeless at work for almost 4 years now. Definitely the first order of business is to get a good pipe. A year or two before going tapeless, we upgraded from a T1 to fiber (different ISP, but still Tier 1) and actually saved money. We started with 10Mbit synchronous, and a year or two later moved to 30Mbit synchronous, with only a 12% increase in cost. I think we can turn up to 100Mbit if we want, but we don't stress our 30Mbit connection. We have about 2.8TB stored online, but that's compressed and de-duped so I'm not sure of the native amount. We upload probably about 22GB per day in compressed and de-duped changes. This is all enterprise-grade, though, so our annual costs are in the 6-figures. Definitely recommend it over tape, though!!! In the long run, it's cheaper and definitely more reliable than tape.
 
Buzzard44
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Re: Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Wed Feb 16, 2011 11:00 am

Depending how often you need to backup, the cheapest/most private form of backup would be a 2TB Caviar Green, that you backup to once a month or so, and keep offsite at a friend/family member's/safe deposit box. Couple that with an eSATA or USB 3 HDD dock, and you're backups will be a snap.
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Dieter
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Re: Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Wed Feb 16, 2011 12:31 pm

Buzzard44 wrote:
Depending how often you need to backup, the cheapest/most private form of backup would be a 2TB Caviar Green, that you backup to once a month or so, and keep offsite at a friend/family member's/safe deposit box. Couple that with an eSATA or USB 3 HDD dock, and you're backups will be a snap.


True, it might be cheapest, but I've found that backups don't happen unless they're convenient. Also, for me, I need some of the backups to happen at minimum hourly, and the rest daily, so removable drives don't work for me.

Two more things I like about CrashPlan (I don't use them, but they're nice to have): You CAN backup to a removable drive. And, you can (for free) backup to a friends computer and they can backup to yours. This functionality (and software) and is free although not quite as secure (uses smaller encryption keys), but it's the same idea as having an external HDD, but without the hassle. You can set a schedule and backup as much as your friend/family allows. It stores the data encrypted on their HDD in 4GB chunks, so they can't get to it. And you can do this for as many people/computers as you like.

I know I keep plugging CrashPlan, but so far I'm impressed with them. I was pretty happy with Mozy, but even if they hadn't raised their prices for less service, I wish I had known about this one sooner -- my experience has been much more positive than with MozyHome.
 
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Re: Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Wed Feb 16, 2011 3:01 pm

hiro_pro wrote:
i have used carbonite for about a year now. i am satisfied. it easy to use and i like the remote access. the problem i have is the upload speed. carbonite seriously throttles upload speed. i was recently married and my sister took all the pictures. she ended up with 30gb of .NEF raw files. carbonite uploads at about 100 megabits per sec so it will take close to a month to backup those pictures.

does anyone have a faster recommendation? I have about 250gb of info worth backing up. yes, that excludes the bit-torrent out of copyright educational matterials

++ Carbonite has been good to me. I would like more options like just upload everything in a folders (compared to the select extensions). It sucks having to click on the files. But the price/size difference isn't worth the upgrade to pro.

I've got 250GB+ encrypted on their servers and get about 50GB uploaded a week (24/7).
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wibeasley
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Re: Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Thu May 26, 2011 2:08 pm

Dieter, are you still happy with CrashPlan? I should get an offsite solution soon.
 
frumper15
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Re: Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Thu May 26, 2011 3:33 pm

