Cloud Backup Options

[darklord700]

I'm thinking of backing up my data (2TB right now, growing by 2TB per year). What's the most cost efficient cloud backup option? I've checked out Mozy but they are too expensive to me.

[Rathji]

Crashplan allows a similar backup plan to Mozy, but the reason I like them is you can backup to any PC that is connected to the internet for free. I have hard drives at both my grandparents and mothers house that have backups of my data, and all their data gets backed up to me.

Up front cost is a bit high since you need an extra hard drive(s) of appropriate size, but you can seed the initial backup with the drive on your computer then transfer it to the remote location. Comparable service like this from Mozy would cost just as much as the extra costs you incur from the drives, so the cost is pretty much a wash.

[darklord700]

Thanks, Rathji. Just signed up for the Crashplan freetrial. Looks like it only costs about $5 for 1 computer with unlimited storage which is exactly what I needed.

[eyipyip]

One of the downside of online backup is that it uses up your internet bandwidth. I am with Shaw on BB100 and I only get 500GB data so that means I can't back up too much each month. Cloud backup only works if you have unlimited data plan.

[darklord700]

I have telus TV so apparently unlimited bandwidth with my internet. But the thing is I'm now uploading 1TB data to Crashplan and it says it's gonna take 9 months!

[photon]

Of course, 1TB is a huge amount of data. Redownloading that much data would take forever too.

What exactly are you backing up that's 1TB? Often things like ripped music and ripped videos you don't need to backup since you can re-rip them in the event of a data loss.

[darklord700]

RAW images files and PSD image files. They could easily be 100mb each. I see that you can increase your upload limit so it's only like 2 months now.

[sclitheroe]

Mozy has more or less priced themselves right out of the pro-sumer market, I have no idea what they are thinking with their current pricing (actually I do..they are owned by EMC, and one only has to look at VMWare's licensing cash grab recently to know what EMC subsidiaries are all about, but I digress...)

Backblaze is committed to unlimited backups, and they are doing their own R&D to develop and deploy storage that will allow them to manage their costs for storage to succeed at this. They are worth looking into.

Note that like all of the online backup vendors, they don't do online archiving - if you don't have all 2 TB + 2 TB yearly online and spinning at home, they won't back it up.

With the kind of content generation you're up to though, I suspect you need to be looking at solid archiving solutions moreso than online backup. An LTO-4 tape drive and a safety deposit box offsite somewhere might actually be a useful solution if you really need to keep all that data around.

[photon]

Yeah for something like that I'd do tape drives with the tapes offsite, or hot-swap hard drives on a rotation or something like that.

Months to get the backup done, months to restore if you ever needed, not my definition of fun

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by photon

Yeah for something like that I'd do tape drives with the tapes offsite, or hot-swap hard drives on a rotation or something like that.

Months to get the backup done, months to restore if you ever needed, not my definition of fun

Hot swap hard drives are probably a better option now that I look at the price of LTO drives - I thought LTO4 had come down in price, but its still up there.

[photon]

Could do some kind of combination too, online backups for the most recent stuff to protect the stuff you're actively working on, and hot swap drives for the archival stuff.

[Ironhorse]

Anyone here have any first hand experience with Backblaze? Looks like the right solution for me right now.

[darklord700]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

With the kind of content generation you're up to though, I suspect you need to be looking at solid archiving solutions moreso than online backup. An LTO-4 tape drive and a safety deposit box offsite somewhere might actually be a useful solution if you really need to keep all that data around.

I am a photographer so every year, I easily have 600GB of RAW file to back up, so the 2TB is an accumulation of couple years of work. I already have some redundancy in the same computer so I'm looking for online solution.

If I lost the RAW file from a job 5 years ago, it's not gonna be a big deal. The cost of Crashplan is an afterthough but the upload speed is a too slow. May be I should prioritize my backup so that the new stuff will get backed up first. Thanks for the suggestions, they really help.

