Online backups for home.
Discussion
As it says above, Any recommendations?
Looking at off-site storage for 200 GB+ of photos + Home Movies + Music(my own bands)
Not expecting it for free and I know it won't be a quick upload but I only have local storage at the moment (on RAID) but that doesn't protect me from Fire or theft. DVD is not really practical for that volume of data.
Not been bothered before but have all the photos of Bullett junior now so I think I would be looking at a divorce if I lost those!
Google throws up plenty of options but hard to tell which are worth bothering with. Obviously don't want to be doing the upload twice.
Looking at off-site storage for 200 GB+ of photos + Home Movies + Music(my own bands)
Not expecting it for free and I know it won't be a quick upload but I only have local storage at the moment (on RAID) but that doesn't protect me from Fire or theft. DVD is not really practical for that volume of data.
Not been bothered before but have all the photos of Bullett junior now so I think I would be looking at a divorce if I lost those!
Google throws up plenty of options but hard to tell which are worth bothering with. Obviously don't want to be doing the upload twice.
ThatPhilBrettGuy said:
Mozy
Desktop Licenses: $3.95 + $0.50/GB per monthGenuine answer here.
Buy a remotely accessible NAS, do an initial backup, and then ask a friend/family member to put it on their adsl. Just remember to get them to use dyndns so you can access it.
Gonna be a darn sight cheaper than $100p/m for online backup with one of these companies.
tinman0 said:
ThatPhilBrettGuy said:
Mozy
Desktop Licenses: $3.95 + $0.50/GB per monthGenuine answer here.
Buy a remotely accessible NAS, do an initial backup, and then ask a friend/family member to put it on their adsl. Just remember to get them to use dyndns so you can access it.
Gonna be a darn sight cheaper than $100p/m for online backup with one of these companies.
ThatPhilBrettGuy said:
$4.95 a month for unlimited storage actually.
Yeah, just re-reading the site. Another online company determined not to make a profit then. The problem I have with the $4.95 per month unlimited thing is this though; it's not realistic.
Imagine if they did lose your data, ($4.95pm isn't exactly going to buy you high end kit for instance), you're going to be pissed, and there will be lawsuits galore. But at the end of the day, your data is gone. (If you've stuffed your original as well).
And when you go down the pub to mull this over many pints with your friends you will be saying "all my pictures gone - I paid a whole $4.95 a month for that service". So your important (divorce costing) data is worth $4.95 per month.
Personally, my solution is far more interesting
Edited by tinman0 on Friday 5th March 18:25
tinman0 said:
ThatPhilBrettGuy said:
Mozy
Desktop Licenses: $3.95 + $0.50/GB per monthGenuine answer here.
Buy a remotely accessible NAS, do an initial backup, and then ask a friend/family member to put it on their adsl. Just remember to get them to use dyndns so you can access it.
Gonna be a darn sight cheaper than $100p/m for online backup with one of these companies.
Mozy, Carbonite, Jungledisc, idrive, etc all offer this sort of thing at a reasonable fee. The initial upload can take a very long time though on home broadband. Big external hard disks are cheap now (around the £45 mark for 500GB, £65 for 1TB), so for "archive" stuff (old photos, movies, etc) I'd put a copy on one of them and keep it elsewhere - desk drawer at work, parents' attic, friend's house across town. Easily encrypted with something like Truecrypt if you'd rather not chance someone looking through it all. Then use an online service for the newer stuff. The key is just keeping more than one copy, in different places, at all times. If one fails, it doesn't matter as long as you've got good copies elsewhere.
If there's a lot of photos, a flickr pro account ($25pa) lets you upload as much as you like, and you can get back original files if you need them (as well as the other benefits of a pro account) - you don't have to have them publicly viewable either. Lots of photo management software lets you upload directly to flickr as well - I do it out of habit these days.
