Smugvault vs.

cmason · October 8, 2009

I am planning to upgrade my offsite storage, to a 'cloud' based solution. Today, my offsite storage involves a 'traveling hard drive' that I use periodically at home, then store at my office.

I have been examining other options, and settled on two: SmugVault (basically same as S3/Jungledisk), or Mozy. I would go with Mozy over say, Carbonite, because Mozy can also backup external drives, as long as they are on and attached at backup time (mounted in Mac speak).

I have run the math, and the difference is huge, big enough to make me think I did something very wrong, or at least wonder who SmugVault is really for, because, it doesn't seem like it is for me.

Details:

I have 150GB of photos that must be backed up, and for the purposes of this calculation, I will assume that I am adding 4GB per month to that total. (some months are more, some are less in reality). I will assume that I won't be downloading from the cloud, unless catastrophe hits.

SmugVault costs are as follows:

Storage costs 22 cents per gigabyte per month.
There is a $1/month recurring charge.
Data transfer in is 30 cents per gigabyte. Data transfer out is 51 cents per gigabyte.

So for me, my figures are:
A monthly storage cost @ $0.22 per GB: $33, which works out to yearly storage cost = $396. But I am adding 4GB per monthly, so that would represent an extra storage cost per year: $75.68.

Moving my initial 150GB data 'blob' would cost $45 initially, with the 4GB per month costing $1.20 per month or $14.40 per year.

So using SmugVault, my yearly cost of backing up my photos would be:
$396+$75.68+ $14.40+$45+$12= $542.08, and $480.08 in subsequent years, since the initial upload is a one-time event.

To put this in perspective, I just purchased 2x Western Digital My Book Studio 500GB for $65ea via WD's refurbished site. For the cost of SmugVault, I can buy 8 of these hard drives a year, or 4TB of hard drive space every year. Of course, that does not buy me offsite storage, which is what I really need. I could simply make more backups and store them in my office, as I do now.

My other option is Mozy, which I use now, but more casually. Mozy costs $55 a year, no transfer fees, no storage fees, and no limits. The math here is a no-brainer.

So, unless I have really balled up the math, its $542.08 a year (and $480.08 per year in subsequent years) vs $55 a year. With math alone, I just don't get who SmugVault is for? Clearly anyone with a sizable collection and moderate monthly shooting can't be who this is for…maybe its for the casual photographer who has only a few dear images that are needed?

Maybe I need to only backup my 'best' work in the cloud, and leave the rest of my just average images to their fate? My issue with this strategy is that I have often gone back and rescued images for other purposes, and would hate to lose anything.

What do you think? Does SmugVault seem awfully expensive? Does anyone use it and find it is not as expensive as this?

Thanks

Pupator · October 8, 2009

Did the same math as you a couple of weeks ago and came up with the same numbers. Smugvalut groups your images together and does a few other "nice" things feature-wise. I couldn't justify it.

With a coupon I found using Google I got 2 years of Mozy Home for $88. I've got 95GB of images to upload (it'll take forever) but once this initial torture is over I'll have saved a boatload over Smugvault.

Art Scott · October 8, 2009

Smugvault Is Just Too Expensive.........
somewhere on here on the forum is a lot of folks remarks about SV being TOO expensive.....I threw a complaint out as soon as it was announced and at the time my Seagates were costing over $150/drive and with 2 or 3 years cost of SV, I would be better off with a BROWNING 20 GUN GUN SAFE and putting it in my basement, which would be the coolest in case of fire and the safest in case of tornado and as long as the flood waters did not get up to it's door {18" off floor}, everything would be safe.......then Mozy and Carbonite came along and now They seem to be a much better solution.

Dan7312 · October 9, 2009

There is a difference between what Mozy and most other "backup" services do, and SmugVault do. SmugVault is an archive... if you push something up to SmugVault it just stays there until you delete it.

Things may have changed at Mozy but the last time I tried it, it didn't really backup USB drives the way I wanted it to.

Mozy maintains a copy of things on your harddrives.... if you delete it from a hard drive it gets marked as deleted on Mozy and in 30 days disappears on Mozy. Mozy will backup a USB drive, but if you run a backup or Mozy does it automatically runs and the USB isn't plugged when you do, Mozy will mark all those files as deleted and you will have to upload them again. This caught me big time when I first tried Mozy a couple of years ago.

