Thinking of getting a cloud service for an additional backup.

WarriorX

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Looking to help my backup solution by getting a cloud backup such as Amazon Cloud Drive. $60 a year seems awesome for unlimited storage. I don't have much storage data right now so this is more of a long term plan. Anybody here use ACD, what are your thoughts?

Also, what is the deal with unlimited google drive? Am I able to upgrade my google drive account, can't seem to find the option.

Any other cloud service I should also consider?
 
try back blaze they extremely inexpensive and getting to a "good enough" point in terms of service

(yeah, i know about days of outage but hell s3 was dead in the water twice this year alone !)

Looking to help my backup solution by getting a cloud backup such as Amazon Cloud Drive. $60 a year seems awesome for unlimited storage. I don't have much storage data right now so this is more of a long term plan. Anybody here use ACD, what are your thoughts?

Also, what is the deal with unlimited google drive? Am I able to upgrade my google drive account, can't seem to find the option.

Any other cloud service I should also consider?
 
Any reason I should look into back blaze vs amazon cloud drive?

Thanks for the suggestions so far.
 
I am curious to see if anyone is using amazon cloud drive too, and what they think of the service. I just read about it a couple of weeks ago, sounds like it could be a great option.
 
I have read that Crashplan will throttle you if you plan on uploading Terabytes and Terabytes of data.....so it would take months (although for many, their bandwidth cap would kick in as well). But Crashplan does allow you to save multiple computers to 1 computer for free and then save THAT computer up to Crashplan.
 
The other option is to look at how much you are going to pay for this service and how much space you need and just buy a USB drive that matches your needs and leave it at work or somewhere else in the house. No delay in downloads and it's as accessible as you want.

$60 a year will get you a 1-2TB USB pretty easily (1 time cost too) that you can copy over to every once in a while and leave unplugged when not needed.
 
$60 a year will get you a 1-2TB USB pretty easily (1 time cost too) that you can copy over to every once in a while and leave unplugged when not needed.

This is not adequate if you want to protect against disaster. Fire? Flood? Tornado? Theft?

Off-site backup. I've used BackBlaze and Crashplan both. Crashplan drove me nuts - stupid java app that consumed tons of memory to upload my backup set. BackBlaze was okay. I use Azure storage at the moment for anything important. No reason the Amazon solution shouldn't work, either.

Do you have any requirements? How much data? How expensive is too expensive? What's your upload bandwidth? Does the data churn?
 
Cloud isn't magic. Just an easy to remember marketing term for someone's data server farm accessible via the Internet. If the amount of data you need to regularly backup won't exceed either your upload speed and/or data cap, $60/year is pretty good for off site storage.

As others have said, a set of flash drives can serve as a low cost backup for the backup. Could be stored in a bank safety deposit box. The smallest size box would hold many TB of flash drives.

Wouldn't hurt to do both. Use the cloud for the normal backups. Use the bank vault/flash drives for archive monthlies. Use the vault for your OS restore media backup as well.

Depending on the data, might need to check legal requirements for off site out of your control storage.
 
Cloud for mass storage isn't practical unless you have extremely quick upload speeds. If you are uploading at say 5 Mbps, it will take ~20 days per TB just to upload your data.
 
As Gronnie says, it's the initial sync that does you. Takes a long time, I know from bitter experience what can happen in that time. If you want to pay $300 Amazon will ship you a device to upload data when you have a LOT but you know whether you need that. Downside of amazons scale option is the cost of restore, holy shit balls.

If you use Crashplan you can sync to a friends pc as well as their storage. Means you can get the initial copy done at their house if that's practical. Unless you have a high rate of change that's probably enough risk mitigation for most people as it will sync eventually it'll just take a long time.

What I would say though is think about what you need to save, for me it's photos and unfortunately my camera does 80mb raws but that's pretty exceptional.

For me documents and other stuff is only 120gb and realistically I care about 10gb of that. Losing my MP3s and videos would suck but is solveable (and a mate will definitely take a copy of those)

Steam etc I don't care, my profile with my save games is about 10gb, that gets thrown up. Otherwise I'm just a lot more structured in how I manage my data, so storing code rather than vm's, having a document structure that saves final versions seperate from drafts etc etc

Another option is a fireproof safe, which if you've moved out I recommend everyone have anyway (losing your birth certificates, car ownership forms or worse house deeds is a f'ing nightmare) it's only going to give you a bit more protection but most incidents will be fine. If you get a super hot, super long fire, it's fucked but it always would have been. Diminishing likelihoods and all that.
 
You should accept the fire as a cleansing process.

Then you can invent yourself, new name, new family, new music.

Backups are not required in life :D
 
I use Crashplan. The software hasn't caused any problems for me so far. The local backup works better than Windows backup for me (and is easier / more customizable). As I have no family and friends (I'm a hermit) cloud backup is good for antisocial me. Also, if I am away from home with just my cheap laptop I can download files from the cloud that would ordinarily be unobtainable on my switched off computer at home.
 
I am curious to see if anyone is using amazon cloud drive too, and what they think of the service. I just read about it a couple of weeks ago, sounds like it could be a great option.


I use Amazon cloud drive. I have about 16TB up there and they do not slow the transfers down either. Great service.
 
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