Online Backup Suggestions

[MakersTeleMark]

So what do folks recommend these days for online backup solutions like Carbonite and the like?

Just looking for something simple and semi automated to regularly backup files, e-mails, and preferences.

Thanks.

[Man Jerk]

A friend of mine works for crashplan. Ive been using it on my and my wifes laptops for some time now.

[Fenris]

I've been pretty stoked with Backblaze for a while now.

[Skidog]

Carbonite.

[Supermoon]

Carbonite.

+1 on this. Used this for a year now with good results.

[MakersTeleMark]

What really separates these products?

[PNWbrit]

Nothing really.

Unless you've got vast amounts of data you can probably get away with using a number of different free services to give you the combined total space you need.

[Snow Dog]

I've moved to IMAP for email since I use a bunch of computers. An IMAP email server keeps everything up on the server instead of downloading it to your computer. Several friends forward their various email names to gmail now so everything is in the cloud (gmail has an IMAP interface). Google Business Services even has some free backend services so you can have your own domain name and their email servers.

For other files I use MS SkyDrive (25GB free) and MS Live Mesh (up to 5GB) to sync various directories between computers and in the cloud. It's not true backup but it does keep a copy of important files elsewhere. If it's mostly documents then 5GB is plenty of space.

[RShea]

What really separates these products?

For home use there are a few things like storage amount compared to the monthly cost, speed of the transfers and efficiency of the data compression, and sometimes the flexibility of the software and types of Operating Systems (Windows and Mac, Linux, etc) you run on the computer. For business use- there can be added features like if there is large amount of data, companies can do things like send a copy of the data on media via over night shipping (so the large lengthy online download of the data is avoided), remote online access (like a virtual server), and if they can handle things like recovery of a single user email box or if the full email database has to be restored.

Egnyte (for businesses especially), Carbonite, Mozy are some of the companies out there. How much data and storage are you thinking you'll require? Dropbox and some other offerings maybe able to offer online storage (but not the automatic transfer every day (or week) of the changed files. Also may have to check that your ISP speed and make sure it does not throttle your bandwidth speed for reaching a set amount of transfer threshold.

[RShea]

Just came across this one- have not used them yet. The price is right (while not free their storage is unlimited so might be worth testing....) Unlimited part is the only thing that sort of scares me- there really is not such thing as unlimited- as storage drives cost money and bandwidth to transfer the data costs money too.

http://onlinestoragesolution.com

[Fenris]

RShea - I believe I found some sketchy things about them when my boss was thinking about using them a month or two ago.

Backblaze is unlimited too if that is what you need (I have a couple of TB with them) and they explain very clearly how they can afford to have it unlimited.

[RShea]

RShea - I believe I found some sketchy things about them when my boss was thinking about using them a month or two ago.

Backblaze is unlimited too if that is what you need (I have a couple of TB with them) and they explain very clearly how they can afford to have it unlimited.

I'd be interested in hearing the detailed info on why and what you found out about them (even a PM if you do not want to discuss it here.) I'll have a look at Backblaze and pricing, etc. also. I understand part of their logic on unlimited- the fact that many people that use their service will only have a small upload pipe for the transfers and that is a bottle neck. But unlimited hosting can be a path to trouble if all the customers are high storage and transfer customers- like an all you can eat buffet is not as popular with the I'm not very hungry right now crowd.

[Fenris]

This is just what I can remember right now about sketchy service:

A couple of different sites with different names that were basically carbon copies of each other...no information about their storage facilities or methods to keep cost down...no actual stories out there from using it, just PR copy and paste and change a couple words for a quick 50 bucks blogs/forum posts....CS???




Why I like Backblaze:

Some level of realism when they say unlimited. They tell you that they will not allow you to back up a server, or several computers onto a single one, and then have Backblaze on that one. I believe a year or so ago they had some post saying how much the average users were using, and how much the most was. I believe that the most was around 21 TB, but the average use was in the tens of gigs, which they think is because people like me who put several TB up also are likely to be their family tech support people and do the pre-emptive strike of giving their grandparents Backblaze as a gift.
Data storage infrastructure. They know that the magic of their system is the code that is running on the servers and routers, not the actual hardware, so they share the hardware spec which helps drive the of building that hardware down as more people use it. I believe their hardware cost is a fifth or a tenth of what it would cost to either by it from a vendor or to use Amazon or other bulk data provider as their backend.
CS - The couple questions that I've asked they have replied really quickly, even the one where they had to consult an engineer (that turned out to be a no because they would have had to do a major change to their codebase for one weird edge case that didn't actually have any effect)

I'm intrigued by Crashplan if I can get a reasonable connection where I want to have my own server (currently cable that rivals a pair of dial up modems, but their is fiber already hanging on the pole at the end of the driveway, and the local telco is just waiting for a go from the town to offer service), but I decided against it when I started using online backup their client performed really poorly on Macs, as did Mozy (both were using Java to abstract their codebase away from being on a single platform, rather than writing native clients). I believe that Crashplan has now written themselves a native, or at least largely native client.