Online backup

I'm glad you clarified, I thought you were purposefully being mean because I'm interested in an off-site backup. I've thought about doing the off-site backup to a friend, but it really is not an efficient use of time or money. At the price of CrashPlan, the time spent driving to a friends house every day would become more expensive per month in gas cost and personal time when compared to paying for a service like this. That's why I was curious why you thought it was laziness.

I'm definitely not willing to pay Mozy's new rates. :)
 
"Greg's idea that the average person is going to get 2 2.5" USB HD's and manually back up their data, take them offsite, and rotate them weekly (or whatever) is laughable even if it saves them money. Mozy and the like are easy. It sits in the system tray and works in the background without any user interaction. A lot of people will pay money for that convenience."

Don't put words in my mouth. 3.5 inch drives, with a hot swap bay, are my choice. I've got a bunch of drives sitting around, full, and, they are sitting on a shelf. Electrical failure, other then tornados, not something we have a lot of in Kali, will not get to the drives if they aren't in the computer. If I had something mission critical, a SATA 2 gig drive, backed up, and taken home from work, or, from home to a safe, or to a safe deposit box would be my choice.
 
3.5" drives are too annoying to carry around. The 2.5" drives are 1TB now and hold enough for most consumer incremental/differential backups.
 
Santilli said:
Don't put words in my mouth. 3.5 inch drives, with a hot swap bay, are my choice. I've got a bunch of drives sitting around, full, and, they are sitting on a shelf. Electrical failure, other then tornados, not something we have a lot of in Kali, will not get to the drives if they aren't in the computer. If I had something mission critical, a SATA 2 gig drive, backed up, and taken home from work, or, from home to a safe, or to a safe deposit box would be my choice.
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So, you take offense that I "put words in your mouth" and then go on to suggest exactly what you got mad about me putting in your mouth. :rotfl:

Drives sitting on your shelf don't have the same level of protection as an online backup in the off site sense. Drives sitting on your shelf are just as vulnerable to fire, theft, flooding, earthquakes, etc... as your main machine. Don't get me wrong, I think a lot of people are overly worried about the whole off site thing, but you can't exactly say they're equivalent.
 
Personally, I just invested in an LTO4 library. My backups can sit in a fireproof safe in my parents' house.
 
How much does a LTO4 library cost? Sounds like it's more complicated than I would want for this task, but fun to play with.
 
How does the base cost compare to the tapes and how many TB make it worthwhile?
 
Yeah Merc, but at this point your data that doesn't change severly dwarfs the data that does.

I'll eventually put some drives at a friends house and online backup to them.
 
Handruin said:
How much does a LTO4 library cost? Sounds like it's more complicated than I would want for this task, but fun to play with.
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$1800 for a 14 tape library. I'm the second owner but the drive itself was made in July so it clearly wasn't used THAT much. They gave me a half dozen blank tapes too. Tapes are around $20 for 800GB.

I haven't completely figured out how to work Backup Exec with it, but since I have well over 35TB of stuff I need to get backed up AND it will free a ton of additional disk space I had been using for mirrored copies of a lot of that data, or completely turn off those machines, I figure it's worth it.
 
My objection is anyone using a 2.5 inch drive, and a USB external. So slow, one is unlikely to use them. A 3.5 in a bag is easy to carry around, and fairly safe if in a briefcase, and, one of those ballistic nylon padded cases.
 
3.5" drives and enclosures aren't designed to be moved around. In my experience they're a lot more delicate, no matter how much they're babied. I toss my bag full of 2.5" drives around and don't have any issues with those. I'd never try that with 3.5" drives.

Also: USB is slow. Modern hard drives are not.
 
Mercutio said:
$1800 for a 14 tape library. I'm the second owner but the drive itself was made in July so it clearly wasn't used THAT much. They gave me a half dozen blank tapes too. Tapes are around $20 for 800GB.

I haven't completely figured out how to work Backup Exec with it, but since I have well over 35TB of stuff I need to get backed up AND it will free a ton of additional disk space I had been using for mirrored copies of a lot of that data, or completely turn off those machines, I figure it's worth it.
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For the amount of data you have, that makes a lot of sense. If I had enough data to warrant such a setup, I would also explore it. My most crucial stuff fits in roughly a bit over 1TB. That's actually achievable to backup to an online service, so that's what I do. Mainly, it gives an easy way to get a backup off-site.
 
