Cloud Backup - Really Slow
 

I've been trying to use a cloud backup service, Backblaze, to back up my home computer. What a disappointment. There are 750GB of data to back up. Backblaze has been uploading files for 7 days. There is still 524GB left to go. My free trial ends in 3 days.

I'm not sure if this is taking forever because the upload speed on my Comcast internet is only 5 Mbps (says Speedtest) or because Backblaze might throttle uploads. Not sure.

Anyone successfully using cloud backup for large-ish amounts of data?.

I religiously backup to external hard drives, but wanted a cloud backup in case my house burns down or gets burgled.

Throw a BU drive in a safety deposit box - done.

PS, "Cloud" just means "someone else's computer"

PPS, yes, it is s l o w

Math.

750 GB of data assuming zero overhead, which is not realistic, at a solid 5 Mbps, we know it will vary, will take 80ish hours.

Now add overhead back in, call it 10%, latency between hops, unless you have an ethernet connection straight into the data center there are always hops, you are probably looking at 2 weeks give or take a day or two. The unknowns make it impossible to get an accurate number.

Also remember, not all data is the same. 1000 mb's of 100 10 mb files will take longer to copy than 1 1000 mb file. Think of it this way, what can you pick up faster, a single dollar bill or 100 scattered pennies.

Incremental backups will be better but if you plan to move that kind of data you need to upgrade your network access. The application or provider wont matter much.

He still needs the first full before he can do incremental.

I could call Comcast and upgrade my Internet for the next month. Heck, I might get cable for the Olympics and throw a faster internet on there at the same time.

Just buy a terabyte external hard drive, secure and it's in your possession. Screw offsite back up.

Or team up with someone. In my spoon safe a friend has 2 external drives with encrypted filesystem. I have two in his spoon safe.

+1
My office computer is backed up to the cloud - company policy. We have a backup on the company server too, but I still keep a local backup of my computer on a hard drive under my desk. We looked into changing cloud storage services. It was going to take over 7 days to move our stuff. At home I just keep a hard drive plugged into my computer. Time Machine backs up every hour. No problem.

I'm not directing this at the OP, but since I've heard about cloud backup, I've thought that it was really bad idea. Yes, once you get backed up, the incremental backups won't be nearly as painful. Also, most Internet connections are asymmetric, faster download and slower (usually much) upload. Backups are pretty much all upload, so they are going to be extra painful unless you just don't have much to backup. Another issue for me, is that you are putting your stuff on someone else's computer, and then you're trusting your stuff to their security. If you were a hacker, and you could try to hack 100,000 different computers around the world, or you could hack one computer with the data from 100,000 users on it, which would you target?

Yeah, cloud backup, hell no, not for me. Am I in danger of losing stuff to fire or theft, yeah, probably, but that's a risk that I'm willing to take right now. If I wanted to mitigate the risk, I'd probably have a hard drive and some sort of offsite storage, even if that just meant leaving it in my desk at work.

As Tannenbaum said "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. "

https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/

Still the fastest way.

Without going into too much detail at one point during our DR after Sandy when our (running) DR site - in a different country - was also compromised we were giving serious thought to a charter to bring the latest set of backup tapes back to the US.

Luckily they fixed the problem with the power at the DR site before the generators ran out of fuel. And no - we couldn't get more diesel in there in the 72 hour timeframe. Long story...

2TB $70: WD Blue Mainstream 2TB 5,400 RPM SATA III 6Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive - WDBH2D0020HNCNRSN WDBH2D0020HNCNR - Micro Center

As others have said it's your upload speed that's the issue, most ISP's quote speeds in the dowload speed. Most "good" cloud DR/backup companies have a way to "seed" the backup - send a hard drive to them and they upload it to their storage so it will only be incremental after that.

I am on my 6th evaluation of cloud backup vendors and they are all over the road with offerings. The best solution is one that does a local backup with deduplication and compression and sends to cloud as well. You can do quick recoveries from local storage and the cloud is more of a total disaster recovery solution.

My guess is they would go for the 100,000 computers with poor or no security over the specialized backup company with symmetric/asymmetric invisible 4096 bit encryption any day.:confused:

x2

your data is useless w/o the key, and the provider doesnt lists keys in plaintext in /root/keys_to_everything

Online backup can be great to protect data in case of fire, theft, coffee spilling... you name it. But, you need proper bandwidth to take advantage of it. 5 mb is really like a 14k modem today.

Its funny how this would have been excellent 5 yrs ago but now if really just average/good access.

http://www.speedtest.net/result/5459091736.png

Just following up. My cloud backup did finally complete. I lost track of how long it took - three weeks maybe. But now the incremental backups are unobtrusive.

So, my current backup scheme is:
- Continuous Time Machine to external HDD. That's for a lost file or two.
- Weekly drive cloning to another external HDD. That's for a complete drive failure, or burglar steals the Mac.
- Continuous Backblaze cloud backup. That's for the house burns down.

That's for the kitchen Mac where photos, music, etc live. The various Macbooks just use Backblaze cloud backup, they don't have much data on them.

Also juiced the kitchen Mac, an elderly Mac mini, with 16 GB RAM, SSD, El Capitan, and juiced wifey's older MacBook with the same. They both feel like new machines. Kids' MacBook Airs are only a couple years old. My MacBook Pro is only a year old. The WiFi access points are older but still working. Ditto the printers and the various monitors.

But wait, the iPhone fleet is getting old. A "6" and three "5"s. Getting about time to refresh the "5"s.

Keeping the home IT current "enough" is a never ending task. And the average home nowadays has as much tech as a small office did a decade ago. Sigh.

Wow, I just dumped 500 gb's to my amazon account a week or so ago.

Under 8 hours.

My bandwidth is like a drip irrigation system . . .

One of my external backup drives is an IoSafe fireproof waterproof drive.

I use Macs and keep 4 backups. One Time Machine (for opps I didn't mean to delete that, updates houriy in the background). Also backup the time machine backup to a partition on the fireproof drive. Also do a bootable full backup that runs nightly and a second bootable full backup to a partition on the fireproof drive once a month. If I accidentally deleted a file, it's on time machine. If time machine becomes corrupted or drive dies can switch to time machine backup or copy time machine backup to a new drive. If my main drive fails I can just boot off the backup drive. If there is a fire I can boot or migrate a new computer off the fireproof backup.

Just think about if you need to restore from that online backup. It would either take as long to restore as it did to backup, or would take time to have them copy your backup to a drive and ship it to you. Same for the time machine backup (which is a little faster because it should be over your local network and not the internet) but still takes a very long time to do a complete restore from a time machine backup. With a local hard drive doing a bootable full backup, you can just plug it directly into your compluter, boot off it and you are going again.

I run a server that I host web and email on for several companies. That server also has the two big external drives attached, one fireproof. Each drive is partitioned for time machine and bootable backups of the server itself and for the bootable and time machine backups of my computer. The server hosts the backups for my computer as a file server and manages making the montly backups of all backups to the fireproof drive partitions.

I also have another partition on each backup drive. The email server backs up nightly to one keeping a 14 day rotation, and monthly to the fireproof drive.

One of my clients wanted their email files to have an off site backup. I have lunch with one of them weekly and he brings a portable drive at lunch once a month. I copy an email backup to it and give it back the next week. He copies it to their local file server. We thought that was better than doing any sort of long drawn out copy of the backup over the network. Takes about 30 to 45 minutes to copy the backup to the portable drive plugged directly into the server.