Anyone Back Up In The Cloud

paulcamcas

paulcamcas

Suspended / Banned
Messages
2,509
Name
Paul
Edit My Images
No
I'm getting worried that keeping an external back up of all my images on a hard drive sitting next to my imac isn't going to be much help if the house burns down or the bandits get in and nick everything. Does anyone use an external back up service?

I've heard of Mozy but are there others that you have personal experience of?

Many thanks.
 
nope, anything over a couple of GB is going to be really painful to transfer.

quicker, easier and probably cheaper would be another hard drive which you take offsite (drawer at work, parents house etc)
 
Ah I see - missus says I'm up in the clouds most of the time ... not what you're talking about is it :sulk:
 
I like to know where my data is, how frequently it's backed up and more importantly who has access to it.

None of those things are a certainty with cloud storage plus, as Neil pointed out, there are likely to be transfer time issues and your bandwidth usage with your ISP will rocket.

Second USB hard disk is the way to go ;)
 
Nope on and off site hard drive backups 4 in total. I control where my data is not some namby pamby arty farty name for WAN.
 
Depends on how much data, how often and what broadband you have. On 50mb VM it isn't a problem. I have data stored in livedrive and in idrive. Idrive is the client back up and does the two macs I tend to use. Main issue is making sure you upload at times outside their throttling times. 50mb used to be completely free of restrictions but they've added them when they made the upload speed half decent. Livedrive does server back ups for a VPS and for web cam data.

Initial backup is the hardest. Once you are on to changes only the data needed reduces massively.

I also upload all my pics to smugmug too so they're backed up in two places.
 
I've considered this but with an upload speed of less than 1meg it's not really been worthwhile.

One thing I would suggest is looking at Crashplan.

Buy an external HD and then use crashplan to backup your data to it.

Transfer the external HD to a firend / relative / place of work and then reconfigure crashplan at home to do incremental backups to the now remote location.

This will also mean that in the event of a total loss you can easily get your data back. Downloading 100's of GB from the web isn't the quickest way to get back up and running!
 
Nope.
I use GoodSync to backup to a 1tb drive, then copy all of that to another.
Really good bit of software that does the job v well.
 
I've set a few people up with Carbonite, I like it, I did use Mozy for a while but over the last 12months they seem to have gone down hill. As well as having 'local' backups I think cloud storage should be part of your backup routine and for £50 per year I think it's bob on.
 
I have a number of files backed up onto DropBox, and I also have them on my iDisk through MobileMe. Like you I have a local HDD on my desk, and another upstairs which is networked.

Important documents are on all my computers as well as my iPad.

Steve
 
Thank you all for some varied and interesting input. I'm going to try it all. Regular backups going offsite and have a go with Carbonite. I've got a 2.5mbps upload speed so it should be feasible. The first upload will be painful but updating it shouldn't be too bad.

I'm not too fussed about who has access to my photos - most of them are awful anyway - so I'm not worried about that aspect.

I'll have a look at Crashplan too.

Thanks all.
 
So bearing in mind recent events did you try it?
 
I use CrashPlan to back up and highly recommend it. I tried Mozy and Carbonite but had troubles with either cost/features/bandwidth or support. CrashPlan have a set price and don't throttle your bandwidth as the size of your backup increases.

I have a Windows Home Server on my home network. It is always on and my PC is backed up by it every day. CrashPlan runs on the Home Server and backs the Photos folder on my server up to their data centre. CrashPlan encrypts all data before it leaves your PC so the files are not accessible to anyone, including the CrashPlan staff.

Another interesting aspect of CrashPlan is that you can set up backups to and from your friends for no cost. My mother's laptop uses CrashPlan to back up her photos to my server from her house. That way she has an offsite backup without having to pay a monthly fee.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top