I'm not Dieter, but I can tell you my experience with Crashplan. I used Mozy for years at home and work (free edition at home, enterprise/corporate at work) and I think it's still churning away on my wife's laptop (note to self, remove mozy from laptop). I only had the free version at home, so I was limited to 2GB which is used for only my most essential files. Uploading took forever, even for 2GB, but once that was complete, it quietly ran in the background. It saved my bacon at least once after a late night file move resulted in me deleting both copies of a certain folder full of somewhat important files. So, I learned the benefit of online/offisite backup with versioning. However, it wasn't enough to do all my pictures or my growing family, so I was considering going the pay route for unlimited storage. Upload speed was still a concern for me, especially considering expanding my usage to more like 50-100GB and restoring that amount in the even of some cataclysm would be an eternity.
Then, I started using the corporate version at work. Let's just say I'm glad I hadn't signed up for a year of the home version. I had nothing but problems with Mozy at work and I'm not sure I ever got a complete backup (only 5GB total files consisting of .pst, excel, word docs, pictures, etc.) before I left last year despite reinstalling and opening multiple tickets with support. I knew I still needed backup, preferrably something offsite and cheap, so I rolled my own combo of mozy for the same stuff I had been using and foldersync for files (I think it's call live sync or mesh or something - it's still around in some form). Essentially, I was now backing up critical files and synchronizing two folder sets between my house and an external drive I had installed on my dad's computer a few towns over. I liked the convenience of being able to "seed" my initial "backup" (just a sync, really) so it wasn't an eternity and since it was my own storage, it was cheap (cost of the drive) and for the most part automatic. However, it wasn't a backup, as I discovered more than a few times. A sync is just that, so an accidental delete or overwrite on a file was replicated instantly on my other drive across town. Not great.
Enter Crashplan about 4 months ago. I haven't looked back. I'm still only using the free version, but I have set up my own little backup network between home, work, my parents house. I have an external drive hanging off my WHS at home and the backup server at work that backup up to each other and a partition on the hard drive inside my parent's computer. So, Home backs up to work and parents, work backs up to home and parents, parents back up to home and work. On top of that, I have my sisters both backing up to me at home and my father in law backs up to the server at work.
It hasn't cost me anything more than some storage space I wasn't really using anyways and I can sleep a little better knowing my family has their files backed up - because I would be the one they call with a hard drive crash anyways.
It has great features for sharing space with friends (encrypted, quotas, schedules, etc) and if you want to pay (I couldn't quite convince my family to split the cost of a family plan with me) you can get unlimited storage for up to 10 computers for I think $10 a month. You can use network drives, external drive, online, friends, family, etc. to store your data, and you can seed a backup if, say, your friend lives across the country, you could both buy external drives, fill them with your initial backups, ship them to each other and have a backup that way. If you house gets destroyed, computers get stolen, etc. you can just have your friend ship back your drive and you won't have to wait forever to download all your data again.
Ok, that's enough - suffice to say, I like Crashplan a lot. I should probably consider paying them for their outstanding product....
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Dieter
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Re: Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Thu May 26, 2011 4:22 pm

wibeasley wrote:
Dieter, are you still happy with CrashPlan? I should get an offsite solution soon.


Yes, I'm still using them and I've been happy with them. I just setup a new computer to replace my old one, and instead of telling CrashPlan that it's a replacement, I just had it push all of the data over again (about 85GB). So now I'm storing ~175GB over 3 computers with them and things are as fast as ever.

They do offer the ability to switch computers so you don't have to reseed everything, but I wanted to test them, and I was going from XP to Win7x64, different versions of Office/Outlook, etc. So the data is all in different locations, and I had wanted to reorganize my photos anyway, so it seemed like a good opportunity.

I've setup multiple backup sets with different backup schedules and retentions, and it hasn't had any hiccups at all. I've got my profile (Outlook excluded), Outlook, client files, photos, videos, and music. The last ones I only have it check a few times a day since they're not critical. I don't even notice a backup is running (except for hard disk activity noise since I've mirrored my drives), but I did upgrade to an i7-2600 so everything is pretty much crazy fast (old system was a P4-2.8 circa 2002 -- painful!)

I still have the old system online and it doesn't have any issues pushing backups, even if there are few/no changes.

I tried iDrive at a client to replace MozyPro, and so far I'm not as impressed. I do like some of its features, but it's not backing up as well as I had hoped. They needed the ability to backup open QuickBooks files, which iDrive says they can do (VSS doesn't work with QB for some reason), so that's why I tried them out. I might switch them to CrashPlan Business or whatever it's called, but I don't know if they can backup open QB files. I may actually switch them back to MozyPro if I can't find something else; it's relatively expensive and somewhat slow but it did work.

So the ~$6/mo I'm paying CrashPlan for up to 10 computers and unlimited storage is a good deal IMHO. I also like the weekly reports, indicating how the backups are going. I'd recommend them for home use.
 
wibeasley
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Re: Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Thu May 26, 2011 4:35 pm

Can CrashPlan do bare-metal Windows backups (ie, Windows Complete PC Backup) natively? Or would I direct all those backups to one directory, and then ask CrashPlan to backup that directory?

I'm now considering this plan:
(A) backup only datafiles to CrahPlan's online site, and
(B) backup my WHS to a friend's house 30 miles north. I'd buy a basic NAS and seed it with my WHS data. If my house got wiped out, I could drive 30 minutes and get the NAS. I wouldn't have to wait days for the recovery to finish (although I'd probably my occupied with more important issues in that event).

Is this consistent with your advice? I'd need to pay attention to encryption for part B. But I guess his house is not that much more likely to get burglarized than mine.

That was helpful, thank you frumper. I hadn't seriously considered the alternate location until your description.
 
