Author Topic: Help me choose an online backup service (Read 96686 times)

app103 · « **Reply #75 on:** March 01, 2012, 02:44 PM »

They are not a reseller like BeeCloud that might suffer the same fate as Backify
-app103 (February 16, 2012, 12:22 PM)

Looks like my prediction was correct. BeeCloud is out of the reseller business and sent all their users an email informing them that all their data will automatically be deleted from LiveDrive on March 13th. Their website also states they are out of the reseller business but will be back as an online backup news site.

I hope nobody here actually paid for their service and if they did, I hope they can get a refund.

Curt · « **Reply #76 on:** March 01, 2012, 04:19 PM »

-well, reply #1 tells that I am one. However, it is certainly not the money that I am concerned about, (those 3 Euro have already been refunded), but the backup - at the moment I have no machine to restore to!

No panic, I still have more than a week ;-)

berry · « **Reply #77 on:** March 12, 2012, 12:18 AM »

Interesting thread with a lot of excellent contributions. Having similar needs I followed it until it "died"?

Did you ever pick a solution?

cheers

barney · « **Reply #78 on:** March 12, 2012, 12:37 AM »

Did you ever pick a solution?
-berry (March 12, 2012, 12:18 AM)

Methinks the question should be, "Is there a solution?"

Not to be utterly defeatist, but don't think there is one (1). Twould seem that each situation requiring a backup solution is unique, thus requiring a unique solution. It doesn't seem there is a currently extant universal solution (damn it

!).

mouser · « **Reply #79 on:** March 12, 2012, 07:12 AM »

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(!)

The CrashPlan developers seem at a complete loss as to how to prevent their application from going on a rampage consuming memory. They know it's happening because people are complaining on the forum about it, but they can't seem to fix it.

It's a fatal flaw for an otherwise great service.

[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.]

40hz · « **Reply #80 on:** March 12, 2012, 09:16 AM »

[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)

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 · « **Reply #81 on:** March 12, 2012, 10:10 AM »

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)

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 · « **Reply #82 on:** April 03, 2012, 12:25 AM »

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.backblaz...ealing-more-secrets/ and http://blog.backblaz...bye-2009-hello-2010/ or http://blog.backblaz...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.backblaz.../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 · « **Reply #83 on:** April 03, 2012, 04:27 PM »

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 · « **Reply #84 on:** April 04, 2012, 01:58 AM »

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.

Boydon · « **Reply #85 on:** April 04, 2012, 04:12 AM »

Maybe you'd also like to have a look at Memopal

mario_a · « **Reply #86 on:** April 15, 2012, 11:58 PM »

So, mouser - Just curious, did you finally settle on Crash Plan or something else ?

mouser · « **Reply #87 on:** April 16, 2012, 01:15 AM »

CrashPlan was the best I found but I simply could not get over the insane memory use issues, so i dropped it after my 30 day trial. However I may try it again at some point.

jity2 · « **Reply #88 on:** April 16, 2012, 01:57 AM »

Hello Mouser ,
Just curious : did you try backblaze ?
(see my post above and especially this technical link http://www.reddit.co...nline_backup_service)

mouser · « **Reply #89 on:** April 16, 2012, 02:05 AM »

I forget who I talked to about BackBlaze, but there were two things I wasn't happy about:
1. That BackBlaze tries to backup EVERYTHING on your pc and you have to work to exclude stuff.
2. This: "Backblaze will keep versions of a file that changes for up to 30 days. However, Backblaze is not designed as an additional storage system when you run out of space. Backblaze mirrors your drive. If you delete your data, it will be deleted from Backblaze after 30 days."

jity2 · « **Reply #90 on:** April 16, 2012, 02:08 AM »

Thanks Mouser! Have a great day.

Giampy · « **Reply #91 on:** April 16, 2012, 08:49 AM »

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(!)

The CrashPlan developers seem at a complete loss as to how to prevent their application from going on a rampage consuming memory. They know it's happening because people are complaining on the forum about it, but they can't seem to fix it.
-mouser (March 12, 2012, 07:12 AM)

Such situations drive me mad. Is it really necessary that CrashPlan continuously controls the activity of the user? Couldn't CrashPlan leave to the user the possibility to activate the back-up service only when he/she wishes???

mario_a · « **Reply #92 on:** April 16, 2012, 01:28 PM »

Here's an interesting blog post about Crash Plan losing all of a user's data:
http://jeffreydonenf...ntire-backup-archive

In the comments to this blog post, many users have reported various data loss, upload issues and support issues with Crash Plan as well...

