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Help me choose an online backup service

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tranglos:
You know tranglos I'm starting to think more and more the idea of grabbing a $10/month hosting account with unlimited or large storage space and just using encrypted ftp may be the way to go.

It's not nearly as convenient and automatic, but it does offer the control and also can serve as a backup place to host an emergency backup website..
-mouser (February 15, 2012, 11:51 PM)
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That's what I'm thinking. One thing to keep in mind in that case: the ISP may not allow storing personal backups in web hosting space. I know Dreamhost doesn't. Their least expensive plan already gives unlimited storage (within reason, but what hard limits there were initially are now gone), but this space is explicitly for stuff you serve on the web.

At some point they noticed people (myself included...) kept personal backups under their /home directories and decided they didn't like it. What they did was give everyone a separate, free ssh/ftp account that's specifically for backup, but limited to 50 GB, or you can buy more.

Other ISPs may not have this policy, but it's something to take into account.

Other than that, ftp gives you plenty of options. SFFS and other backup apps do ftp, but I'm thinking an even better option would be to use something like WebDrive (is there a free alternative?) that maps an ftp account to a drive letter and just keeps it open all the time. That way uploads are transparent and you can throttle them better. Down here for example all ISPs offer only asymentric links, with fast download but a really limited upload bandwidth, so throttling is useful.

apankrat:
Just I thought I'd mention - http://tarsnap.com - "Online backups for the truly paranoid"

Runs natively on Unixes, via CygWin on Windows. Naturally, it's command line only, because that's where all truly paranoids are :)

app103:
I've got most of our high backup volume clients set up for either Carbonite or Backblaze.

I've been happy with both services.

Everybody knows about Carbonite. Backblaze is a little different in the way it works from most. It's more a continuous mirroring rather than a traditional backup/sync service (although it can be set up to do a scheduled standard backup if you prefer), so definitely visit their website for full details. They'll provide you with a free 15-day trial to see if it works for you. For general backup use I slightly prefer Backblaze. Especially now that they've added support for backing up VMs. Datasheet here. And having the option to have them send a DVD or a drive to restore from is a major plus for me. Sure beats pulling half a terabyte of data down the wire during a major restore.

I'm not too up on what the exact performance is for either of these two services. They're more than fast enough for what we're doing.

Luck. :)
-40hz (February 16, 2012, 06:30 AM)
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Backblaze would probably be the one I'd go with if I could afford something like this. They are not a reseller like BeeCloud that might suffer the same fate as Backify, the software seems simple enough, nothing to think about, backs up everything, unlimited storage at $95 for 2 years, and unlike others they haven't raised their rates in their last 3 years of business.

And they don't mind giving you the details to some of the secrets to their success. http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/

highend01:
Backblaze
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Tried it today. Maybe it's a cheap solution but for an advanced or pro user this isn't probably the way to go. You can exclude folders / drives but it's a cumbersome task if you have a nested folder structure and want to sync several folders inside this structure.

It is _really_ not possible to reverse it and say: Only include these specified folders that I want to sync, no matter what.

I hope http://www.acrosync.net/home.html gets into a usable state in the near future so that I have a more graphical approach to my current online backup / sync needs...

40hz:
@app - Their new platform is quite impressive. Interesting what they had to say about Hitachi drives too. Can't get more of a real world test than what these guys are doing.

Speaking to a few of my cronies, we're thinking crazy thoughts about massive storage like they're doing combined with machines running something like myCloud (see below.) I'm not surprised myCloud has since been acquired by Citrix. Fortunately it was built on an open source platform so it's still available as a free download.



Right now almost all the pieces are in place. There's affordable massive storage technology, open source server and desktop operating systems and software...so all that's needed is a good replacement for the public IPaddress and DNS system (new protocol maybe?) and we'd be at the point where we could implement our very own alternative Internet. Bwahahahahaha!!!



Dilbert would be envious. ;D

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