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Re: Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Thu May 26, 2011 6:03 pm

Crashplan doesn't yet do bare-metal backups, so you're looking at plan B.

Also of note: Crashplan does data de-duplication, and it works pretty well IMO. If they somehow implemented block-level backup, now that would be incredible.

Besides the previously-mentioned features, the killer one is that it's so lightweight/efficient. Ever since I installed the client, I'm not noticing any extra I/O load. The UI is sluggish but you can't have everything, and it's supposed to be running quietly in the background anyway.
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dmjifn
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Re: Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Thu May 26, 2011 7:53 pm

I also use Crashplan and I'm pretty happy with it. My main PC is backed up to Crashplan's cloud, to an external HD, and to a thumbdrive on my work PC. My company doesn't backup our workstations - they want you to work off network drives for important stuff. Remote files doesn't work so well for some of my tools, so I run Crashplan there to backup my workstation both to a thumbdrive [s]and to said network drives[/s] (1). I have not done a full restore but I've pulled down several lost files. I've also used the web control panel from work to change backup settings on my home PC's Crashplan client - which I thought was slick.

Unlike most posters, I only push ~5-7GB over the wire. My truly large files (like disc images, photos, and music) are pretty static, so I only send them to the external drive and keep them offsite on DVDs.

FWIW, I also looked at Carbonite, Mozy, Backblaze, iDrive, and DropBox. Every provider seems to have a contingent of loyal fans as well as bitter former users. Most have lost data at some point in their history (even Amazon's EC2 last month). For a business, I think having a cloud service as the ONLY form of backup amounts to gambling.


(1) - Edit: My mistake - I haven't gotten it to use network drives. That's a limitation with the Crashplan Windows service.
 
frumper15
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Re: Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Thu May 26, 2011 9:46 pm

morphine wrote:
... If they somehow implemented block-level backup, now that would be incredible...

I believe Crashplan does do block-level and uses Shadow copy for open files... Yes, it does, according to this page:
http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/faq/backup
" Why does it look like my whole file is backed up repeatedly?
After initital backup on the file is complete, only new or changed information is sent when the file is backed up.
When CrashPlan scans a file, it knows that the file changed and the progress bar runs through the file as if the information is new. But as it goes, it discovers the information hasn't actually changed and only transmits the new information to the backup destination.
For the technically savvy: CrashPlan does incremental deltas by block within the file."


It would be nice, I suppose, to have bare metal restore from Crashplan, but I can't imagine how that would work without downloading an image to a local drive first. I can't imagine the wait to restore a 20GB OS image over the wire -- what if it hangs halfway through? Yuck. I think your best bet if you want that functionality would be to use something like Acronis Truimage to make incremental or differential backups to a locally connected drive and then back up that folder. With block-level and dedupe, it should be pretty efficient with how much it has to upload.

Personally, I really only care about things I can't replace like picture of my kids, work from college (that I'll probably never look at but spent entirely too much time on to just risk throwing away), and anything from my current job, and things that would be a pain like my install/setup files for programs I own or have accumulated through the years (benchmarks, plugins, etc.). Pretty much everything else, including reinstalling my OS and main programs is easy enough to do that I don't get too crazy or bog down my internet connection for the sake of backing it up. That said, I do have a WHS to make those backups locally, but I'm exposed to fire/flood/theft, etc. for that type of stuff. I don't stay awake at night worrying about that knowing i've got the important stuff backed up about 7 different ways from Sunday.
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frumper15
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Re: Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Thu May 26, 2011 9:51 pm

dmjifn wrote:
(1) - Edit: My mistake - I haven't gotten it to use network drives. That's a limitation with the Crashplan Windows service.

There is an "unsupported" method you can use to backup mapped drives using Crashplan as outlined here:
http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/r ... ped_drives
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Re: Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Thu May 26, 2011 10:35 pm

dmjifn wrote:
FWIW, I also looked at Carbonite, Mozy, Backblaze, iDrive, and DropBox.

