Dropbox v alternative online storage

[strath44]

Hi folks,

I'm a long term dropbox user, it does what I need or did as the case may be! However its not that cheap long term.

My wife and I have a lot of family photographs & videos and personal docs which I currently have backed up on an external drive. For the second time in a few months the drive failed to spin today, I've bought a cheap replacement and backed up until I figure out a plan.

I was going to get a large raid NAS but I'm wondering if I'm better moving everything cloud based then we can get to it much more easily and the capacity is much more scale-able long term.

What do other people do, any other options over dropbox?

[FurtiveFreddy]

Mega

50GB free. Enough for me.

[akirk]

We use a synology system (has run non stop with not a single issue since purchase - replaced Netgear NAS systems which were a pain) - and then it auto-backs up to Dropbox

We are yet to find a backup system which is a flexible and intuitive as dropbox - though I do agree it is not cheap - business use for us...
so the synology might give you all the resilience you need - however if you want off site resilience in the case of a fire, then you either need to find someone else to also add in a synology box (they can sync) or use a system like Dropbox...

[bitchstewie]

Google Drive and OneDrive are pretty cheap.

Some of it depends if you have other devices that suite one "ecosystem" more than another.

There are a few threads on here about the whole cloud v on-site NAS thing.

[AJB88]

I use Google Photos for photo backups, I do use Google Drive as well but not as much.

[Slushbox]

1 TB of Dropbox is £79 p.a.

A Zyxel NAS326 2 bay unit with a couple of 1 TB drives is about £170. That will give 1TB store in RAID1. Takes up to 2 x 8TB.

I've got one here, it will auto-backy-up to GDrive, has OwnCloud, Zyxel MyCloud and others inbuilt so can be remotely accessed. Also does media-streaming if you need it.

Supports three more USB external drives. Internal 3.5" drives are RAID1 mirrored and auto-rebuild on failure.

Has a button on the front which will auto back-up to an external USB drive. So I do, plus GDrive.

A couple of years old now, very reliable so far. Gigabit port and fast enough to transfer at around 900 bp/s to an Ethernet PC. Also has UPS monitoring and shut-down, so almost immune to power failures if you add one.

Other brands are available.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Personal-Storage-Remote-A...

[DocJock]

For me, it's worth the £79 pa for the reliability and simplicity of Dropbox.

[strath44]

thanks for the feedback so far, I meant to add that another factor in this is i'm pretty close to 1tb on dropbox and the capacity then jumps to 2tb for double the price which is more than i need just now................

[Slushbox]

I think as others will always point out, backups need to be in three places really.

Users often delete stuff dragging it around, so at least one of the backups needs to be kept away from them .

2 TB of Gdrive One store is 'only' £79.99 a year, possibly useful for the 'cloud' archive.

https://one.google.com/about

BackBlaze is 'unlimited' at $6 US a month, works like OneDrive with a PC client which runs in the background.

https://www.backblaze.com/backup-pricing.html

[Somebody]

Do you have Amazon Prime? Unlimited storage on Amazon Photos. Keep Dropbox just for documents.

[strath44]

Somebody said:

Do you have Amazon Prime? Unlimited storage on Amazon Photos. Keep Dropbox just for documents.

That’s a great idea but I’ve already got iCloud on the go, trying to consolidate everything!

[Phil.]

If you have Office 365 then it includes 1TB of OneDrive storage each, for up to 5 family members.

I also back up to a synology that auto backs up to OneDrive.

[breamster]

Slushbox said:

I think as others will always point out, backups need to be in three places really.

Users often delete stuff dragging it around, so at least one of the backups needs to be kept away from them .

2 TB of Gdrive One store is 'only' £79.99 a year, possibly useful for the 'cloud' archive.

https://one.google.com/about

BackBlaze is 'unlimited' at $6 US a month, works like OneDrive with a PC client which runs in the background.

https://www.backblaze.com/backup-pricing.html

Backblaze for me. Proper backup rather than just an online drive. Incredible simple to setup and use. Tested when a drive failed a few weeks back and successfully restored a few tb.