I will also say that I spent about seven months looking at Craigslist and Ebay before I found my tape library. I got it through Craigslist. I think it came from a failed business. I hope it did. I'm not asking that many questions.
 
Santilli said:
My objection is anyone using a 2.5 inch drive, and a USB external. So slow, one is unlikely to use them. A 3.5 in a bag is easy to carry around, and fairly safe if in a briefcase, and, one of those ballistic nylon padded cases.
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USB 3.0 and eSATA exist making things quite a bit more palatable.
 
A 1TB WD Passport USB 3.0 drive is small, cheap, and fast enough for backups.
 
I've been playing around with CrashPlan now for about 2 weeks. If you're thinking of changing your backup strategy, I really suggest you try the application and the 1 month trial of the cloud backup.

So far I really like it. The client continuously runs, and on my computer requires about 140 MB of RAM (!). It continuously monitors changes, and uploads changes on the fly. You can backup to the cloud (CrashPlan Central). The application is free, and it allows you to backup to friends, and across your LAN for free.

I have it set to backup about 200 GB of data, which required a long time to backup to the Cloud as it only uploaded at 1.5 Mbit/s. You can limit both WAN and LAN up- and down-speeds based on whether you are at your computer or away, but my upload speed maxed at 1.5 Mbit/s (probably limited by my ISP). Download speed is much better - I did a test restore that ran around 2.2 MB/s. Restoring from a local drive (a USB3 drive in my case) is basically at the speed of the drive, although backing up, at least the first time, seemed relatively slow as well. It does compress stuff, and with a mix of mostly videos and some other random stuff, it got ~25% compression, but the downside is you need the application to open your backup. You can have it backup older versions, although I have not explored the versioning system. You can restore using the webpage, but you're limited to files <200 MB in size. They'll also ship you a HD to seed your upload or to send you your files, but I'm not sure how expensive that is.

There is an iPhone application, and it works pretty well. I've used it a few times to download documents I've recently worked on, and it was slick. Some have privacy concerns about the iPhone app, but I don't really care. Seems to function similar to DropBox.

All this, including unlimited single PC backup for $3/month is pretty good if you ask me. I have about a week left on my trial, and I'm really tempted to buy a year or two's service. Especially now with the Thailand devastation. But my big hangup is that to do a restore of my 200 GB would require 27 hours (at 2.2 MBps=16.7 Mbps if I did the math correct). I guess it's not that bad.
 
I've been using it for a little over 8 months now and I've been happy with them. I'm currently up to 1.5TB of data backed up to CrashPlan.
 
The thing I keep telling my students is that restore time is nothing compared to losing the last decade of digital photos or financial records or for that matter the collection of music they spent two or three years either painstakingly ripping one disc at a time or slowly stealing using the inefficient methods known to steelworkers.
 
I'm currently using Windows (7) built in backup tool to do nightly backups and a system image to an internal 3.5" drive (backup #1). I also have SyncToy set up to sync my stuff to an external drive (backup #2), and selected folders to my HTPC (upstairs, backup #3) and my wife's PC (across the room, backup #4). And now I also have CrashPlan sync my main backup load to the cloud (backup #5) and to another external hard drive (backup #6). I'm thinking maybe this is overkill, but I'm not sure what the best simplification would be. I'm not sure how to interpret the 3-2-1 rule in light of cloud storage - does that count as both offsite and different media? Do my two external drives that use a different technique (SyncToy vs CrashPlan) count as different media or simply duplicate copies?

By the way, my external drives are 1 TB USB 3 Toshiba Canvios (not the recently redesigned versions), which I'm very happy with.
Handy, are you using CrashPlan to do any local backups?
 
Oops, forgot backup #9 - I have a 500 GB drive that I put most of my backup stuff on and put in my parent's house.
 
I'm not using CrashPlan for any local backups, though it would probably be simpler if I did. I use the boring windows backup utility to backup to my NAS.
 
Has anyone run into the issue with SMB shares and CrashPlan?

I'm wondering what your choice of solutions is.
 
I'd like to find a decently priced, unlimited online backup service. It must support Linux and Windows and all me to backup more than one computer.

Backblaze seems like a good deal, but they don't have Linux support. $5 month-to-month.
Crashplan supports Linux and is a good deal if I pay for 4 years up front. However, I'd like to pay month-to-month and don't want to spend $12/month.

