Online back up services.

snollup

Hi,

I have just had my second external hard drive that I use for back ups fail on me in about a year so am now looking at online services for back ups.

From the little research I've done Dolly Drive seem the best value in terms of space & use-ability. It looks like this can be set up as your Time Machine drive which I quite like. You can also back up iphotos & itunes.

Does anybody use such a service and how do you find it?

The mac I use is running 10.6.8 so some services may not be available due to this.

Thanks in advance,
Joe

Piliger

Your OS should be irrelevant.

What volume of data are you needing to backup ?

You shouldn't be losing HD's at that rate. Are you buying budget HDs ? What make ?

snollup

Piliger wrote: »

Your OS should be irrelevant.

What volume of data are you needing to backup ?

You shouldn't be losing HD's at that rate. Are you buying budget HDs ? What make ?

The last drive was one of these so defiantly not budget.

Have decided to give Dolly Drive a shot. So far so good. While €10 a month seem a little expensive it really only equates to one decent hard drive every 18 months or so.

I also found OpenDrive offering much the same service but I like the OSX Time Machine compatibility offered by Dolly Drive.

OU812

Haven't used them, but I hear good things about crashplan.com. Single computer costs from $5.99 a month. Biggist issue I can think of it the time it would take to back up.

I run a time machine & two secondary hard drives using CCC, one of which is always stored at my dad's & rotated weekly so the longest loss of data would be a week if the absolute worst happened.

OU812

Just decided to try crashplan for myself. Fairly painless setup & a 31 day free trial.

However, I have 330GB to back up, (home movies, photos, documents). I didn't include my itunes library, it's reporting 8 days to complete, I'm guessing that's without any downloads going on. Will report back as to how I get on.

snollup

ya, the time it takes for initial back up may be a bit of a pain but hope once done it wil only run incrementals that should go relatively quickly.

Type 17

I use backblaze - cheap and unlimited.

Seamless working in the background. I haven't needed it for real, but I did a few sample restores and it worked perfectly.

I have over 550GB backed up - when I first tried it, I was on a DSL ISP with a 512kbps uplink, and it said I'd be backed up in 112 days(!).
I switched to a 10Mb uplink (was going to change sometime soon, but that clinched it) and it finished in 8 days...

onelessprob

Started using CrashPlan a few months ago. Great service, constantly chipping away in the background. They have a good iOS app which lets you access your file directory from your laptop/ desktop on your iDevice, and download a particular file, which I've used a good few times (photos or PDFs that you want to look at, etc). The only reason I went with them was I found a link on Engadget I think which gave you a 10% discount, (www.crashplan.com/mozyonover) might still work.

OU812

Just discovered the iOS app today. Pretty solid. I'm leaning very heavily toward subscribing to this. Going to complete this upload (6.5 days), and then go to the end of the month then decide.

Onelessprob, the link you provided doesn't appear to be working, but if you check your control panel, there may be a friends and family discount of 20%. If you're jot using it, I'd appreciate it.

When I had a mac, I used to use arq which is software which resides on your mac and it then encrypts your data and then sends it to your amazon s3 account, which is based in Ireland, so less hops and very reliable.

It is certainly worthy to add to the list here.

OU812

Eleven days later & I'm at 95.6% backed up. I'm expecting to hit 100% in the middle of tonight. My system has been running constantly & backing up all the time so it's a big job. I'll have about two weeks to "test" the system after I'm up and running, but will most probably commit to it.

If there's anyone using Crashplan who has the family & friends discount code in their control panel, & aren't using it, I'd be very grateful for a PM.

Thanks

OU812

Actually, just pulled the trigger on this. I found a 40% discount link & rather than risk it expiring in the next two weeks, Decided to purchase

Blazer

Just a word on external drives etc.
Look for a good brand name which lists the name of the actual hard drive.
That G-Drive does not list the brand.
A good brand is Western Digital Red (used for home NAS etc )
Bit more expensive but very reliable and 5 year warranty.
Another thing is power management...do not buy external drives with no power management...examples of these would be the iomega drives etc which means the hard drive is constantly spinning and never parks the heads.
Seagate/WD all offer drives with power management where you can set a time for the hard drive to power down after a period of inactivity.
They might be €10-20 more expensive but are worth it in terms of reliability and running costs.

OU812

Just an update on this.

I did a full personal files backup which took almost a month to complete to the cloud (several hours to an external).

This was nearly 900gb comprising of documents, photos & video going back several years.

I later added my iTunes folder which is another 900gb including movies, books, TV & music.

It's just reached 99.1% and I expect it to finish late today, throw ever it'll then rescan & find all the additional stuff I've added (several gb) over the month so will update with that.

Overall it's a long slow process but there is peace of mind knowing everything is backed up offsite.