Anyone have experience with Acronis Online Backup?

[mwb1100]

I've just found out about an offering by Acronis that looks quite interesting:

    http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/online-backup/

for $50 per year you get 250GB of online backup storage for up to 5 computers in your household.  If this turns out to work reliably, I think it might be the 'off-site' backup offering I've been waiting for.

I'm wondering if anyone here has experience with it that they're willing to share. 

It should be noted that I'm not interested in image backup - I just want irreplaceable documents, picture, music etc. to be backed up.

[barney]

One of my students is using it, raves about it  .  But she's only storing something like a hundred megabytes or so .

I've been reluctant to try it because I just don't see any practical upside to transferring multiple gigabytes of data over a cable modem connection while I'm trying to work ... when I tried DropBox, my Internet access was basically shut down for many hours, for all intents and purposes, except the file transfer, and that was only a couple of gigabytes .  I suppose it could be worthwhile if your data does not change very much over time, but if your data is volatile, the time factor could become significant.

[mwb1100]

Thanks for the info.  I'll definitely need to think about how the initial upload will go. A quick, back-of-the-envelope calculation (about 1.5 Mbit/second raw uplink bandwidth divided by 15 or so) indicates I might expect about 1GB of data uploaded per day (I wonder if I'm even close).  I may have to just sign up for a month (a $5 trial, if you will) and see how well/bad things work.

[JavaJones]

For really large remote backup needs, look for a service that offers a "seeding" option, where they send you a hard drive (or you can send one of yours) with an initial full backup, and then you just sync the differences (usually much smaller) from then on. This can also be really handy for restoring later on too, if they offer a service to send you a drive with your e.g. 1TB of data on it, rather than spending a month downloading it so you can restore. CrashPlan is one such service (see the entry "Seeded backup and restore to your door"). I'll be signing up for them very shortly and will report on their service once I've had a few weeks of it.

- Oshyan

[barney]

Thank you very much, sir  .

CrashPlan will work beautifully for off-site storage, which is a significant problem when working at home.

Talked to some folk I know with similar problems.  Of eight that I could reach, three are using it - asked 'em why cussed 'em out because they hadn't mentioned it  - and all three have nothing detrimental to say about it.  Of the three, two of 'em have used the shipped hard drive service for backup, and one of 'em has had cause to use the same service for a restore.  Said it was a bit confusing to set up, but once configured, it's pretty much a stroll in the park.

'Course, that's someone else's experience, so I'll reserve judgment 'til I've tried it, but it's reassuring to know someone who's actually tried it.  They are using the the $50 option, whereas I'll need the $120 option, but that's cheap for verified off-site storage, no?  With three (3) aye votes out of three (3) users, I feel confident that the $120 will not be wasted.

Once again, sir, thank you very much.

[JavaJones]

You're welcome. I have been doing research to figure out my own backup situation after a big data loss issue (fortunately 99% recovered), and CrashPlan looks most applicable to my needs.

You should however be aware that there have been some recent discussion threads on the CrashPlan forums with some concerns about occasional non-restorable file issues. I don't know how widespread these issues are, they seem very isolated, but a lot of noise has been generated by a few users over them. I'm currently reading through the full discussions, e.g. https://crashplan.zendesk.com/entries/140286-silently-corrupted-data

That being said I'm still quite likely to go with CrashPlan.

- Oshyan

[kalons]

+1 on CrashPlan.
http://www.kinook.com/blog/?p=64

[Fresitleer]

Hello Never tried acronis. Seems to be a good offer though. I don't need that much storage space though. I was curious th eother time and found a couple of online backup tools that are offering free storage space. anyways will look for that one and try it

[barney]

ZenOK looks decent, but I bought into CrashPlan  earlier in this thread.  It has been exemplary for my needs to date, although it's always nice to have alternatives available  .

[40hz]

I'm seriously considering Backblaze. You get unlimited (for real) backup storage for $5mo/$50yr.

Couple of caveats:

1. This is strictly a backup solution - not a file sharing service or "cloud" solution.

2. Each account is for one PC. Consequently, there is no support for networked drives although there is apparently no limit to the number of physically installed or attached drives. So while it won't backup a NAS drive you have mapped to your PC, it will handle a full box of SATA or plugged in USB drives.

Of course, if you sync all your home network PCs to a big drive on one of your PCs, and have Backblaze backup that...

The Backblaze client supports Win 32/64bit and Mac OSX. No NIX client as yet. Probably won't be anytime soon. Which is the only thing that has stopped me from signing up so far.

They do offer a free trial. And last time I checked, you didn't need to give them your credit card first just to try it out. (Kudos for that!)

I originally got interested in this company because of some articles they published about their unique storage server design which allows them to offer unrestricted storage for such a low price. Original DoCo forum post here if anybody is curious. Be sure to check out the link to the video where one of the founders discusses their product design and philosophy and gives some insight into their business model.  

[hpearce]

I haven't tried the acronin online backup since it originally came out as a free intro for my True Image.

But I found it very slow.

[40hz]

I have large data volume clients using both Carbonite and Backblaze. So far, everyone's been happy with both. Backblaze works a little differently than most (it's primarily a mirroring solution) so you'll want to see their website for details. For set and forget I like Backblaze a little more. They offer a free trial.

I have no idea what the CPU utilization on these are since, in my client's case, we're only backing up the backup servers. So I haven't done much performance testing since these servers do nothing but sync to offsite storage during the business day. They also perform the local backups in the evening and early morning so in both cases there's no performance concerns other than to make sure we have a verified backup.

Have to check that out now that my curiosity is piqued...