Online backup
I've been afraid of my home computer failing (it's more than just a few years old), and taking all my precious data with it!
So I wanted to start researching online backup companies, including Mozy, Carbonite, Baracuda (and any others I can find via Google). Unfortunately, here at my office I cannot get to any of their sites (big brother); and was wondering if those of you in da haus had any experiences.
What I'm looking for is:
-$100/year or less
-unlimited space (although I only have about 100GB of stuff right now)
-ability to pull from multiple sources (incl multiple drives in single computer; and maybe multiple computers altogether)
-online access to stored data
Anything else to consider?
Any recommendations or suggestions?
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Comments
I hear good things abour Carbonite, and if it Barracuda you are talking about they are very good. I use a few of there products here at the PD.
How often do they do backups? Daily, weekly or when you want.
Do they do incremental backups? So you bite the bullet and upload all your files which will take some time but after that they only backup what has changed since last time.
What happens if there is an interuption during the backup? Does it start over again or does it know where to pickup from the drop.
How do you verify and test you backup? You can backup all you want but if the data is no good after it gets there then you are SOL.
Will you ISP drop you if you if you try to ram 100gigs worth of data over there pipe?
A few thoughts.
For a single computer (unlimited online storage) it's only $50 a year and they also have a plan if you need to cover all of your household computers.
Everything is 448bit encrypted.
You can setup the backup schedule down to every minute I think and you can backup external drives as well.
They have online access to files and also versioning of files, which is a pretty cool feature.
It takes a while to do the initial backup, but after that it is quite efficient in backing up changed files.
They offer a service where they will send a drive for you to put all of your initial backup data on and send it to them, but its quite expensive.
I liked the fact that they don't have bandwidth caps either.
It took me about a week and a half to upload 130gb and I don't have the fastest connection.
I had been banking on this until my 500g drive croaked two weeks ago. 10 years of photos, tax returns, music, video, gone. Geek Squad tells me it's a mechanical issue with the drive and recovering the data will run about $1600 because of the "special tools and environment required". From a drive that cost $100 in the first place.
Takeaway: redundant back up sources.
I am right there with Chuck in that I don't like backing up in the clouds. I'm just more comfortable with my stuff in my hands. My wife is a good amateur photographer so we have thousands of photos that we are interested in keeping.
My solution is that I have a 500gig very portable external ($75) that I manually copy the important stuff to. It goes from computer to computer In The house once a month or so and I put the family photos and such on it.
Additionally, I have a 1TB external hard drive ($125) connected to my wife's main computer and my main computer that does scheduled backups on it's own creating complete copies of each computer's hard drive.
My solution cost me $325 total, and 1 hour up front with about 30 mins a month of maintenance. Everything on each computer exists in 2 places with the important stuff on a hard drive that stays in the safe. The safe is more for fire proofing than anti theft.
The solution is a bit over the top, but it sure does give me peace of mind as well as control.
My suggestion, and what I've set up for several friends, is a 500gig hard drive that does weekly backups on a schedule, and another drive (hard drive or thumb drive stick) for the manually backed up stuff that stays somewhere else in the house.
Uh, yeah. After failing this strategy twice before myself (once because I didn't routinely back up everything so I was a few months behind when my PC died, and the second time because the backup died) I signed up for Carbonite. I've been very happy with it. The first backup takes a little while 'cause it backs up everything, but then it just backs up the stuff that changes and it does that in the background during times when your PC is idle. There's a nice little icon on files to let you know if it's backed up or not, and a icon in the utility bar always lets you know how current the backup is. It's around $60/yr.
I use Mozy and it works fine. The Mozy app let's me back-up to the cloud AND to my local HD on my home net at the same time. The back-up's occur 2x per day in the background. I don't have to do anything. Just happens.
The issue I have with local back-up only is if my house burns down, etc. I still lose everything. With the cloud solution I at least know I can get the data back and it is recent back up. Just a few hours old.
Be wary of solutions that involve a safe that is less than $500. Most home safes are designed to keep paper from combusting, but they may very well get hot enou inside for stuff to melt. Shop for a "media" safe, and I think you'll be in for some sticker shock.
I'm also a big fan of set-it-and-forget-it solutions. After a couple of weeks I generally forget to do whatever it is I'm supposed to be doing.
Mike
I used Carbonite for several years with a great deal of success. My hard drive failed, I had it replaced and the tech guy doing the work was very impressed with the ease in which he was able to get my data from Carbonite onto my new hard drive.
On the other hand, recently I had a serious virus infect my hard drive. I had a tech guy clean the virus out of my system, and then when I reinstalled Carbonite, the files residing off site were infected and my entire system was once again infected, so we had to repeat the process. The second time I canceled my Carbonite account so that I would not reinfect.
Next time this happens I will contact Carbonite (or Mozy if I use them) and request an older back up to hopefully avoid the reinfection.
Mozy for me. Runs in the background, and I never have to think about it. Works great on Mac too. Cheap peace of mind for sure.
I use Carbonite. I don't like the way restores work with Mozy.
I had been reading this topic all month and was trying to decide myself what to do. So let me tell you what happened Friday night I'll try and keep it short. I was sitting in my home office, I get a call from Sears they are around the corner with my new treadmill. I go into my Pain Cave to get ready for them, I flip on the light and the light starts going really dim and then really high then back to dim. I then hear a crackling popping sound coming from my office (room next door). I run back into my office and under the desk where everything is plugged into the surge protector I see flames, arces of electricity and smoke going everywhere. I dive onto the floor and shut the computer off then hit the button on the surge protector. Then I hear loud popping coming from the master bedroom. My wife has the flu and had been sound asleep with the tv on. The tv was about 15 years old so the tubes had been blowing, she was sitting straight up in bed when I ran into that room, she told me later she thought someone had burst into the room and started shooting. After I got the electrical part under control then I ran around the house for 30 minutes and up into the attic to make sure the house wasn't on fire. The electrician came and found one bad socket. In fact the tv and the fan that were plugged into that socket weren't even on at the time. After the electrician left I ran up to Best Buy to get a new surge protector, the old one had done its job and died fighting off the electrical surge. I plugged everything back in (small preyer) and everything worked fine. Didn't lose anything in fact when the computer came back on it went right back to the EN page I had been looking at at the time. The only thing I lost was the old tv (excuse to buy a new one) and the DVR (taken back to cable company for free exchange, did not explain why it died). Only thing I lost on that was the Ironman championship which I hadn't watched yet. I am now leaning toward online backup and an external hard drive.
I have an older Dell desktop, where I have ALL my data (workout data, music, pictures, personal stuff, etc). As you can see in the previous posts, I've got the internal HD (all 145GB of it), backed up to the external USB HD (with some space left) as well as the online carbonite cloud.
My internal HD is full, and I mean FULL, so pretty much nothing will work anymore. I've deleted everything I can, program-wise, and nothing else can go!
I've got to figure out a way to get more space on my internal HD, while keeping all my data on my C: drive (carbonite will only back up from a single letter drive, no C: &
Ideas? PLEASE?!?
PS, Yes, I'm in the (slow) process of getting another computer - but it takes time!!!
Dave beat me to the punch. IYou can get a 2 TB HD from New Egg for $80.
http://bit.ly/7vBKG2
500 GB for $45.
http://bit.ly/fQQeJU