online back up recomendations

my external hd dived today and I learned my lesson already by not backing up. So I want to Back up NOW..


Looking at MOzy.. some bad reviews on Version Tracker for idrive..

Thank you

I use iDrive, but my needs are modest. I've never had to try recovering anything from it, so I guess my "report" is incomplete. In fact, I'm uploading files right now!

expatgirl said:

my external hd dived today and I learned my lesson already by not backing up. So I want to Back up NOW..

Looking at MOzy.. some bad reviews on Version Tracker for idrive..

Click to expand...

Here's a review of on line backup services. Something to keep in mind about on line backup - the first time you upload your data, it may take considerable time, even days depending on how much you have.

Also, you probably should choose a service that has been around for awhile and will be in the future.

Regards.

I know some friends who use Mozy and like it. Mozy's also owned by EMC so it's not going anywhere any time soon which I think is an extremely important point that chscag makes.

I don't use any myself, just an external hard drive and TimeMachine backups.

I do use Dropbox which gives me a couple of free gigs (you can pay for more) where I store important stuff like research papers and things and it not only is in the cloud, but I can access it and sync it easily between multiple computers.

Call me old-fashioned, but I'm not comfortable backing up all my stuff onto "the cloud."

First of all, it would take weeks. Literally. I have a (at best) .5MB upload speed.

Online backup is *fantastic* for certain things, particularly small but hard-to-replace data sets and such, but I don't really see it as taking the place of cheap and fast hard drives for thorough backups anytime soon.

chas_m said:

Call me old-fashioned, but I'm not comfortable backing up all my stuff onto "the cloud."

First of all, it would take weeks. Literally. I have a (at best) .5MB upload speed.

Online backup is *fantastic* for certain things, particularly small but hard-to-replace data sets and such, but I don't really see it as taking the place of cheap and fast hard drives for thorough backups anytime soon.

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I guess it depends on how truly secure you want your data to be. I've been using an external drive for a long time to do backups, originally using SuperDuper and then moving over to TimeMachine when that became available. That is definitely a very cost effective option and one that every computer user should be taking advantage of in my opinion.

But...

This thread also got me thinking of how important my data really is on my computer. All the photos, important documents, records, music, and other such things that would be completely lost if something happened to my home or in some other scenario where I lost both my MBP and my external drive.

So I actually signed up for Mozy Home so I can have secure offsite storage of my most important documents and files. Even paying for their unlimited space option comes down to less than $5.00 per month which to me is pretty good considering the "insurance" it provides in a disaster.

In the end, I agree, external hard drive regular back ups are great. But depending on how important your data is and how painful it would be if you lost it all, an offsite solution of some sort might be worth looking into.

I personally store my most important stuff on Dropbox and backup the rest locally with time machine. Stuff that lives exclusively on my external drive (iTunes library, movies) is backed up to an additional external drive on a regular basis as well.

Dropbox is fantastic for documents in particular, as it also does versioning, so if you need to revert to an earlier version of a file, you can grab it via the website.

old news but compelling to use an alternative source


Coppola plea after computer theft
Francis Ford Coppola
Coppola won his first Oscar in 1971
Film director Francis Ford Coppola has appealed for the return of his computer backup device following a robbery at his house in Argentina on Wednesday

...he had lost 15 years' worth of data, including writing and photographs of his family.
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Coppola plea after computer theft


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I am trying crash plan now but my connection is slow and indeed will take days

I use Carbonite. The initial backup seems to take forever though.

firesidedog said:

I use Carbonite. The initial backup seems to take forever though.

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Yep, my initial backup is still going on and I think I've got about 2 days to go before it's done

They need to raise upload caps in the US I swear!

Agreed with chas_m. I just don't trust these services with anything sensitive. There's been too many reports of cloud-based services being hacked and customer data being exposed.

What I recommend is a RAID1 (mirroring) solution as a backup device:

Plug & Play RAID 1 Mirror FireWire 800/400+USB2 Redundant Storage Solutions up to 2.0TB - OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro

I personally use a D-Link DNS-323 dual-drive NAS. This little box sits on my network and I transfer anything that I want to keep for posterity to it. Then I use external hard drives to do system wide backups.