TaoPhoenix · « **Reply #93 on:** April 19, 2012, 07:36 AM »

CrashPlan was the best I found but I simply could not get over the insane memory use issues, so i dropped it after my 30 day trial. However I may try it again at some point.
-mouser (April 16, 2012, 01:15 AM)

What about those "Memory Reclaimers" that used to be all the rage a few years ago? I know, I saw the articles that many/most of them didn't actually work but just fiddled with interconnected stats, but just suppose it's "just a memory leak bug", why not just use a utility that reclaims the memory as if it were stopped and started? Just set the mem-util settings so that it doesn't actually interfere with CrashPlan, etc.

wraith808 · « **Reply #94 on:** April 19, 2012, 11:13 AM »

CrashPlan was the best I found but I simply could not get over the insane memory use issues, so i dropped it after my 30 day trial. However I may try it again at some point.
-mouser (April 16, 2012, 01:15 AM)

What about those "Memory Reclaimers" that used to be all the rage a few years ago? I know, I saw the articles that many/most of them didn't actually work but just fiddled with interconnected stats, but just suppose it's "just a memory leak bug", why not just use a utility that reclaims the memory as if it were stopped and started? Just set the mem-util settings so that it doesn't actually interfere with CrashPlan, etc.
-TaoPhoenix (April 19, 2012, 07:36 AM)

I wouldn't trust *any* of those reclaimers, and I think that anyone that has an idea of Windows memory management would tell you the same thing, especially with GC'd languages.

RANT

ALL software that claims to free memory, optimize memory, etc. is a bunch of lies.

Here's how they work:

You have 8GB of RAM and 4GB paging file. You are currently running a bunch of programs that require, say, 256 megs of RAM, but most of that RAM isn't actively being used. These programs run and allocate 384 megs of ram which causes the operating system to page ALL of your existing applications to disk. Then they free that RAM. The operating system begins paging those applications back into memory as they touch their resources. The appearance is that you have "reclaimed RAM". You haven't.

Here's how the operating system works. When someone asks for memory the operating system goes and finds some. If it can't find some it goes through the applications that haven't touched ram for a while and pages those "stale" parts out to disk. This means that until there is a *NEED* for more RAM, the operating system will allow applications to hold on to as much RAM as they want. When there is a need, the operating system will make the right decisions about where to find it. These memory "reclaimers" just create an artificial need and all that creates is an "impression" that the memory was freed.

If you are experiencing out of memory conditions due to an application leaking, these tools will not help because they will not be able to allocate any memory. You can either increase the size of your page file, add more ram to your system, stop using the broken software, or close it from time to time (the operating system will get all the lost memory back when the application closes).

Don't be fooled. And please don't PAY ANYTHING for this kind of software. You are paying for a pretty picture and optimization code that amounts to:

void main( void )
{
free( malloc( 402653184 ) ); // Allocate 384 megs of ram and then
// free it.
}

TaoPhoenix · « **Reply #95 on:** April 19, 2012, 11:21 AM »

Nice answer.

I'd seen that kind of info, but I was wondering about Mouser's remark that stopping and starting the process seemed to help.

mouser · « **Reply #96 on:** April 19, 2012, 11:24 AM »

There are some posts on the web talking about tricks to force java apps to let go of memory or use less memory.

While Wraith has a point -- it may actually make more sense than one might think to try to trick a java app into using less memory -- precisely because, unlike 99.9999% of applications, it seems that the Java runtime does explicitly make some dynamic decisions about how much memory to claim and when to release it. Which means that if you can convince Java that it shouldn't be using so much of your system memory, and perform garbage collection more frequently, you *may* be able to keep it in check. That's assuming that the memory use problems of CrashPlan aren't due to memory leaks in the code..

Ath · « **Reply #97 on:** April 19, 2012, 12:10 PM »

if you can convince Java that it shouldn't be using so much of your system memory, and perform garbage collection more frequently
-mouser (April 19, 2012, 11:24 AM)

You actually can. By calling the static method System.gc(); a number of times (3 to 8 seems appropriate), that way you shift so many discarded objects into the 'destroy' bin that the memory is actually released. That can cost you performance for a few hundred milliseconds, but it is often worth the effort.

It also helps to not have circular object-references within discarded objects in your application, but that's ofcourse a matter of carefully crafting your application, and/or null-ing an object or 2 in the right place & time

Memory management in (long-running) Java applications is just as important as memory management in a C/C++ application

tomos · « **Reply #98 on:** April 19, 2012, 02:12 PM »

there was a request lately: IDEA: Application memory limiter

John L · « **Reply #99 on:** April 29, 2012, 11:44 AM »

Interesting thread. And I think I'll begin posting right here.

As for imaging, I have Acronis and have used it, although I haven't recently. My Bad! But I never had problems, so I didn't have to use the latest image. I really need to check into the best imaging software, and make certain I can use it as a reboot should everything fail.

Concerning backup, I think Barney still has the best solution. But I would be hard pressed to use five extra 2TB drives. That's perhaps a bit of overkill IMO. But two, or even three backup drives in different locations? To my thinking that is the very best solution. I keep two Samsung 2TB drives and they are loaded with well over 1TB of music, all in 320kbs format. I have a Huge collection of Contemporary Jazz, New Age, and Classic Rock. If I lost that collection, I would be in an almost total state of depression from there on out. It would cost me thousands of dollars, or an unG-dly amount of time just to come close to recovering what I already have.

Uploading onto the internet is fine, but doing all this locally, and spreading them out,........just in case, is the very best solution I can come up with. Granted one would have to remember to go around with an up to date drive, switch it with the old one, and then return it for updating. But that way the owner of the data is required to keep active and alert to any problems.