Actually I found that if you remove the USB drive and later plug it back in, but it appears with a different drive letter Mozy will think it is a new drive and think the old one is gone and upload it all over again as a brand new drive.

You might want to check BlazeBack.com too. I think it does a better job of handling USB drives, though you still cannot move them between machines without having to back them up all over again.

In any case check closely with Mozy or Blazeback and make sure it is going to backup your USB drives the way you expect them to.

cmason · October 9, 2009

Thanks Dan. I have considered this, and one of the reasons I have done the above calculations is that my new firewire drives automatically sleep with my Mac, so that now I do not have to remember to turn them on and off: they are always connected.

I had not considered Backblaze because they did not have a Mac client, but I see now that they do.

I also checked the Backblaze documentation, and their behavior on external drives is identical to Mozy's: if your drive is not connected at time of scan, the files at Mozy (or Backblaze) are marked for deletion. They are not actually deleted for 30 days, so if your drive is scanned anytime in those 30 days, the deletion marks will be removed. Since my drives are always connected, I am not too concerned with this.

from Mozy docs:

Important: If you have selected files from an external drive to be part of your regular backup and you unplug or turn off the drive while your backup is running, MozyHome detects that the files are gone and assumes that you no longer need them. Those files are then marked for deletion. After 30 days, the files are deleted from our servers and you are no longer able to get them back. However, if you reconnect the drive and run a back up, Mozy identifies the files, cancels the deletions and saves them in your backup set. Only files that have changed need to be backed up again.

from Backblaze docs:

Backblaze works best if you leave the external hard drive attached to your computer all the time. However, Backblaze will backup external USB and Firewire hard drives that are detached and re-attached as long as you remember to re-attach the hard drive at least once every 30 days. If the drive is detached for more than 30 days, Backblaze interprets this as data that has been permanently deleted and securely deletes the copy from the Backblaze datacenter. The 30 day countdown is only for drives that have been unplugged. There is no countdown for local files.

By the way, you can easily control which drive letter Windows assigns to a USB drive, so that it is always "F:" or whatever. Click Start, then right click on My Computer, choose "Manage" from the popup menu. Find "Disk Management" in the left hand tree, and then you can right-click on your USB drive and assign a permanent drive letter. This way, your backups on Backblaze will never get confused by your USB drive. (Mac users don't have this problem)

Dan7312 · October 9, 2009

It's good to hear that Mozy has updated their USB support... it rebacked up the entire drive for me when I tried that

: , but that was well over a year ago. Thanks for the updated info.

I'd still recommend doing a "smoke test" of this when you first start using the service.

Andy · October 9, 2009

cmason wrote:

I had not considered Backblaze because they did not have a Mac client, but I see now that they do.

I've been using Backblaze for a long, long time on my Mac systems. Love it.

Dan7312 · October 9, 2009

Also I don't think the sticky drive letter thing is needed for Backblaze. Backblaze puts a small config file onto every drive it backs up, so it can id the drive and a number of other things. In fact Backback is capable of backing up a USB drive properly, i.e. only backing up things that have changed, even if you move it to another machine, but BB disables that capability because they are worried people would sign up for just a single machine but use it to backup data from many machines.

BTW I've found it easiser to get real "tech" info from BlazeBack than from Mozy. Don't get me wrong Mozy support for the backup issues is good, but if you want the tech details I've found it takes more work to get it from Mozy.

Backup is all about process so for me I have to know the details of what's going on... oh wait I need to know all the details anyhow

Zanotti · October 9, 2009

www.jungledisk.com/

I believe this is the background server for Smugvault.

Is it also cheaper?

Why is my font green? I dont know!

Z

Dan7312 · October 9, 2009

I think both SmugVault and Jungledisk use Amazon simple storage to store files, as do some photo sharing sites. http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

Zanotti wrote:

www.jungledisk.com/

I believe this is the background server for Smugvault.

Is it also cheaper?

Why is my font green? I dont know!

Z

Art Scott · October 9, 2009

Andy wrote:

I've been using Backblaze for a long, long time on my Mac systems. Love it.

Some how I thought you were a tried and true user of SMUGVault????

Andy · October 9, 2009

Art Scott wrote:

Some how I thought you were a tried and true user of SMUGVault????

