Does anyoe here use a Online backup service

[hoffy]

Howdy,

I am doing a bit of research for a presentation on archiving and backing up. I would like to touch on most backup options, including online backup services.

Does anyone here use one? Are you happy with it? Does it gobble up your bandwidth and any down/upload limits that you have? Do you have any feedback?

Any information would be greatly appreciated!

[Kym]

We are looking into secure commercial cloud computing options for document management at work.
The more we get into it, the less simple it gets.

Personally I just dump everything to a external hard drive that lives in a drawer at work, about once a month

http://www.onlinebackupreviews.com/

[kiwi]

www.backblaze.com

Has saved my bacon twice now.

[flash]

yep external hard drive for me as well but I do use (unintentionally) an online service provided by Norton 360, it nicks my piccys and puts them in the "ether" somewhere and I know not where!, I also use "picasa web gallery" but I dont think that is what you are asking about!

[shanebaker]

Hi

I use *edited* as well as multiple ext hard drives and a drobo. After five months I have managed to back up about 200Gb of 500Gb of images to the cloud. Bandwidth in Australia is definitely an issue especially upload speeds.

Cheers

Shane

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[Spyke]

Bandwidth limitations and relatively slow upload speeds, compared to download, mean I backup to external drives only.

[clickclick]

Sorry i cant offer any info but found this interesting. Online backup sounds like a great idea... will just have to wait for the quicker upload speeds by the sounds of it. I use an external HD too but would really like to have a 3rd option. Especially if you could view it & upload wherever you are.. say when your travelling.

[joele]

I use multiple external HDDs, one 2.5" which I use to backup onto and a bigger 3.5" that I leave offsite to sync to every so often..

I use http://allwaysync.com/ to keep the drives in sync, great value app..

I did try online backup but for photos (large RAW files) I just found it too painful..

[ameerat42]

I don't use it as any sort of serious backup, but I have a Skydrive account. It takes ages to upload almost anything - which seems to be common with such "services". I use it to post large images for the forum, like in this post...
http://www.ausphotography.net.au/forum/showthread.php?t=63215
But it's external HDD for serious backup. Am.

[ving]

just an external HDD :)

[Art Vandelay]

I couldn't 100% trust any online back up system to be there when you needed it.

crikey, with spare drives are so cheap and you having total control over it, why trust someone else ?

[hoffy]

I couldn't 100% trust any online back up system to be there when you needed it.

crikey, with spare drives are so cheap and you having total control over it, why trust someone else ?

While I do agree that online backups should not be your only backup source, but it does have its place. Look at it this way, you backup securely online. They then will also back the data, in the same way that any corporation would backup the data. This gives a bit of a double whammy.

[fastr1red]

I was the system admin / developer for an online backup service for many years. All our clients were corporate, generally sales reps, that travelled around the country with their laptops. If anything ever happened, laptop crashed, stolen etc, they would simply purchase another laptop and log onto the server. ALL their data would be available from anywhere in the world.
That was the main reason for this style of service. It's not designed to backup all the images (although it does) just for safekeeping/archiving. It's designed to backup your email, your data and client files etc, probably around 2-3GB on average.
We did have a few around the 20GB capacity and that wasn't a problem at all, just if they needed a full recovery it would take ages or I would just create CD's for them. All autoboot as well.

[clickclick]

Gee fastr1red that backup system sounds awesome. My mate just lost a lot of data a short while ago and its terrible to see his pics, music, everything gone. Scary. So ive been doing the ext HD but the sync'ing of the drives i did not even think about! So thanks joele & darksome, i will check those programs out and will make my backups easier im sure!

[stevo01]

I use an external RAID network storage solution (i.e. it has dual drives that get mirrored automatically so if one dies the other one has a copy also) but also backup offsite using Jungle Disk (http://www.jungledisk.com). I would highly recommend Jungle Disk, it is fairly cheap and easy to setup. You can select whatever files or directories you want to be backed up, and the backup can be scheduled to regularly run automatically (i.e. overnight) or you can just run manually if you want. It gives you peace of mind that if everything goes pear shaped then you can always get your photos back from "the cloud". Sure it would take a while to download them all if you ever needed to (and would quickly use up your download quota with your ISP) but that would only be your last resort and is obviously better than having no offsite backup at all.

Keep in mind that depending on your internet connection with your ISP uploads can be slowish (I have an Annex M ADSL2+ connection so I get slightly faster upload speeds than normal which helps) and if your ISP counts uploads and downloads (mine counts downloads only) against your monthly quota then that could also be a problem (could use up your quota rather quickly!). Scheduling the backup software to do it's stuff during an offpeak time (i.e. early morning) may help here, especially if your ISP has an onpeak/offpeak split for quota.

[Anne Sh]

I am really interested it people's views have changed since these posts. I am starting to think that it may be an option but i am still a bit hesitant.

[ricktas]

I am really interested it people's views have changed since these posts. I am starting to think that it may be an option but i am still a bit hesitant.

not until we get better internet speeds will i consider it. Uploading several GB of RAW files can take ages forever a long time. If we got decent upload speeds it may be worth my while. but for now i can store for free (cost of hdd) only..at home.

[stoogest]

I'm seriously thinking about going with Crashplan as an online backup solution. We recently got NBN hooked up which means upload speeds are much more practical than previously. At $6 per month it isn't going to break the bank and it will give me a whole lot of peace of mind.

As a side note, I already backup to a second hard drive reasonably regularly and I have been backing up to DVD annually, but with the increased file sizes now it's just becoming unmanageable (and I refuse to delete more photos than I already am! :) )

Cheers!
Andrew.

[davidd]

I have been considering cloud storage, but due to the slow upload speeds, have decided it is not practical, it would take weeks to backup all my photos etc. Plus I always feel better knowing I have done something myself, so I would rather have it all under my control. :action:

My latest plan is: I have a 2-drive case that I have installed 2 2Tb drives in RAID 1 (ie mirrored), meaning I have 2 Tb of storage, but two identical copies of everything as backup. This takes care of hardware failure.

To take care of the disaster scenario (ie house burns down, someone steals all my gear etc) I have another 1Tb drive in a small case that I will store off-site (at work) and take it home to update once a month or so. If I ever get to the stage where 1Tb is not enough, I will upgrade this drive, but it should be OK for a few years.