This way, if a system fails, I can easily restore it from an external drive. But it wouldn't be the end of the world if one of my externals fail, because everything really important is on the NAS. The NAS has two drives that are mirrored and instantly store any data transferred to it to both drives in a redundant manner.

cwa107 said:

This way, if a system fails, I can easily restore it from an external drive. But it wouldn't be the end of the world if one of my externals fail, because everything really important is on the NAS. The NAS has two drives that are mirrored and instantly store any data transferred to it to both drives in a redundant manner.

Click to expand...

But is that offsite? The advantage that cloud-based backup has as a companion to an external, on-site solution, is that it stores data at another location.

So if you don't have an offsite solution, what happens if your drives are stolen, or your house burns down?

I agree that I wouldn't trust my only backup to the cloud, especially if I wasn't sure who was really behind the cloud service. But, I'm also not so sure any more that a totally on-site only approach is also the best since I can backup all my stuff for the price of having 1 less Starbucks latte's a month.

I've been trying to figure out how to store approx 5TB and growing off-site. There just is no inexpensive way to do it that I've found. And currently have data sitting on 4 computers, a TC and a WinHomeServer machine.

Have all the data on all 4 computers sitting in at least 2 places, but backing up the server??? expensive proposition.

bobtomay said:

I've been trying to figure out how to store approx 5TB and growing off-site. There just is no inexpensive way to do it that I've found.

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Haha, yeah, that's a ton of data, especially if you're thinking of mirroring it offsite over a residential broadband connection.

For me, I'm looking at about 50gb of data at Mozy at the moment, but I think that's alot to ship over for the initial sync.

cwa107 said:

Agreed with chas_m. I just don't trust these services with anything sensitive. There's been too many reports of cloud-based services being hacked and customer data being exposed.

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I store sensitive documents on an encrypted disk image that is backed up with Dropbox. That way, even if somebody hacked into my account, they would still need a separate password to access my really important data.

I believe carbonite actually gives you an option to locally encrypt everything before it is sent up to their servers. So that would offer some peace of mind. (Others may offer this as well).

Aptmunich said:

I store sensitive documents on an encrypted disk image that is backed up with Dropbox. That way, even if somebody hacked into my account, they would still need a separate password to access my really important data.

I believe carbonite actually gives you an option to locally encrypt everything before it is sent up to their servers. So that would offer some peace of mind. (Others may offer this as well).

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Mozy does also, it uses 448-bit encryption, or at least it told me it did when I started the process and generated the key.

schweb said:

Mozy does also, it uses 448-bit encryption, or at least it told me it did when I started the process and generated the key.

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So there you go. Not only is it protected from external hackers gaining access to your account, it's also protected from somebody inside the backup provider from accidentally revealing your data.

I recommend ABM4M - anything but Mozy for Macs

I used Mozy for a year, testing it every once in a while with a few files, and it seemed to work fine. Then had a fatal hard disk crash, and when I confidently went to Mozy to download onto the new hard disk -- it wasn't all there! Only about a quarter of my files came back.

So I tried their online chat help, and their helpdesk folks ran me through the same scripts time after time. Then I found the secret phone number of the top Mac guy in the company, and worked with him for several weeks. He found another quarter of my files and then admitted that the rest of the files were just plain gone, and he didn't know why. Maybe they hadn't backed up, maybe they were erased... who knows?

I had to take the crashed hard disk to a data recovery service, and for "only" $500+ I was able to get my files back.

Now I'm using Carbonite and an external hard drive. I'm hoping that belt and suspenders works.

That's a real shame. I wonder if you could have sued Mozy or at least "convinced" them to pay for the data recovery? Thanks for posting, it's good to get feedback on some of these on line storage facilities.

Backing up

After my eternal HD crashed followed a few days later by my iMac reulting in a loss of 3 monts data I too am looking for solutions.

I asked for advice on backing up online and was told that, if you have some big files, e.g. films, music, pix backing up could lead to your exceeding your ISP's allowance on broadband use. In some cases it can lead to your ISP cutting you off automatically.

The person who advised me suggested that I use a Time Capsule in conjunction with an external HD to archive. As the retail price is £234 in UK, this seems an expensive solution.

I have spoken to Applecare to ask if it would be possible to have 2 external HDs to use alternately as Time Machines. My experience of external HDs is that they don't seem to last very long so the Time Capsule with a Time Machine may be the most robust solution. The guy at Applecare felt that online solutions were not a good idea.

expatgirl said:

my external hd dived today and I learned my lesson already by not backing up. So I want to Back up NOW..


Looking at MOzy.. some bad reviews on Version Tracker for idrive..

Thank you

Click to expand...