I would like to backup my data to a cloud based service. Mainly photos and video, I'll need about half a TB currently. Can you recommend any reasonably priced services?
I'll check with them, I already have data backed up twice but only locally.
Yes, if you are doing 20GB a day, then some quick maths shows 65 days to complete the upload.
Lots of companies will allow you to send them hard drives for the initial uploads as they can take so long.
Once uploaded, you are then only submitting the deltas to what you have in the store. I have never used this company, do they offer any suggestions for getting the data up there quicker? It might also be worth doing a backup to a USB or firewire external drive to be super safe, as waiting 2 and half months to get your data backed up, leaves a lot of room for a failure.
The day I posted this (12 days ago now) I opened a free trial account with Backblaze and their installed service has been backing up my machine ever since, non stop for 12 days on a 6mb upload connection. It hasn't finished yet, but it does appear to be working, I have yet to try and restore anything.
So it looks like it's done 290GB and has 1397BG still to do. It's doing around 20GB a day which will mean it should finish around the end of August. Have I got that right?!
I was wondering about Carbonite too. Always-there automatic incremental backup of whatever you decide to save, accessible from anywhere.
As for Flickr, I have lots of photos there but I have pretty much abandoned it since The Changes of 20th May. It does indeed offer 1tb now for free accounts, but really only photos and videos, and retrieving them is going to be a pain in the backside if ever you need to. So not really useful for backup, better with a purpose-designed utility.
One comment I would make about all data that is stored in the cloud, and I follow this rigorously . is to make sure that anything that is sensitive to you, or indeed to someone nefarious , is that you encrypt it.
I use Truecrypt - which is free and open source - though I recommend donating to the cause.
I have come across another option for OSX and WIndows users called Carbonite. This offers unlimited backup in Amazon S3 for only $59 per annum , for one machine. You data is accessible from mobile applications as well. That seems like a very good deal to me.
If you use Linux , you already have a very good built in backup tool called Deja Dup , which will also use Amazon S3, but it will cost you more than the above I suspect, depending on how much you wish to store.
SInce hard drives are so cheap :
http://gizmodo.com/5995229/set-up-your-own-personal-storage-cloud-with-bit-torrent-sync
Thanks Nick, I'll have a look
Why would anybody spend 500 bucks for a measly 500GB of online storage? That's mad.
I pay around than annually that for my webserver in the UK and get more space than that.
And as is often the case (because it requires software installed onto your system in order to operate) it's not compatible with Linux !
This use of proprietary software would also mean that you'd not be able to access your own data from another computer by way of FTP.
You could use a vpn service for the setup process, whether it would continue to work after I don't know!
Thanks Stuart, I'm installing their software now.
The big plus for off-site backup has always been in case of disaster such as fire or flood. With the very high capacity of modern USB-connected 2.5" drives, you can easily take all your data with you when travelling. These also provide super cheap & effective local backup, but can be destroyed by a fire or a flood at home & just might suffer a catastrophic failure at the wrong moment. ("Murphy's" Law)
The occasional full-scale external backup to a Cloud provider does add a sort of insurance cover against this. After all, you insure your house & contents against fire, so why not go the extra bit & be sure your data is safe. {Seems as if I've talked myself into entering the 21st century, so I'd better go and do it!]
Thanks for that but it wont let me sign up from Angola - Dumb question - I wonder if I signed up next time I am in France whether I could then access from Angola ??
It's a Google Nexus 4 - you can buy them direct from the Google play site, and they are very cheap indeed compared to the competition. They are fantastic phones, and to be honest , in almost all scenarios now it has replaced my iPad for on the move utils and connectivity.
Cheers
Nick
Can I ask why store on the internet when high capacity discs are so cheap these days.
I have all my stuff on my laptop, one other laptop and an external drive.
OVH offers archive for 0,01 €/GB/month. 500 GB would be 5€/month. Billing is according to actual usage.
www.ovh.com/fr/cloud/archives/
Flickr now provides 1 TB for free.
Not officially, but I did hear/read of a 'hack' somewhere in which you can amalgamate other files into a .gif format which they would then accept the files. How long that hack would last though is another question.
Flickr (www.flickr.com) offers 1 TB for free. I don't know if it works for non-photo/video files though.