muditha

Hi,

I want to back up my files, photos etc in my computer and thought of online storing them. Can anybody who is online storing data suggest a good service provider for online data backups ?

Thanks.

Muditha

h2oskineil

Dropbox....
use it everyday and cannot fault it. access my files from any pc, or app on my phone.
put any file in your Dropbox folder on you pc and it appears on 'the cloud'.

www.dropbox.com

hoofie2002

Google drive

Red_V_Roger

Started using Google Drive, you would need to pay though for large storage capacity.

fish.01

Hi muditha,

Been looking at the same thing myself recently. I have a Mac so if you're on a Windows PC not all my software suggestions may be useful but the concepts behind them might be as there may be Windows equivalents.

One I've been looking at is Arc which manages backup to Amazon S3 buckets.

The good thing about Arq is that you just pay once-off for the software that manages the backup and then use your own Amazon AWS account to store the data. That way you only pay Amazon's normal fees rather than the markup that most cloud backup providers put on top. Drop box is stored in Amazon for example.

It also means you get to take full advantage of the Amazon AWS free tier that all new Amazon AWS accounts get.

Another intersting backup option I've been looking at is Crashplan and it supports Mac OS X and Windows.

It offers multiple backup options. It supports online but interestingly it also supports backing up to a friends/family members computer as well. It's free if just doing that. You seed your backup by physically taking an external drive to your friends house and then it continues to incrementally backup from that point over the internet.

I can understand you asking as there are so many cloud backup providers out there now it is hard to know which is reliable. The biggest issue is seeding the backup (ie the initial copy of all your data) as this could max out your monthly upload limit. Good to find one that allows you to throttle/cap uploads.

Amazon is opening an AWS region in Australia this month so backups to Amazon will have even less latency than the current Singapore option.

roaringmouse

Skydrive

Pom_Chch

I used a-drive when travelling. Stored all of my travel pictures on there and they give you 50GB free storage when you sign up : www.adrive.com. Never had any problems, easy to use etc...

muditha

Thanks everybody

PunkDebutante

We use Carbonite.

GarryP

Thing to consider is volume vs time.

At an upload rate of 1Mbit (typical maximum ADSL2+), it would 12 hours to fill a free Google Drive. If you are looking at backing up large amounts of files, say 100GB, that would mean 10 days, minimum.

You are much better off backing up to an external drive, then giving that drive to a relative for safe keeping (off-site backup). Connect it up properly and you can use something like Crashplan for keeping that backup current.

Online services are only really practical for small amounts of data backup, and if you are doing small amounts, just use something like Google Drive for free (remember to encrypt though). Best bet is to have a home NAS that you can backup to, and have that NAS run a remote sync pair (such as Crashplan) with a relative that has a similar setup. Then your files are on your PC, on your local NAS, and on your remote relative's NAS. If you lose it after that, someone is trying to tell you something.

furbacchione

Google needs a geek translator. I'm betting you lost her at "upload rate of 1Mbit" and I'm sure you lost her at "Best bet is to have a home NAS

GarryP

Hey, if you aren't paying, you have to do some of the work yourself; like understanding what your ADSL connection is, what upload rate is, what a Mbit is, what crashplan is, and what a NAS is.

Free means quick and dirty, which means I don't write a glossary - google it.

Or if you want a real idiot friendly response - don't get seduced by talk of online backup; it's f***ing slow.

old.sparkles

And most of the blokes too

fish.01

One of the big differences in cloud backup is whether it is just a sync service where you have to drag the files you want to backup into a separate folder (eg dropbox) or whether it is a proper backup solution that backs up your files in-situ, supports seeding your backup with an external drive etc.

RedDragon2008

At what point of storage space do you start paying?

And how much for say 1 TB?

or say 500GB to 1TB?

Being lazy but compared with say DropBox, Google,