IMHO, Dropbox is really different from the others. It's a remarkably cool technology for making strategic files available on every device. But I wouldn't recommend it as a mass backup solution. I'd use Dropbox separately and in tandem with another full backup solution, simply to have certain files instantly available on every PC/mobile device.
 
wibeasley
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Re: Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Thu May 26, 2011 11:07 pm

This is a great thread Dieter. It fills in a gap since Scott's backup article two years ago. It's encouraging that your epxerience has been consistent with frumper's.
frumper15 wrote:
It would be nice, I suppose, to have bare metal restore from Crashplan, but I can't imagine how that would work without downloading an image to a local drive first. I can't imagine the wait to restore a 20GB OS image over the wire -- what if it hangs halfway through? Yuck. I think your best bet if you want that functionality would be to use something like Acronis Truimage to make incremental or differential backups to a locally connected drive and then back up that folder.
I think that's the plan morphine termed 'Plan B' (as opposed to 'Part B' of the plan I outlined) and endorsed. I agree that downloading the bare-metal over the internet would be a problem. But my NAS would be at a friend's house 30 miles away. If I drove it home, I could use it directly in my home network, instead of running the data back through the internet, right?
 
dmjifn
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Re: Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Fri May 27, 2011 12:29 am

wibeasley wrote:
... my NAS would be at a friend's house 30 miles away. If I drove it home, I could use it directly in my home network, instead of running the data back through the internet, right?
Yes. And it also works the other way, meaning you could drive the initial backup to his place instead of sending it over the wire.

frumper15 wrote:
There is an "unsupported" method you can use to backup mapped drives using Crashplan as outlined here:
http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/r ... ped_drives

I have seen that! Unfortunately, I'm not comfortable with storing my creds in a batch file. I also started looking at running Crashplan as me instead of as SYSTEM but put it aside and never got back to it.
 
Dieter
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Re: Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Fri May 27, 2011 9:40 am

As others have said, I don't think CrashPlan does bare metal, but I'm just looking to backup data. I don't really care about the system as a whole. Windows 7 takes about 20 minutes to install, so to me it's not critical that I be able to restore the full system.

CrashPlan does have a form of changed-block backup, but not in the traditional sense that I think of. When I think of block-level backups, I think of OS/filesystem independent, and basically raw backup of the HDD sectors. So I think CrashPlan can just see what's changed in the file itself, but it still examines the file, rather than true block level that detects changes to the blocks. I could be totally wrong about this, but since it seems to sit on the filesystem I think that's how it works. Minor detail, but some may get in trouble if they think this is "true" block-level backup.

I haven't used any of the other features (storing to local media, seeding, or storing on friends/family's computers) since I use their online service, but I like the idea that I *can* if I want to. When storing on others computers, for the free product I think encryption is limited to AES-128. For the paid version, I think it's AES-256. Don't quote me on that; it's from memory from a few months ago. And if I recall, I think it stores the data in large chunk files (4GB comes to mind???), so you cannot see others data and they can't see yours. It's just an encrypted chunk on your/their HDD. Pretty nice model, I think.

I agree that the UI is laggy, but it works and it's stable so I don't mind. It's certainly not perfect (far from it!), but it's the best I've found so far for the price. I DO wish that it could backup network shares natively so that I could use it at one of my client's offices. Maybe the Business version can; I don't remember, but it would be nice to have.

I'm a huge fan of online backup, as I think the odds of the provider having a failure AND my computers having failures at the same time are slim. So I'm not too worried about my data and I only use one provider. It may come back to bite me, but it's still better than nothing at all, or just copying to local media.
 
frumper15
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Re: Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Fri May 27, 2011 12:34 pm

I guess I didn't realize there was a difference between true block-level OS independent backup and file-based block level - I'll need to educate myself some more. Although, the more I think about it, I kinda doubt that Crashplan has implemented at least 5 different file-system types of block-level considering it supports windows, linux, mac and solaris and each of those could be using at least 2 different file system types. I think this warrants further investigation (I'm a windows only guy and everythign is NTFS so it doesn't really affect me, but good to know anyways).

As far as "Plan B" vs. "Part B" I guess I'm not sure how you would implement a WHS backup online to a NAS across town. I would love to hear about a good solution for doing this - I've got a WHS at home and one at work and I would love to Sync some of the shares (music, for example) which acts as both a "backup" and allows me to listen to my music collection both places. I've attempted using FTP and Syncback and that didn't go well. Something like Live Mesh might fit the bill, but I haven't gotten that far. I pretty much settled on just seeding the work WHS from a few trips with the external drive and any new copies of things at home get copied to the appropriate folder there as well as a "transfer" folder on my main PC that gets copied over to a an external and brough to work every once in a while. Certainly not elegant or foolproof, but the reality is I could get those files again if I needed to, unlike pictures and home movies that are irreplaceable.

I run Crashplan directly on my WHS and backup the data folders that way. I don't backup my computer backups that are stored elsewhere in the file system. I'm already less than 100% confident everything is getting caught by Crashplan because of the way files are stored in WHS (tombstones, multiple drives, etc) and I don't know what the files even look like for the PC backups. I believe there is a WHS plug-in you can use to backup your backups to an external or other drive that isn't in your WHS pool and then you shoudl be able to use any number of solutions to move those files elsewhere.
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xtalentx
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Re: Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Fri May 27, 2011 1:02 pm

I was "told" to setup an Amazon S3 account at work and backup everything to it.