If there's a lot of photos, a flickr pro account ($25pa) lets you upload as much as you like, and you can get back original files if you need them (as well as the other benefits of a pro account) - you don't have to have them publicly viewable either. Lots of photo management software lets you upload directly to flickr as well - I do it out of habit these days.
tinman, I'm slightly confused! Firstly you say Mozy is too expensive as you were looking at the Pro version. You then go on to say that Mozy is too cheap when you look at the home version.
I agree Mozy is cheap but they are also a big company and I would trust them much more than a Heath Robinson £200 setup using my mates ADSL line!
I agree Mozy is cheap but they are also a big company and I would trust them much more than a Heath Robinson £200 setup using my mates ADSL line!
rich1231 said:
And your poor friend gets their over download limit warnings the next day
And that is different to the warning you'll get on your own line how?200GB has to go to the US in the first place. With a 5G monthly limit, you're whole backup is going to take the best part of a couple of years to upload. And thats before we measure the upstream 25k per second that most lines have. (200,000,000k / 25k = 7 weeks or so).
Personally, I'd do the easy thing - back up programme on your machine, two external drives. Stick one in the boot of your car and swap them over once a week.
Four Cofffee said:
Do these services do the upload automatically at a set time or do you have to open the software daily and tell it to upload?
With Mozy it is either daily scheduled or it starts when your processor usage drops below a level you set. You can start it manually as well.Soft Top said:
tinman, I'm slightly confused! Firstly you say Mozy is too expensive as you were looking at the Pro version. You then go on to say that Mozy is too cheap when you look at the home version.
I agree Mozy is cheap but they are also a big company and I would trust them much more than a Heath Robinson £200 setup using my mates ADSL line!
Heath Robinson? I'm sure Netgear appreciate you calling their kit a Heath Robinson set up.I agree Mozy is cheap but they are also a big company and I would trust them much more than a Heath Robinson £200 setup using my mates ADSL line!
My point about cost is this. $100 a month for a backup that could be done a lot cheaper is overkill for a personal user, personally speaking of course.
My other point is that $4.95 is too cheap. Spent too many years in IT and internet services specifically with people trying to do things for f-all money and then complaining when it all goes titsup. $4.95 is not a real value. It's meaningless. Barely covers the cost of the drive array, let alone the bandwidth required.
Like the guys over at Uk2.net last year with the non existent mail servers - they were paying pennies per month for the service, yet when it went wrong, they b
hed about all sorts of cash it was costing them. Same with Gmail and its servers that went titsup - the amount of people's livelihoods that were based around a service that cost nothing.Edited by tinman0 on Friday 5th March 19:35
tinman0 said:
Soft Top said:
tinman, I'm slightly confused! Firstly you say Mozy is too expensive as you were looking at the Pro version. You then go on to say that Mozy is too cheap when you look at the home version.
I agree Mozy is cheap but they are also a big company and I would trust them much more than a Heath Robinson £200 setup using my mates ADSL line!
Heath Robinson? I'm sure Netgear appreciate you calling their kit a Heath Robinson set up.I agree Mozy is cheap but they are also a big company and I would trust them much more than a Heath Robinson £200 setup using my mates ADSL line!
My point about cost is this. $100 a month for a backup that could be done a lot cheaper is overkill for a personal user, personally speaking of course.
My other point is that $4.95 is too cheap. Spent too many years in IT and internet services specifically with people trying to do things for f-all money and then complaining when it all goes titsup. $4.95 is not a real value. It's meaningless. Barely covers the cost of the drive array, let alone the bandwidth required.
Like the guys over at Uk2.net last year with the non existent mail servers - they were paying pennies per month for the service, yet when it went wrong, they b
hed about all sorts of cash it was costing them. Same with Gmail and its servers that went titsup - the amount of people's livelihoods that were based around a service that cost nothing.Edited by tinman0 on Friday 5th March 19:35
I do get my moneys worth out of it with the data I have there but I am sure they make plenty of money out of those who don't. It's not about the short term game.
tinman0 said:
rich1231 said:
And your poor friend gets their over download limit warnings the next day
And that is different to the warning you'll get on your own line how?200GB has to go to the US in the first place. With a 5G monthly limit, you're whole backup is going to take the best part of a couple of years to upload. And thats before we measure the upstream 25k per second that most lines have. (200,000,000k / 25k = 7 weeks or so).
