What service is best? Just looking to back up my home computer, nothing serious. Or am I stupid for even looking into this?

8/24/2011 9:20:18 PM

I think theres 6 threads on this in tech talk

8/24/2011 10:12:18 PM

Backblaze is who I like.

Lots of TWW recommendations for Carbonite and Mozy floating around; although I heard rumors Mozy was going to a per GB structure instead of unlimited.

Things to look for:
1) Compatibility with your OS (particularly if mac or linux)
2) How do you get your data back (backblaze will fedex you a harddrive; trying downloading that terabyte on your wimpy home connection.)
3) Reliability (if their servers are down; you're not backed up)
4) Security (Most usually use some kind of key generated on your machine to encrypt with - which means don't forget your password.)
5) Accessibility (Mozy/Carbonite have various apps for phones and tablets - making sure you can get to your data in a pinch)

8/25/2011 1:02:57 AM

I used to be with Mozy ($5/mo) until they changed their pricing structure which was going to cost me more than $30/mo. I switched to CrashPlan's family plan which gives me unlimited data backup on several computers (10 maybe?). I bought the 3-year package so I don't know what it's costing me per month.

The client works well, and what's cool is you can maintain multiple backups of your computers at different locations. On their servers, on a spare HDD connected to your computer, or a spare HDD you install at your friend's house. Pretty cool I think.

Backups were quick, haven't noticed any connectivity issues with their servers, and restoring data is very easy.

8/25/2011 1:28:32 AM

I have an office mate who likes BackBlaze.

8/25/2011 2:31:37 AM

I have heard really good things about Crashplan but haven't jumped to them yet. I like the crowdsource backup concept in addition to using the service's formal backup option.

http://www.crashplan.com/


Oh, and Lifehacker seems to really like them, too:

http://lifehacker.com/5299993/crashplan-does-local-remote-and-friend+based-backup

http://lifehacker.com/5787572/set-up-an-automated-bulletproof-file-back-up-solution

Quote :

"CrashPad supports peer-to-peer backup solutions. CrashPlan can back up to multiple locations including local disks, networked disks, remote server space you have access to, your friends' remote computers, and, in the style of backup apps Mozy and Carbonite, to CrashPlan's remote backup servers, if you subscribe to their service. Assuming you have a remote location (a personal web server, friend's computer, or work computer) you can use as your backup location, you'll be in business. Your remote data is encrypted, too, so you don't have to worry about your friend discovering you have the largest collection of Hello Kitty videos outside of Japan. The setup and user interface for CrashPlan are straight forward, you shouldn't have any trouble getting things up and running. Most people won't find that they need the additional perks that come with an upgrade to the premium service, which makes CrashPlan an appealingly free option for personal backup. CrashPlan is freeware and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux."

[Edited on August 25, 2011 at 11:11 AM. Reason : .]

8/25/2011 11:10:27 AM

I have been using Carbonite on my Mac for a year and to be honest have been a bit disappointed. I have relative good up and down but it takes days to upload 1 gb of data. Also the carbonite app uses a crap ton of memory and cpu usage. They extended my subscription by a few months after I bitched but I am considering blackblaze myself.

8/25/2011 11:26:05 AM

backblaze doesn't have any support for linux computers unfortunately

if you are looking for *nix backups, check out tarsnap.

8/25/2011 11:30:15 AM

Awesome info guys, thanks a bunch

8/25/2011 12:29:44 PM

To add to my topic earlier, I was told by a carbonite "advanced" tech today that the issues I was seeing with Carbonite on my mac was due to backing up too many files. I have roughly 230 GB of data backed up and he said I was in the top 99% of users. He said the algorithm used on their end gets stuck with such large back ups. I called a bit of bullshit, but if you have a mac you might want to steer clear.

8/25/2011 11:03:04 PM

What carbonite doesn't tell you is the more you upload/use the slower they'll upload from you. My mom tried to use it for her photography business and because she uploaded so much they cut her upload bandwidth down so much it was a struggle to get anything backed up.

8/28/2011 3:12:30 PM

Currently uploading 100GB-ish worth of stuff to Crashplan. Signed up a couple days ago, it's $5 for unlimited storage...so far so good. They also have a feature where you can have a friend install the client on their computer and you can each back up your data to the other person. That feature is free, as well as scheduling backups to local folders/drives or another PC on your network. The advanced settings show dedupe and compression options, I'm not sure if that's happening at the source but I assume so since it gives you the ability to turn it off (and I imagine Crashplan is deduping on the backend storage).

I was with SwissDisk which has end-to-end 256 AES encryption but their client is horrible and when I made some hardware changes to my desktop it wouldn't let me access my data anymore. Apparently if you change the hardware profile of your PC enough you have to cancel your account and start all over which totally defeats the one of the purposes of backups.


Funny, after I posted the stuff above, I got an email advertising this new vendor:

http://www.symform.com/

100GB free or 3 users unlimited for $10 / month (or $100 / year if you pay up front). Going to sign up for the free service to use for files on my work laptop

[Edited on August 29, 2011 at 10:30 AM. Reason : Symform]

8/29/2011 10:18:50 AM