I'll be doing that this weekend... We have about 10 TB of data that will be going.

If you want I can let you know how the whole process goes.
 
Dieter
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Re: Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Fri May 27, 2011 1:59 pm

xtalentx wrote:
I was "told" to setup an Amazon S3 account at work and backup everything to it.

I'll be doing that this weekend... We have about 10 TB of data that will be going.

If you want I can let you know how the whole process goes.


Interesting. I know there are quite a few providers/solutions out there to backup to Amazon (Jungledisk, etc), but I didn't know many were really in the business/enterprise space. How do you retrieve the data for DR? Are you doing it all in-house or using a provider? I'd be really interested to hear how it turns out and how you architect it.

Good luck!
 
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Re: Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Fri May 27, 2011 2:21 pm

I guess I missed this thread originally, but noticed it recently.

Sounds like the original deal was one of those "too good to be true" things. They probably got killed by improved residential broadband speeds (people unwilling to pick and choose what to back up, and taking advantage of the "unlimited" aspect), and had to adjust their business strategy accordingly.

Know anyone else with a decent broadband connection? My inclination would be to go with some sort of "you back up my files, I'll back up yours" agreement with a friend or family member. Use something like rsync to minimize Internet bandwidth demands, and keep a local copy as well. For normal "my hard drive crashed" or "I accidentally deleted a file" scenarios, you're relying on nobody outside your inner circle. And you're only relying on your "buddy" in the case of a catastrophic event (e.g. fire, earthquake, tornado); and provided you periodically check that the backups are happening, I'd trust your best friend / parent / child / etc. more than I'd trust some faceless Internet cloud services provider.
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Re: Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Fri May 27, 2011 2:33 pm

xtalentx wrote:
I was "told" to setup an Amazon S3 account at work and backup everything to it. We have about 10 TB of data that will be going.
That's around $1,500/month. Did they give you much hassle about finding a lower price, or are the risks too great?
 
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Re: Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Fri May 27, 2011 2:42 pm

wibeasley wrote:
xtalentx wrote:
I was "told" to setup an Amazon S3 account at work and backup everything to it. We have about 10 TB of data that will be going.

That's around $1,500/month. Did they give you much hassle about finding a lower price, or are the risks too great?

Seems to be pretty much the going rate for cloud storage from the major vendors (Rackspace is similar).

Related to my previous post, do you (xtalentx) have a geographically remote office you can back up to? That might be a better solution.
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Dieter
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Re: Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Fri May 27, 2011 2:43 pm

wibeasley wrote:
xtalentx wrote:
I was "told" to setup an Amazon S3 account at work and backup everything to it. We have about 10 TB of data that will be going.
That's around $1,500/month. Did they give you much hassle about finding a lower price, or are the risks too great?


$1500/month for 10TB is cheap in the enterprise space. If they do it right, it should be a good, solid solution.
 
Dieter
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Re: Best Online (offsite) Backup solution?

Fri May 27, 2011 2:46 pm

just brew it! wrote:
I guess I missed this thread originally, but noticed it recently.

Sounds like the original deal was one of those "too good to be true" things. They probably got killed by improved residential broadband speeds (people unwilling to pick and choose what to back up, and taking advantage of the "unlimited" aspect), and had to adjust their business strategy accordingly.

Know anyone else with a decent broadband connection? My inclination would be to go with some sort of "you back up my files, I'll back up yours" agreement with a friend or family member. Use something like rsync to minimize Internet bandwidth demands, and keep a local copy as well. For normal "my hard drive crashed" or "I accidentally deleted a file" scenarios, you're relying on nobody outside your inner circle. And you're only relying on your "buddy" in the case of a catastrophic event (e.g. fire, earthquake, tornado); and provided you periodically check that the backups are happening, I'd trust your best friend / parent / child / etc. more than I'd trust some faceless Internet cloud services provider.


I'm not sure if you're asking rhetorically or if you're looking for a solution, but the free (and paid) version of CrashPlan offers what you are talking about (backing up on your friends/family's computers, and they on yours). They do manage the central servers so it's easy to connect to the other systems, but once the connection is established I think (though I'm not sure) it's direct between computers. Once established, it's pretty much set it and forget it.

I don't mind using "cloud" storage since it's encrypted, and I like the ability to retrieve my files from anywhere with an internet connection. But, I do find the peer-backup model a really nice feature, even though I don't (yet) use it.

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