Personally, I'd do the easy thing - back up programme on your machine, two external drives. Stick one in the boot of your car and swap them over once a week.
rich1231 said:
tinman0 said:
rich1231 said:
And your poor friend gets their over download limit warnings the next day
And that is different to the warning you'll get on your own line how?200GB has to go to the US in the first place. With a 5G monthly limit, you're whole backup is going to take the best part of a couple of years to upload. And thats before we measure the upstream 25k per second that most lines have. (200,000,000k / 25k = 7 weeks or so).
Personally, I'd do the easy thing - back up programme on your machine, two external drives. Stick one in the boot of your car and swap them over once a week.
i agree with tinman
just buy a WD passport drive, and copy once a week/month (or as needed)
if it's really essential, life threatening data, then for 200GB, changing on a 'daily' basis
then you'll need something a bit better than Mozy home
oh, and you might need an SDSL line, or T1 ?
Bullett said:
As it says above, Any recommendations?
DVD is not really practical for that volume of data.
DVD is practical if what you are trying to achieve is a backup of data that over time is unlikely to change.DVD is not really practical for that volume of data.
I section my disk up into drives of:
OS
Stuff I really need keep backed up (home photos, videos, documents)
Stuff that it does not rally matter if they die as I can rebuild (ripped CDs etc)
Of the stuff I really need to keep, I full backup(s) to a external disk and full backup to DVD (yes I know a lot of DVDs) I then incremental backup to DVD
The DVDs go off site and the external HD is local.
What you need to check with any of these backups services is wether they just sync or actually backup.
by that, i mean if Mrs Bullet deletes a folder of photos ( that you get the blame for...) and the backup service is really just a mirror of whats on youre hard drive and your hard drive syncs up to the backup service and kills off the photos in the "cloud" tecnically speaking - yer screwed - . If it does a full backup and then incrementals - your gold.
I like the idea of DVDs (+R -R) as it is a read only copy, has no moving parts and should last 10 years easy.
the biggest problem is in stuff being deleted or moved on the PC without your knowledge....
Most in IT support are familiar with the click-drag-click mouse trojan that disguises itself as a double-click-left-mouse-button
Edited by lestag on Friday 5th March 22:53
Edited by lestag on Friday 5th March 22:54
rich1231 said:
tinman0 said:
rich1231 said:
And your poor friend gets their over download limit warnings the next day
And that is different to the warning you'll get on your own line how?200GB has to go to the US in the first place. With a 5G monthly limit, you're whole backup is going to take the best part of a couple of years to upload. And thats before we measure the upstream 25k per second that most lines have. (200,000,000k / 25k = 7 weeks or so).
Personally, I'd do the easy thing - back up programme on your machine, two external drives. Stick one in the boot of your car and swap them over once a week.
Man-At-Arms said:
rich1231 said:
tinman0 said:
rich1231 said:
And your poor friend gets their over download limit warnings the next day
And that is different to the warning you'll get on your own line how?200GB has to go to the US in the first place. With a 5G monthly limit, you're whole backup is going to take the best part of a couple of years to upload. And thats before we measure the upstream 25k per second that most lines have. (200,000,000k / 25k = 7 weeks or so).
Personally, I'd do the easy thing - back up programme on your machine, two external drives. Stick one in the boot of your car and swap them over once a week.
i agree with tinman
just buy a WD passport drive, and copy once a week/month (or as needed)
if it's really essential, life threatening data, then for 200GB, changing on a 'daily' basis
then you'll need something a bit better than Mozy home
oh, and you might need an SDSL line, or T1 ?
Get some external drives and store somewhere away from the house.
Saves any connection problems, unnecessary bills and is also something you can trust.
No cheap back-up service is worth it, in my experience. Its a false economy.
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