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Help me choose an online backup service

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40hz:

[As an aside: For those of you programmers who are suspicious of garbage collected languages, this is some ammunition for you, and confirmation of your reluctance to adopt java.]

-mouser (March 12, 2012, 07:12 AM)
--- End quote ---

And further discouragement for those who picked their development environment mainly because it promised an "easy way" to attain cross-platform compatibility.

For system type applications, develop specifically for the platform. And use an appropriate language.

berry:
I'm still using the CrashPlan trial but I cannot bring myself to commit to it because it's sitting here in the tray using 250mb of ram(!)
-mouser (March 12, 2012, 07:12 AM)
--- End quote ---
Having programmed on an IBM360/40 with 64 KB of memory, I can appreciate your sentiment. On the other hand, with memory being as cheap as it is today - I'm seldom using even 4GB of my installed 8 - if that's the only downside you've found, I'll give it a look.

Thanks to everyone for the interesting and informative contributions.

cheers

jity2:
Hello,
Here is my 4 years experience with online backup (if you can afford it I recommend also to have a raid mirroring in your computer and dvd manually saved elsewhere than inside your home the time that all your data are uploaded online).
 
I recommend backblaze because :
- it is a profitable company (fees: aprox 50$ /year for unlimited data) : from mid 2008 to the beginnings of 2011 I was a customer of elephantdrive: 50$ /year per computer and saved more than 1000 Go. It took me one full year aprox to upload my data (dsl line in europe). Alas I realized too late that the cost for them to save my data online was aprox 1000$ / year (amazon s3 based) ! Once they run out of money the company increased their fees a lot. Then last year I turned to backblaze  firstly because they are a profitable company (see their old blog posts examples : see last image http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/ and http://blog.backblaze.com/2010/01/04/goodbye-2009-hello-2010/ or http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/). BTW they are owned by their employees )! ;)

- low usage software: Then they tried to remove unnecessary things when coding their software (low cpu and low ram usages:  see last url of this message for coding details).

- no hassle : The only thing that annoyed me at first is that you cannot choose directly what to upload first ! But it is still possible to exclude the not desired folders. In fact I have to admit that in reality this is a great thing : yes it uploads a few unwanted files but if it is 5% or less of what you exactly needs who cares ?  ;)
You can choose the type of files exe... that you want uploaded.

-what happen in reality when one of your drives fails :
The other thing is : I realized it better a few weeks ago: I had an OCZ ssd (note: I don't recommend this brand !) in C:\ then 4 months later it failed. ;( Out of 120 Go I had only 40Go that were personal data important for me, the rest being normal software data I didn't care. The great thing that I was able to download exactly what I needed (even some small settings files I thought that I would never use : for sure if I had to choose such folders myself I wouldn't have done it! So I would have lost some time fine tunning such settings...) as a zip file : 40go took me about 2 days with my dsl line (they have a great little software that allow resume downloading for your specific zip files). But I realized that if I needed 1000go of my data I could either download them for free (that would took me ages!) or simply buy from them a hard drive with those 1000 Go for aprox 180 $.

The only caveat is that : you should be cautious when you add a new drive on your computer (they allow you to transfer your old backup state to your new computer (you keep your data) or start over from 0. From my experience it is better to ask them before what to do in your particular case than doing so yourself as I did and I was wrong (their explanations are a little bit tricky when you are in a hurry) ! Their support always answered me within 24 hours).

- nice feature if your computer is stolen :
Furthermore, if you computer is stolen you may be able to locate it thanks to their "locate my computer"  : it gives you the last ip address used with backblaze software inside your computer. So the police should be able to locate the thiefs with luck. ;) (http://blog.backblaze.com/category/locate-my-computer/)

- data location building etc... :
Final notes:
Their servers are located around San Franscisco area ("datacenter is located in Oakland, California, United States" in the same building that where cnet data are stored ! from memory please check their blog).
They use "MB basis 1000" for computing file and folder sizes.
Here is a great technical link abut their systems:  http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/rhrt4/we_are_the_team_that_runs_online_backup_service/
Encryption of data is possible (you choose your own password). Files transfer is encrypted.
You can make searches inside your backup data for filenames in a few seconds. ;)
They doesn't reduce uploading speed! ;)

I hope this helps ;)

sciagent:
Hello Everybody

Has anyone tried Wuala provided by LaCie?

I found it as a complimentary 10GB free-for-one-year storage subscription supplied with one of the LaCie's external HDD. 2GB they offer for free, more storage is for a fee. Encryption and versioning out of the box; not a cheap though...

jaden:
To add another data point, I've been using JungleDisk on Rackspace storage for about 10-15GB but the monthly cost has been creeping up over the years.  Tonight I installed CrashPlan so I could backup everything on all my computers and so far I'm impressed.  Memory usage for CrashPlanService is 123MB (out of 8GB).  It's chugging along nicely, uploading ~1TB of data.

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