Of course, I use both. But Backblaze is for EVERYthing. SmugVault is for stuff I want to entangle with my display copies.

cmason · October 9, 2009

Dan7312 wrote:

I think both SmugVault and Jungledisk use Amazon simple storage to store files, as do some photo sharing sites. http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

OK haven't looked at JungleDisk in a long time, but here is how my numbers work out for JungleDisk:

Amazon S3:

.15 per month per GB storage
.10 per GB upload
$2 per month fee

That works out to:
Initial storage $270 per year for my 150GB
Initial upload: $14
Additional uploads and storage: $47.92
Fees: $24
Total: $355.92 vs $480 for SmugVault

JungleDisk also now offers a Rackspace plan, which is better still:
$0.15 per month per GB storage
no upload or download fees

so my costs here would be $270+$4.80= $274.80

So JungleDisk is far more affordable than SmugVault, but still doesn't compare to the all you can eat offerings from Mozy/Backblaze/Carbonite.

cmason · October 9, 2009

Andy wrote:

Of course, I use both. But Backblaze is for EVERYthing. SmugVault is for stuff I want to entangle with my display copies.

Andy, not sure what you mean 'entangle with my display copies'? Perhaps I am missing the point of SmugVault and there is some very cool use cases with key images where this makes a hell of alot of sense, but does not as a library archive? (where Mozy/Backblaze fit in).

BradfordBenn · October 9, 2009

Just thinking out loud/typing, and I have not done the full thought process yet, but a FatCow plan for $66 a year has unlimited storage http://www.fatcow.com/fatcow/hosting.bml Would that not be the most cost effective solution, yes one would have to do some FTP transfers but hey it could be easy. I am sure that there are other hosts as well, it is just one that I know.

Pupator · October 9, 2009

BradfordBenn wrote:

Just thinking out loud/typing, and I have not done the full thought process yet, but a FatCow plan for $66 a year has unlimited storage http://www.fatcow.com/fatcow/hosting.bml Would that not be the most cost effective solution, yes one would have to do some FTP transfers but hey it could be easy. I am sure that there are other hosts as well, it is just one that I know.

I got Mozy Home (which is unlimited) for $44/year.

denisegoldberg · October 10, 2009

cmason wrote:

So JungleDisk is far more affordable than SmugVault, but still doesn't compare to the all you can eat offerings from Mozy/Backblaze/Carbonite.

I'm glad you started this thread. I have been using Jungle Disk and S3 for over two years now. I was getting pulled in by the price and recommendations for Backblaze, and I was about to switch when I saw that if a drive isn't connected for 30 days that the files will be deleted. Looks like Mozy is the same from that standpoint.

As Dan mentioned above, Jungle Disk/S3 and SmugVault/S3 are both archive solutions, not just backups. I have a good chunk of my files on an external drive, and while that is usually plugged in to my computer... For now I think I'm going to stick with my more expensive Jungle Disk/S3 solution.

Your post and the discussion opened my eyes, so thanks!

--- Denise

Dan7312 · October 10, 2009

Just for completeness I did a quick look at what the underlying cost to implement this sort of thing using Microsofts Azure platform (http://www.microsoft.com/azure). Looks about the same as using S3.

So it looks like backup (where you have to keep the files on your computer) is always quite a bit cheaper than pure offline storage. But you probably want your files to always be in two different places anyhow.

The thing that seems useful about SmugVault is that is allows you to keep track of what raw and other files were used to make a particular jpg.

Both Amazon and Azure make it possible to build a web based application that could manage this relationship for you. Both have clould based databases that could relate a jpeg to the xmp/psd/xml/raw used to make it leave those actual files in inexpensive offline backup. The actual amount of data you would store on Amazon/Azure to do this would be small and so, therefore, would the costs.

So you could go the a jpeg in a album, get back all the stuff you used to make it, or that you considered related to it.

Just a thought... when I have a bit more time to think about it I'll post a new thread that tries to explain it more clearly and let everyone shoot it down.

In the grand scheme of things though it doesn't seem all that hard to do.

cmason wrote:

OK haven't looked at JungleDisk in a long time, but here is how my numbers work out for JungleDisk:

Amazon S3:

.15 per month per GB storage
.10 per GB upload
$2 per month fee

That works out to:
Initial storage $270 per year for my 150GB
Initial upload: $14
Additional uploads and storage: $47.92
Fees: $24
Total: $355.92 vs $480 for SmugVault

JungleDisk also now offers a Rackspace plan, which is better still:
$0.15 per month per GB storage
no upload or download fees

so my costs here would be $270+$4.80= $274.80

So JungleDisk is far more affordable than SmugVault, but still doesn't compare to the all you can eat offerings from Mozy/Backblaze/Carbonite.

timk519 · October 10, 2009

I wonder if it would be cost effective to get a network storage box, put it in a friends (remote) house, and then have something FTP the updates to it periodically, and they could do the same to a network storage box on your site.

