Online Backup Service?

jyl · jyl's Garage

Can anyone recommend a good online backup service? Something that I access over the Internet and can upload a few GB's of personal files to, that is reliable and safe? Willing to pay some, free is nice but not necessary. Don't need to store hundreds of GBs. Thanks.

Head416 · Head416's Garage

Lot's of people have recommended Carbonite to me, but I haven't used it myself.

Joeaksa · 07-23-2010, 08:20 AM

Mozy will let you do 2 gigs free.

A silly question? Why pay rent on hard drive space in the internet when you can buy a portable HD that will fit in your shirt pocket that holds 500 gigs to 1 TB for under $100? You pay for it in half a year compared to these online places?

Not something that I am going to do. I almost never rent. It pays someone else. Start paying yourself instead!

Head416 · Head416's Garage

An external hard drive sitting next to your computer doesn't do you any good if your house burns down.

stomachmonkey · 07-23-2010, 08:30 AM

I'm assuming you are looking at online solutions for either a) access to your data from anywhere b) offsite disaster recovery in case of fire, flood, theft or a combo of booth.

Honestly I'd just go somewhere like 1&1 and pick their cheapest hosting package, $3.99 per month which includes 10 GB of space. You get the benefit of setting up a domain name, mail accounts etc.

Don Plumley · Don Plumley's Garage

I used SugarSync and it works great. The main reason for offsite storage is ultimate security from local disaster. The reason you use a service like SugarSync or Carbonite instead of a hosting service is the backup is automatic and continuous. What's really cool is you can use it to sync directories between multiple computers and it automatically replicates and keeps the newest version in all places (online and diff computers).

gr8fl4porsche · gr8fl4porsche's Garage

I use Carbonite. $4.25 a month.

The best part of online backup is the auto backup feature.
You don't have remember to plug in the external drive.

stomachmonkey · 07-23-2010, 09:03 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Don Plumley

....The reason you use a service like SugarSync or Carbonite instead of a hosting service is the backup is automatic and continuous. ...

Simple script and cron job or scriptable FTP client ='s same results.

But for $4 a month Carbonite seems cheap enough and it's managed so ='s "let someone else play tech support" which I'm a big fan of lately.

Time is too hard to come by these days.

Hugh R · 07-23-2010, 09:44 AM

I live in a brush fire zone, so offsite backup is for me. I use Carbonite, and if you have an iPhone they have a free app that allows you to access from your phone any file that has been backed up and email it to yourself or anyone. As others said, it does it automatically. It backs up everything, music, emails, photos, etc.

Z-man · Z-man's Garage

Quote:

Originally Posted by Don Plumley

What's really cool is you can use it to sync directories between multiple computers and it automatically replicates and keeps the newest version in all places (online and diff computers).

A problem with that logic is that if a file corruption occurs at one site, that corruption automatically propegates to backup files! Granted, this issue can be somewhat remedied by using some type of version management tool, but often a data corruption issue crops its ugly head the day after the non-corrupted backup version is expired. I've been this countless times - and my line of work is SAN/Storage management.

I dump all of my files to an external harddrive, into a folders such as: "Z-Work-2010-07-23." I then burn those files onto a DVD which I store offsite (my work office). Granted, I am wasting a lot of space since I will have mutiple copies of a given file on my backup media, instead of just copying the incremental changes and/or files with recent "last updated" dates, but storage is cheap enough these days, and the headaches of restoring incrementally backed up file is too high for me to bother.

-Z-man.

matthew-s · matthew-s's Garage

Jungle Disk + Amazon S3 storage. Just a couple bucks a month.

Don Plumley · Don Plumley's Garage

Quote:

Originally Posted by Z-man

A problem with that logic is that if a file corruption occurs at one site, that corruption automatically propegates to backup files! Granted, this issue can be somewhat remedied by using some type of version management tool, but often a data corruption issue crops its ugly head the day after the non-corrupted backup version is expired. I've been this countless times - and my line of work is SAN/Storage management.

-Z-man.

You are right this is a risk. For most folks that don't back up anything, losing all of their data, photos, music, etc. is a larger risk. I use an external hard drive and Time Machine locally, and it has saved my bacon more than once. I also have a NAS drive on the home network, and copy files to that drive, and when we go on holiday put it into a fire safe. Belts, suspenders and glue.

id10t · 07-23-2010, 10:50 AM

Create a bunch of gmail accounts and let them figure out how to store it all for ya

Gmail Filesystem - GmailFS

jyl · jyl's Garage

I had the file corruption problem, it prevented restore from Time Machine. I was unhappy. Had to manually restore, file by file.

stomachmonkey · 07-23-2010, 02:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hugh R

I live in a brush fire zone, so offsite backup is for me. I use Carbonite, and if you have an iPhone they have a free app that allows you to access from your phone any file that has been backed up and email it to yourself or anyone. As others said, it does it automatically. It backs up everything, music, emails, photos, etc.

The Irony.

Brush fire in my backyard now

jyl · jyl's Garage

Wait. Duh. I have a dot Mac account, which I guess is now a MobileMe account. Can I upload and download from a PC - not a Mac - to the iDisk? This is for the netbook, which runs Win 7.

stomachmonkey · 07-23-2010, 05:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jyl

Wait. Duh. I have a dot Mac account, which I guess is now a MobileMe account. Can I upload and download from a PC - not a Mac - to the iDisk? This is for the netbook, which runs Win 7.

Looks like it.

MobileMe Control Panel for Windows

Hugh R · 07-23-2010, 06:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by stomachmonkey

The Irony.

Brush fire in my backyard now

Exactly!

kevin993 · 07-23-2010, 06:13 PM

Has anybody had good fortune doing a full recovery from Carbonite? Have heard lots of people talk about the ease of backing up, but haven't seen much from people trying to recover documents after they had a problem.

campbellcj · 07-25-2010, 05:19 PM

I use Mozy + external drives/NAS for home PC's and my wife's office. At my office we have a fairly elaborate server+RAID disk+tape system (Microsoft DPM) but may soon add cloud backup to that as well. Many people are clueless how a huge, unrecoverable life setback could arise from a catastrophic loss of data, especially business files, so I'm glad you guys are on the ball in this regard.