Backing up to the Cloud

[TromboneAl]

I've figured out a few things about backing up to the cloud, and here they are.

I use cloud backups as an additional offsite backup. Having had our house burn once, I know the advantage of keeping some backups off site.

1. GoogleDrive gives you 15 Gigs of free storage, but that is shared with your gmail account. I have 8 gigs of old emails, so adding a 6 gig backup almost fills up the storage.

2. Its easy to get 100 gigs of OneDrive space for free. OneDrive normally syncs files back and forth between your offline and harddrive storage, and, for me, hogs bandwidth. But if you go to onedrive.com and upload a backup file, it will be available online only, and won't try to sync. I'm still testing this out.

3. Box.com gives you 10 Gigs of storage for free.

 

[2017ish]

I don't trust myself to backup every day, so I've been using mozy for a long time. Have to pay at the level of data we keep, but once set, the automatic twice daily is comforting. (luckily, only had to use it once so far....)

Ah, found it: $209.79 for a biennial subscription to MozyHome 125 GB, which covers our two computers.

 

[fidler4]

I use Carbonite. I cant remember what I paid but I did the 3yr deal. Plus I have a home NAS I use as a local backup. I am mostly concerned with my photos/videos.


Sent from my iPad using Early Retirement Forum

 

[Likes_to_Lurk]

Backup

I use CrashPlan for cloud backup. It's about $60/yr. The cost is well worth it for the peace of mind. It's automatic, unlimited storage and encrypted. I also use a removable hard drive once a week with Windows file history.

Both allow me to specify versions to keep and handle deleted files the way I would like.

 

[marko]

Google Drive. Everything as I use Chromebook almost exclusively.

 

[audreyh1]

We don't do it.

We have our own drives.

 

[nuisance]

+1 for Crashplan. I really like that the same software will back up to the 2nd hard drive on my desktop PC as well as to the cloud.
I don't trust cloud services that I don't pay for. How are they making money?

 

[ggbutcher]

I just acquired a cheap Windows tablet, so I tried OneDrive to share a particular directory around my machines. Not there yet...

My Own Cloud is a 8GB thumb drive...

 

[JustCurious]

Google Drive. Everything as I use Chromebook almost exclusively.

+1 Same here. There's no need for a backup when everything is stored in the cloud.

 

[growerVon]

My team had to take a hotfix when they changed from SkyDrive to OneDrive... rigid IA/nav code, good times.

Despite the name change, I'm a big OneDrive fanboi. Just got up to 120gb space via a recent promo.

I have all my music up there and am listening to Ravi Shankar right now, streamed to this surf pro 3, piped to a Bluetooth speaker so DS and I have the earthy, exotic sound while we read & forum about.

 

[walkinwood]

I use CrashPlan for cloud backup. It's about $60/yr. The cost is well worth it for the peace of mind. It's automatic, unlimited storage and encrypted. I also use a removable hard drive once a week with Windows file history.

Both allow me to specify versions to keep and handle deleted files the way I would like.

+1. It works.

And if you have a friend you trust, you can use his/her computer as your offsite backup and not pay anything.

 

[martyp]

I started using Google drive recently. I also have a 1 Tbyte drive at home that I backup to. I don't need to update my additional backups all the time. I don't accumulate all that much information very quickly. I do it when I feel like it.

 

[growerVon]

One other thing when backing up to the cloud: be sure to turn off the engine once you're there; keeps bad gas out of the clouds..

 

[bUU]

I use Carbonite.

As do we. It's secure, easy to use, and we trust it more than anything that requires any manual work on our part.

 

[Rich]

I use both Carbonite and DropBox (it's a long story...). I like both, for different reasons. The DropBox is a manual back-up, in other words, you treat it as if it were just another drive.

The advantage of the cloud is, your data is off site, and not susceptible to a virus or other malicious cyber attack. For example, there is this nutty attack where the bad guys hold your data for ransom. If you back up to the cloud you're safe.

Rich

 

[catotx]

For pictures and videos, I use Amazon Glacier.

For data files, I use OneDrive (in conjunction with Boxcryptor which encrypts the contents and filenames).

 

[misanman]

We use Dropbox extensively, more for universal access and sharing than cloud backup, but some data is backed up there. We backup to a in-home NAS with mirrored drives and then store a copy in a bank vault twice a year. We use volume backups (Acronis) as well as file backups (SmartSync). Volume backups allow for quick restores of the entire system while the file backups with versioning allows a lot of flexibility for restoring individual files.

 

[photoguy]

Anybody using one of these online backup systems with a few TB of data?

For pictures and videos, I use Amazon Glacier.

What drove you to Glacier? was it pricing or something else?

 

[wrl11]

I use Cabonite as well. Works good, unlimited backup storage, but the more you take the slower the backup gets. I think it was about $70 per year.