Storage forum: What's your take on online backup services?

Since you work for the parent company, perhaps you can make a suggestion - add the ease and simplicity of Dropbox to the capability of Mozy and I would consider it!

I have a MacBook Pro, an HP Laptop, and an iPhone that I work from and need to back up and keep certain files in sync. I also need to be able to use my iPhone to access those files while away from the office for numerous reasons. I have not yet found an elegant solution that addresses both the backup capability of something like Mozy or Carbonite, coupled with the great functionality of Dropbox.

If you really want safe, secure backup then buy an extremely reliable
SSD (solid state)Drive.
They cost more, but you will have no worries about your drive failing.
There are enclosures like this you can put them into easily.

http://www.crucial.com/promo/index.aspx?prog=ssd

You then have your crucial information in your home & safe from failure,
& the eyes of the internet.

Power consumption would be lower on a SSD device. It contains no moving parts and does not need to spin up like a HDD. Examples from Samsung's website that compare a SSD device with a HDD show that active power consumption for a notebook HDD is 3.88 watts avg, whereas a SSD device is 1 watt for active power consumption.

Downsides to SSD:

Cost. SSD devices are about $9/GB more expensive than HDD devices.
Inability to recover lost data. This could be due to accidentally deleted files, mechanical failure after abrupt power loss, magnetic fields near the SSD, and electrostatic charges.

positive attributes of SSD are:

a) Significant weight reduction, to the order of 1/5th the weight of a notebook HDD.
b) Can withstand 0 to 70 deg Celsius as opposed to 5 to 55 with a notebook HDD.
c) Can withstand up to a 1500G impact vs 170G for a notebook HDD.
d) No noise.
e) Fast access, read and write times. Virtually no seek time, 100 MB/sec read - 80MB/sec write (2-12msec seek, 59MB/sec read - 60MB/sec write for a notebook HDD).

Rumor that SSD drives fail after a certain number of re-writes. This is true. All electronic components will eventually fail (including HDD devices) and this is usually expressed as MTBF and stands for Mean Time Before Failure. This just means how many hours before the electronics will no longer function. MTBF for a Samsung SSD device is over 2,000,000 hours whereas it would be less than 700,000 hours MTBF for a notebook HDD device.
Estimated time of failure 228 years.

I stay in India and the broadband speeds here are just not up to the mark to be able to use online backup services. Even if the speeds are good, it is limited usage so we cant use these services for actual backup of anything.

I back up everything on my main HD to a second internal SATA HD, and to a networked HD. The network HD is simply a 500 gb HD in a Venus DS3 fan cooled case, connected to a Pogoplug via USB. The Pogoplug connected to my home Ethernet and located in the basement powered with a cheap UPS. Using Pogoplug I can connect to files from any computer on my home network or any other computer outside of my network once an easy sharing procedure is completed.

I use Mirrorfolder (software) to completely my main HD file-for-file once a week and mirror my data files every two hours to both an internal hard drive and my own networked external hard drive. I mirror every two hours so that if I make a mistake and save the file to my primary HD, I can retrieve it from my internal alternate HD or networked drive.

The networked HD is at a different location in my home via a Pogoplug set up. Mirrorfolder works great, it's cheap, is easy to use, and it can operate as about any kind of backup you want, including a software RAID, and will backup to a network location. It has a restore option and works in the background unnoticed and seldom slows my machine down.

I've had terrible luck with Ancronis and deleted (removed) it.

I backup all my sensitive files to a couple of encrypted thumb drives. I've tried several online backup services and calculated that I can by my own HDs, thumb drives and a Pogoplug for what an online setup costs for two years, and it's MINE.

I use adrive.com. You can get a free account with 50 GB. That has ads but you can pay and skip the ads and/or get more space. So far I have not had any trouble with this service. The upload/download speed can some times be slow. But I think that could be said for most of these types of service.

I've been using Carbonite for over a year now, and have had no problems. It does slow my computer down somewhat, but I just pause it for a selected period, then restart it when I'll be away from my computer. I'm using over 200G of space which is backed up by Carbonite, and at only $50+ a year, it's well worth it. I did start the backup over at one point some months ago, because my computer had acquired a virus, and I was afraid that had been backed up also. But, there were no problems starting over, and it didn't seem to take Carbonite that long to do a catch-up. Overall, I highly recommend.

The only things I really want to back up like Operating System's, files, registrations, software appi's & passwords, family pic's, movies, & video's are seriously safer & more easily accessed from my own storage devices like portable flash drives & desktop external HD's. It does not make sense to me to pay a fee to remotely store anything personal when I can buy my own storage devices, like a couple 500GB drives, or terabyte drive & keep a copy of everything.

I've been doing backups since the 1960s on mainframes. Although the products differ, the concepts always remain the same. Before you can determine how you are going to do backups, you need to look at what you will be backing up and why you want to back it up. It's not really all that simple. Do you have an SQL database, if so, you probably have open files and you cannot really back them up just by copying as a lot of data could be in cache (memory) and the files may be changing while you are copying a given file. Do you really want synchronizing? There are pluses and minuses to this. The backup will be exactly (with a few seconds) to your updates. But what if it is some update that is trashing the file? Will this trash the backup copy as well? Does it need to a to-the-second backup or will you be able to get away with a daily backup.

In "disaster recovery" we have a couple of concepts to consider:

1) RPO - Recovery point objective - This is how much "data" are you willing to lose in a disaster (eg, would last night's backup be good enough?).

