Online backup- which is best?

[Spagbolagain]

We are currently backing up to an external drive, but ideally I'd like to use a cloud thingy. I looked at carbonite and mozy, but the problem is carbonite don't back up external drives (all our video is on here as PC would otherwise fall over) and Mozy don't do an unlimited package. In fact, when you have a bit of HD video recorded, their package is just too stingy.

So, any experience of using any other providers? Pros and cons?
Any advice much appreciated.

[niceguy2]

I looked at cloud backups too. The problem for me wasn't just cost, it was also speed of uploading. Especially if you have HD Videos. Home broadband just isn't man enough to cope with such volumes. And even if it were, the prices are simply ridiculous.

In the end I've decided to invest in a couple of external hard drives and just back up onto those instead.

[prism]

One day (I sincerely hope) people will look back on this craze for online backup and laugh that it ever got any mileage at all. If you were running out of space for your books would you
A) Buy a bookcase for £20 or
B) Hire someone for £50 to gradually take then all to a warehouse somewhere very distant where you could get them back if you really wanted to? And they might keep dropping them on the way.
Bear in mind that in the world of IT you effectively live in a house of infinite size.
There is a perfectly good solution to the backup problem already, which is an external hard drive or optical discs. Online storage is slow, limited, expensive and tends to go wrong.
I'm sorry to sound so tranchant about it but I've seen lots of people be conned by this and find that they are either paying far more than they expect (just see your broadband bill when you've tried backing up 50GB on line) or it doesn't actually work.
Buy a hard drive. They are cheap, and they work.

[mranchovy]

It's all about the right tool for the job. If you have critical data that changes frequently, backing it up to an external drive and taking that drive off-site for safety every day is not practical so cloud backup is the ideal solution. Video, image and sound files don't change at all so they only need backing up once - an external drive (possibly and/or an optical drive copy taken off site) is appropriate.

[mranchovy]

So to answer the original question, when you consider the use case that makes online backup an appropriate solution i.e. frequent backup of dynamic data, Dropbox becomes the best solution. Just don't use it for backing up your mp3 collection

[Spagbolagain]

Thank you, that's food for thought.
Hadn't realised the upload speeds would be such an issue.

We already use external drives, so I wasn't averse to that idea, my rasons for thinking of cloud backup were:

-if your house burns down (but suppose I can get around by leaving a drive at my mums or in the office)

• accessibility from anywhere and different devices (can use portable drive though, issue with iPad which is a pain but not the end of the world I guess)
  

• as mranchovy says, frequent backing up of changing data. But I guess we don't actually have too much of that.
  

So all in all, maybe I need a couple of new drives then :o

[mranchovy]

Yes, they are three different applicaitons:


- if your house burns down (but suppose I can get around by leaving a drive at my mums or in the office)
Either that or DVD/Blurays - this is for media files that take up a lot of space and never change

- accessibility from anywhere and different devices (can use portable drive though, issue with iPad which is a pain but not the end of the world I guess)
For that you need your own internet streaming media server which is not the same as cloud backup and costs a (relative) fortune.

- as mranchovy says, frequent backing up of changing data. But I guess we don't actually have too much of that.
So the free 2GB Dropbox is ideal

[NetworkGuy]

prism : "(just see your broadband bill when you've tried backing up 50GB on line)"

I can think of a couple of ISPs (AAISP for one, Zen perhaps the other) which do not count any upstream data in their monthly "quota". I don't know which "Fair Usage" ISPs would be unhappy with 50 GB, but the ISP I use doesn't count any traffic (upload or download) between midnight and 08:00 (01:00 to 07:00, I think, if you have higher speed via Fibre)

As for low upload speed, the initial backup may take a few days, but for peace of mind, that's not going to be a problem, and afterwards, any backup software should do incremental backups to only upload items which are new or have changed.

"or it doesn't actually work."

Clearly one needs to check backups, from time to time, and any reports generated by backup software, which would point to success of the process. I would probably suggest online backup in addition to any routine 'copy and remove from the site' routines for a small business, at least where invoices, quotes, and other correspondence is primarily printed and posted to customers, but even if items are sent by e-mail, it is easy to have a all new items backed up online, so even if there was some major problem (flooding in an office block from floor above, for example) which killed all the computer equipment, if there's software checking for new or altered documents "on the fly" then something which was saved to disk 3 minutes before the flood/ disaster, should still have a chance to have been backed up in time! Easy!

Yes, external drives / memory cards/ sticks can be useful, but online storage can have a place too.

[NetworkGuy]

For that you need your own internet streaming media server

I read it not as streaming audio/ video from the online storage but being able to download items to another machine in another location. It would be costly, of course, to download hundreds of MB using a mobile network, but a hotel with free Wi-Fi access (and awful weather) might still make the (free) downloading of items of value.

Live.com (owned by MS, and possibly live.co.uk therefore) offers 10 GB of storage (5 GB for multimedia) for free, so another one worth considering, just for the (free) cost of an extra e-mail account!

[NetworkGuy]

Spagbolagain - as mranchovy wrote "backing it up to an external drive and taking that drive off-site for safety every day is not practical" for most people, but for a larger business it may be, but yes, keeping a backup drive at your office or (probably better!) with your Mum, is certainly worth doing.

Just remember to "refresh" the stored copy from time to time - ie if you buy some extra external drives, then before the next visit [around Christmas / birthdays / whatever] make sure you have copied everything important and take the latest copy and swap with the previously held one when you get there.

While prism makes the point that online backup "can go wrong", the same is true of optical or magnetic storage, so it is worth checking a few files at random from every backup. If you want a "belt and braces" approach, then you'd perhaps keep 2 backups with your Mum, as part of a 'grandfather, father, and son' (sorry, not intentionally sexist!) backup strategy

[prism]

There's a big difference between backup and online file storage. If you want to access files from anywhere, Dropbox etc is great, but that's not backup. Backup is keeping a copy of your stuff with as little effort from you, so that you can retrieve it if something goes wrong, but you won't be actually using those backup copies unless the worst happens. In my experience the most common reason for data loss is user error, closely followed by burglary, followed by hard drive failure (bear in mind that if you computer goes wrong you haven't necessarily lost the data on the drive). I have yet to encounter anyone who lost data because the house burned down, though obviously this is possible.

The great thing about running backup software onto a hard drive is that if it fails you will know straight away, because the process is quick and the software tells you what has happened. Online backup is a bit too out of sight and out of mind for me, as well as everything else.

[cdtaylornats]

Look at a NAS

A large disk drive set attached to your home network. Many can run regular backups at ethernet speeds.

Mine has 16TB (4x4TB) configured as a raid array so if one disk fails all the data is safe.

I have the 4 bay version of this www.synology.com/en-uk/products/series/home