Any other companies out there that are worth looking at?
 
I am trying the Crashplan trial on one of my Linux machines to see how it works and did notice this blurb on their website:

Risk-Free, cancel any time!

Our risk-free cancellation policy will automatically credit you for the remaining unused months on any plan if you decide to cancel at any time. Don't miss out on a money-saving multi-year plan!
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I would be more willing to buy 4 years worth of service for $6/month with the possibility to cancel if it doesn't work out.

Is anyone else using Crashplan?
 
timwhit said:
I am trying the Crashplan trial on one of my Linux machines to see how it works and did notice this blurb on their website:



I would be more willing to buy 4 years worth of service for $6/month with the possibility to cancel if it doesn't work out.

Is anyone else using Crashplan?
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I may be the only one here using it but yes, I've been using CrashPlan for over a year and a half now. I switched over when Mozy went stupid with their pricing at that time. I even talked about it earlier in this same thread. :-) I've have zero problems with CrashPlan so far. It has been so seamless that I forget it's even running on my system. I have some 1.6TB backed up with my account now and it runs every night. I disabled the continuous backup feature to reduce the impact on the machine. I can't say it's actually that much, but I didn't want it interfering. I only need late-night backup protection so this is fine with me. I pay for a single account on my primary system and use this as my 3rd off-site remote backup after my NAS. I was in your same boat when I switched and only chose to pay for it for a year to start. Now I'll pay multiple years to get the discount.
 
I'm also using CrashPlan on my Win7 machine. No problems here and very seamless. As Doug mentioned, you don't even know it's running aside from the email status updates I get from time to time. I have about 500MB backed up there.

I particularly like the Android app that allows me to access my files if I need something while away from home. I've used that on several occasions.
 
I have a number of customers on Crashplan. I consider it a secondary backup since they're all too lazy to physically rotate media. The sales pitch goes something like this: "So if I pay like $13 a month, you'll quit bitching at me about going in that little room to connect and disconnect all those external drives?"
"Yup."
"Sold."

I've yet to really NEED it, but I have used it a couple times just to test. I don't think I'd try to do a full restore from it.
 
Using Crashplan too, similar amount of storage to what Handy is using. I like that I can tell it to restore a particular file from a particular date.

I'm debating how many local backups I need if I also have Crashplan. Not sure I want to download >1 TB of data.
 
I've started using crashplan as well. But I'm unhappy with the speed of the upload.
My backup image that I create with acronis trueimage is about 600GB and I normally regenerate that every two weeks. It has taken two months and it still isn't fully uploaded. By my calculations with my upload speed (25Mbps fios) it should have uploaded in like 3 days. But I get something like 400KBps to their servers about an eighth of what it should be.
 
Will Rickards said:
I've started using crashplan as well. But I'm unhappy with the speed of the upload.
My backup image that I create with acronis trueimage is about 600GB and I normally regenerate that every two weeks. It has taken two months and it still isn't fully uploaded. By my calculations with my upload speed (25Mbps fios) it should have uploaded in like 3 days. But I get something like 400KBps to their servers about an eighth of what it should be.
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Have you tested the upload speed to other servers?
 
Will Rickards said:
But I get something like 400KBps to their servers about an eighth of what it should be.
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I wonder where you're being throttled. All my customers are on Comcast Business Cable and I usually see upstream speeds between 600 and 1400kB/sec aggregate between machines that are backing up. I want to say it takes maybe two or three nights to copy over around 200GB data during an initial upload
 
Has anyone attempted to restore anything from Crashplan? The speed is terrible: ~660Kbps. Restoring 20GB of data is going to take over 2 days. I currently have over 3TB backed up with them, if I tried to restore that amount of data at this speed it would take over a year.
 
I just created a support ticket with the following:
I am attempting to restore approximately 18GB of data. The download rate of the data is around 700Kbps and it estimates about 2 days to complete the restore. This seems ridiculously slow considering my internet connection tests at around 18Mbps and the amount of data I have backed up. If I lost an entire drive it would take many months to restore the data. Is there any way to rectify this situation?

I have purchased a 4 year plan, but will seriously consider cancelling it if this is the level of service I can expect. Backed up data that is inaccessible to me is useless.
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I'll see how they respond and post back here if anyone else cares.
 
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