Best online backup service?

[amorak]

Hey guys,

That Millrise fire thread got me thinking about offsite file backups.

I have a second HDD that ghosts my primary drive daily (thanks Windows7!) but if our house burns down, that's of little use...

I've looked at Mozy and Dropbox, but they both seem kind of pricey for what they are, but I might just be being cheap...

What's the best site (price / service wise) for 10-100GB of backup space?

[Russic]

I've heard the most about Carbonite. Looks to be about $60/year for unlimited backup. The big downside here is that it won't read off an external drive, it must be files on your computer.

I use dropbox (costs about twice as much as Carbonite) because i like having access to those files from my phone and i like how I can have it on an unlimited number of computers.

[jtfrogger]

I use SugarSync, and it works well. We syncronize files (e.g. pictures) between computers. It is nice to have access to everything via the web or the iPhone. The iPhone app isn't the greatest, but it is workable.

[FanIn80]

Originally Posted by Russic

I've heard the most about Carbonite. Looks to be about $60/year for unlimited backup.

Don't for get to use offer code "Rome" for big savings!

[photon]

Funny you should bring this up I just found out about this one:

http://b4.crashplan.com/consumer/index.html

They have a VERY cool feature, p2p backups if you don't want to pay the annual fee!

So find a friend, both of you make sure you have the disk space, and you can back up to each others' computer over the Internet!

It's all encrypted and junk so no privacy concerns, and it covers off the house-burning-down scenario of online backups without having to pay an annual fee (though they have that option as well and it's comparable to the others).

Haven't actually tried it yet, but going to give it a shot here shortly.

[amorak]

I've got multplie PC's and Macbooks to backup, so I think something like dropbox is probably best, given that I don't want to be paying $10/month x 2-4 machines - Anyone ever seen coupon codes for them?

[photon]

The downside of dropbox is you can't backup your whole PC, you can backup only one folder (the dropbox folder), so unless you want to a) run a process first to backup everything to that folder or b) store all your files in one folder it's not really appropriate.

Plus Dropbox is more expensive than the other ones on a per GB basis.

You could create a backup process that backs all computers up to one place and then back that up online via Mozy/Carbonite.

Or that CrashPlan site I posted has a family plan with unlimited computers for less than $10 a month.

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by photon

Funny you should bring this up I just found out about this one:

http://b4.crashplan.com/consumer/index.html

They have a VERY cool feature, p2p backups if you don't want to pay the annual fee!

So find a friend, both of you make sure you have the disk space, and you can back up to each others' computer over the Internet!

It's all encrypted and junk so no privacy concerns, and it covers off the house-burning-down scenario of online backups without having to pay an annual fee (though they have that option as well and it's comparable to the others).

Haven't actually tried it yet, but going to give it a shot here shortly.

Would you be able to have multiple people backing up to the same location? Like if I bought a NAS and put one at my house could everyone in my family backup to that single drive with this software?

Or even better, have 2 NAS at seperate houses that everyone backs up to?

[photon]

The overview I read had the guy doing just that, setting up a big NAS so his whole extended family could back up to it.

Being able to control when it's backed up is important too, I don't want to be playing BFBC2 and then get lagged out because a backup starts up!

[sclitheroe]

[QUOTE=amorak;2412838]
I've looked at Mozy and Dropbox, but they both seem kind of pricey for what they are, but I might just be being cheap...
/QUOTE]

How is the $5 a month for Mozy expensive?

I guess it depends on what your data is worth to you. Digital photos are awfully hard to replace...

[photon]

Got this CrashPlan setup so we'll see how it does tonight.

Because it runs as a service and not an app, backing up to a NAS is a little more complicated, I logged in as the administrator and used mlink to create a directory link to my NAS volume, and it seems to like that fine. Setup to go at 1am so we'll see.

[calumniate]

nm

[Burninator]

Okay so I would like to backup my files online and the only problem is that I have a lot of my files on a NAS. Any suggestions?

A lot of these online backup sites don't support external hard drives. I don't need to backup everything on my NAS. Just the photos, music and iTunes purchases. It's not really necessary that I backup my ripped DVDs.

Is there any cost effective online backup solutions that would work? I've thought about buying another hard drive and copying (either manually or if some automatic solution is out there it would be great) those files to the local hard drive so they can be uploaded via Carbonite.

[photon]

So far I've been liking CrashPlan, though I haven't been using their online backup yet, just backing my PC up to my NAS with it.

As for these programs not supporting a NAS, have you tried just mapping a drive to see if it accepts that?

If you've tried that, there's another pretty simple work around, just create a symbolic link:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windo...windows-vista/

I created a directory link (I can't remember now if I used /D or /J) from C:\BackupTarget to my nas \\nas.ip.add.ress\Volume_1\Backups\photon, and then told the app to backup to C:\BackupTarget. You could do the same, just create C:\BackupSource mapped to your NAS root and specify the directories, hopefully the app isn't smart enough to tell it's a symlink instead of a real directory.

[Burninator]

Originally Posted by photon

So far I've been liking CrashPlan, though I haven't been using their online backup yet, just backing my PC up to my NAS with it.

As for these programs not supporting a NAS, have you tried just mapping a drive to see if it accepts that?

My NAS doesn't support Bittorrent. I'm pretty sure Carbonite and the others won't support mapped drives. Carbonite even says so on their website.

If you've tried that, there's another pretty simple work around, just create a symbolic link:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windo...windows-vista/

I created a directory link (I can't remember now if I used /D or /J) from C:\BackupTarget to my nas \\nas.ip.add.ress\Volume_1\Backups\photon, and then told the app to backup to C:\BackupTarget. You could do the same, just create C:\BackupSource mapped to your NAS root and specify the directories, hopefully the app isn't smart enough to tell it's a symlink instead of a real directory.

I could give that a shot. I don't quite understand what this produces though. It creates a file that I can click on or what exactly?

[photon]

Heh sorry, symbolic links are mostly unknown to the Windows world.

Basically it's a directory that points to another directory.

So say the files you want to back up are on your NAS at \\nas\volume\documents.

On your computer you have a directory mapped so you can just go to T:\documents to get your documents, but the backup programs don't like it.

What the symbolic link does is give you a local directory linked to a remote one. So if you created a symbolic link from C:\BackupSource to \\nas\volume then you would tell your backup program to backup C:\BackupSource\documents... if you used Windows Explorer C:\BackupSource is a directory and inside you will see the documents folder (and all the other folders on your NAS), and the path in the title bar will be C:\BackupSource\documents even though it's getting the files from the NAS.

It's just creating another way to get to a specific location.

[photon]

And your NAS doesn't have to support Bittorrent to use CrashPlan.

[mykalberta]

I have been using box.net for a while.

Its free up to 1GB. I dont trust it enough not to keep copies elsewhere but so far it has worked fine.

My tried and true method of backup is email files to my gmail account and then store them PDF/Word/Excel etc.

I am not looking to backup music, just files that if I lost I would be SOL.

[Rathji]

I set up crash plan to bckup my entire families computers to my external drive, then I back up all my stuff to 2 of theirs. It is crazy easy to setup and as long as you are backing up to a friends (or one of your own) computers it is totally free.