[photon]

Keep in mind too that all of the unlimited plans I've seen are for "personal-home use", not for commercial use, so using one to store your pictures would be violating their terms of service. May not be a big deal but if you upload 2TB of data that may draw attention to yourself and it wouldn't surprise me at all if they either asked you to pay extra or terminated your account.

Anything sold as unlimited isn't really unlimited, just unlimited for people who don't use it much

Doesn't hurt to try though, all you would lose is time.

I'm sure I've read of online backup solutions where you can send them the data on a physical media to get started, and order your data on physical media in the event of a data loss, I'm just not finding any right now. They'd probably be hundreds a month though for terabyte level of data.

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by darklord700

I am a photographer so every year, I easily have 600GB of RAW file to back up, so the 2TB is an accumulation of couple years of work. I already have some redundancy in the same computer so I'm looking for online solution.

If I lost the RAW file from a job 5 years ago, it's not gonna be a big deal. The cost of Crashplan is an afterthough but the upload speed is a too slow. May be I should prioritize my backup so that the new stuff will get backed up first. Thanks for the suggestions, they really help.

As I mentioned, if you have another location to do your backups to - a friends or relatives house you can backup to their location for free. You can create the initial backup at your house and then bring the hard drive to their house and attach it. No 9 month (or 2 month) waiting period.

600GB a year, is 50GB a month, so you need to ensure they have bandwidth available to use this - Anything on Shaw higher than Regular would be sufficient.

However, if you want to stick with the online solution: If you do want to prioritize the recent stuff, you could make date sorted folders and then attach them to the backup separately as the previous folder is completed. I dont think there is a built in prioritization solution.

[darklord700]

Thanks for all the replies, this is my first dip into online backup. I have some redundancy built into my computer. And I have offsite backups but I'm kind of lazy to consistently backup my data offsite.

So I'm thinking of indiscriminately backing up everything online. Well, the conclusion after a few days is that, no you cannot backup everything indiscriminately online. It took me two days just to upload the RAW files from a job to Crashplan and that was a smaller job.

What I'm saying is that Cloud is overrated at the stage until everyone has fiber connection at least. The easy way for me is to buy bigger hard drives, and store everything on them. The 2TB drivers are like $70 each so the costs are minimal.

[Azure]

We just put up a wireless connection to a building offsite, and we run daily backups. Of course, the building has to be line of site and within a certain distance.

The cloud wasn't worth it for us either, because like you, we had more than 5TB of stuff to backup, with more being added monthly. Uploading 5TB isn't exactly fun, and our ISP wouldn't approve.

So the offsite worked better because the bandwidth is all internal. Now it just runs backups every night.

With hard drives being so cheap, the cloud would have to offer some pretty exceptional service for us to switch over.

[photon]

Yeah online backups are great as long as the amount of data isn't huge, I backup all my business stuff online to Amazon S3 as well as having redundant drives at my house, and it works well for me, but I don't work with huge RAW files

[Azure]

So to bump this thread again, with the threat of ransomware, we want to do something better with the cloud backup.

Crashplan and Backblaze both sound fine, but I'm thinking for backing up drive images for 20 business computers it wouldn't exactly be fun. We have a 30mbps upload connection, but it would still be too much. Unless we take the drive images, back them up to an external hard drive, and then back that specific hardware drive up once a month to a cloud service.

The concern of course is whether or not it is actually 'offsite' in such a way that the ransomware could not access it.

We do in house backups to the server, NAS box, plus off site to another NAS box. The drive images would not be super important because we could easily get the important information back and just install a new hard drive should any of our work stations be encrypted.

What is everyone else doing?

This thread was last updated in 2011, and the IT world has changed a lot since then.

[Galakanokis]

Most big cities will have local data centers that could be used for cloud back up. Somebody like Scalar Decisions probably does for Calgary. I use them here in Vancouver for off site backup, archive, rendering etc. They will even co-locate your gear if you wish. You spec, buy what you need and they rack it and maintain it for a monthly fee of course.

This way you are offsite, in the cloud but can still have fairly easy access if you physically needed. I know they have an office there but no idea if they have a data center or not but might be worth checking out.