2) RTO - Recovery Time Objective - how long can you be "down" in a disaster (minutes? hours? days?)

These will determine how you backup your PC.

Once you have put together a plan, ask yourself a few "what if" scenarios. What if your PC goes up in a "puff of smoke"? What happens if it is only a hard drive? If you are only saving the critical data? How will you recover the rest of the computer? Hardware? Operating Sytem? All of you programs? Applications? Do you have all of your "install disks"? What happend if you overwrite your file? Will this affect the backup? What if you don't notice overwriting for a few days or a few months? Will you still have something to go back to? So, how often are you gong to back up and how long are you going to keep backups.

Some people think they can just copy to a secondary drive of the same size (or smaller) than the original. How many archival copyies will you be able to keep with this?

I personally prefer to do my own backups. Why? Because, if something goes wrong, I can only blame myself and I prefer to have the "system state" backed up so I can restore the entire computer quickly if I have to. You should have an ERD (Emergency Recovery Disk) handy.

Good luck.

Whoops,, I don't backup anything I can get at the store!!

disclaimer; i work on software, so all of the next issues are important to me.
but if you're just interested in storing your digital photo album or any other files that don't require secure crypto, then i wouldn't want to scare you away from trying online backup services.
i believe non-essential backups is the category they will serve best in their current toddler stage.
for digital photo albums, i would favor providers that allow me to tag, organise (in a tree->albums) and expose any backed-up photo(album)s to the web.
things like auto-twitter posts when tagged with a certain custom tag would reap extra points too for some people..
oh, and do check my point 4).


but for me, a webdesigner with code-to-protect and financial data i dont want in unauthorized hands,

1) if transfer-crypto is even used, it'll be relatively weak gov-sanctioned crypto that even botnets (which can be hired) can hack.

2) adding transparent military grade crypto (like pgp.com) is not cheap and not easy to set up (unless a virtual drive can be mapped, but don't expect that to work for every OS + backup-provider). Also, it is likely to work (unusably) slow, possibly resulting in looooong freezes of pieces of the transfer stack.

3) if i need my backups, i don't want to face the situation of a internet outage at the same time.
there are situations in which this can happen. while traveling for instance.
or just-after any large(ish)-scale real-world disaster.

4) i wonder (for the sake of noobs) if the backup-providers allow you to burn a CD that'll restore your operating system in case of failure on that level.

nah, for a loooong time to come, i'm sticking with double, big USB harddisks (1 for local storage, 1 for offsite biweekly/monthly backups), and a 32gb very sturdy fast flash drive for files in flux that require daily backing-up.

you know what? after all the development on user-friendly backup programs, that people buy to feel safe, and many of which i've tried for free, i have reached the conclusion that they are all too cumbersome to use.
simple drag-and-dropping of properly structured file-trees to seperated media, has worked much better for me.

i often use directory / file names like these :
20100221 0900 project name - change description

that allows for quicker dragging and dropping, and also establishes multiple-day backups, or labelled backups, which when sorted-by-name in any file browser, will result in easy-to-find backups.

you can ofcourse add hypens for readibility (2010-02-21 09-00), that's a tradeoff for you to make.
(i think it's lotsa extra typing and rsi generation)

I agree that getting files back from Carbonite is not the easiest or fastest thing you can do.

But, I really think that Carbonite provides a good service depending on the application.

For me, I use Carbonite to store an archive of photographs. Many of these photographs are not replaceable. Should something bad happen to my home, I don't have to worry about my photograph collection. It cost me many thousands of dollars and several years of my life to build my collection. Some photo collections, such as bands that have broke up or celebrities that have died, I just can't reshoot.

Yeah, it took several months to upload all my photos. It may take that much time to download them. But, at least the option exists.

It's not just Carbonite, but any offsite storage company. They provide a good service. That level of security is worth paying for. Who can get that kind of protection at home?

Well. To me, without taking my movies/dramas/animes into considerations, I don't need more than 75GB currently. For my three accounts in hotmail, there are still most of places left. I don't store my movies/dramas/animes online.

I'm very skeptical about online back up services. With the number of hackers out there today, I relly don't know that these companies can keep your personal data safe.

Personally, I use an external hard drive that I only connect to my computer when I am backing it up or retrieving a file. If my computer ever crashes or gets damaged, I have all the data stored and ready for either my computer redone with the recovery disks, a fresh install of Windows or my new computer, whatever the case may be.

After my husband's computer crashed about four years ago, the cost of repair and the fact that they could not retrieve the data from the hard drive and the fact he had not been backing his files up as he was supposed to, the inconvenience of lost data convinced me that I religiously need to back mine up on my external hard drive.

I also have a My Book where I store all of my video, music and photo files, in order to not clog my memory up with a lot of large files unnecessarily.

I purchased a new Dell Studio Hybrid a few years ago, and between the My Book and the other external hard drive, I don't have a lot of files that I keep on my computer. I simply copied all of my files from my old computer to the external hard drive, and as I need them, retrieve them. So it works out really well for me.

I would rather trust myself in safe storage than an on line back up service.

Don't trust them, and in the long run, it's cheaper to get a drive and sync on your own.

I backup my essential files to Windows Live SkyDrive. I save media files into external hard drive. As a regular hotmail user, I'm constantly look at Microsoft. If Microsoft has any intention to stop providing the service, I'm sure that we will be notified. Being one of the largest corporations on earth, if I can't rely on it then I can rely on nothing else. It's not that large corporation doesn't collapse. As time goes by, Microsft may even become a part of history. But now, relying on it may not be bad choice.