It certainly sounds a lot cheaper once it was up and running.

CatOne · October 10, 2009

Crash Plan has the best prices really... unlimited storage for all your machines for $180 for 3 years. I have ~500 GB up there. Took a while, but it's _very_ low overhead and it's worked very well for me so far.

You can also back up to multiple destinations with the same service... I back up to a NAS on my local network and then to their site in Minnesota really for DR purposes only.

Anything that uses S3 is really too expensive... Uploading 500 GB and then storing it there will cost you, what, $1000 for the first year? Compared to $60/year for unlimited from many computers for Crash Plan, it's really not a contest.

gecko0 · October 10, 2009

cmason wrote:

OK haven't looked at JungleDisk in a long time, but here is how my numbers work out for JungleDisk:

Amazon S3:

.15 per month per GB storage
.10 per GB upload
$2 per month fee

That works out to:
Initial storage $270 per year for my 150GB
Initial upload: $14
Additional uploads and storage: $47.92
Fees: $24
Total: $355.92 vs $480 for SmugVault

JungleDisk also now offers a Rackspace plan, which is better still:
$0.15 per month per GB storage
no upload or download fees

so my costs here would be $270+$4.80= $274.80

So JungleDisk is far more affordable than SmugVault, but still doesn't compare to the all you can eat offerings from Mozy/Backblaze/Carbonite.

after reading through this thread, i was going to mention jungledisk w/ the rackspace option too...that saves you the additional up/down costs. i've been using jungledisk/S3 for personal data (no photos...really only ~2GB total) for years. works great.

Dan7312 · October 10, 2009

It took a while to rummage through the crash plan online docs, but it looks like it handles external drives differently than Mozy or Backblaze do. When an external drive is not connected it does not think the file have been deleted like Mozy and Backblaze do and drop their content after 30 days.

When an external drive is not there, it just notes that they are not connected and the next time that they are is syncs up with them. The only thing you loose is the multiple versions of files that might have been created while the drive was somewhere else.

If that's the case this really is a better solution (IMHO of course) than Mozy or Backblaze.

There is one gotcha, though I don't think it's a big deal, if you delete a file from a drive it will be deleted on Crash Plan... at least I think that is how it works.

I think that this deserves a much closer look.

Thanks for the pointer to it

.

CatOne wrote:

Crash Plan has the best prices really... unlimited storage for all your machines for $180 for 3 years. I have ~500 GB up there. Took a while, but it's _very_ low overhead and it's worked very well for me so far.

You can also back up to multiple destinations with the same service... I back up to a NAS on my local network and then to their site in Minnesota really for DR purposes only.

Anything that uses S3 is really too expensive... Uploading 500 GB and then storing it there will cost you, what, $1000 for the first year? Compared to $60/year for unlimited from many computers for Crash Plan, it's really not a contest.

Dan7312 · October 12, 2009

I've been looking at both CrashPlan and Blazeback for offsite backup and have decided to go forward with Backblaze. I thought I would write down my reasoning for this in case it helps someone else.

CrashPlan looks to be a better solution technically but it is also more complicated and would be, at least for me, quite a bit more expensive.

Backblaze is a pure backup system... if you delete a file from your drive or leave an external drive unplugged for to long, Backblaze will remove it from its servers. Backblaze does, however, keep all versions of a file for a month..

CrashPlan is what I have been calling an archive system, it never deletes anything from its server unless you ask it to... even if you delete a file on your drive or leave an external drive unplugged for months.

CrashPlan seems a bit more sophisticated than Backblaze in that it can make use of a Windows feature called VSS. This allows CrashPlan to backup databases and things like Exchange Server. Backblaze just works with plain files.

CrashPlan exists in many different forms, but what I wanted was continuous (every couple of hours anyhow) backup to CrashPlans' servers and I didn't want an advertising based service. This requires a $60 copy of CrashPlan+ on each machine and annual updates.

I did run into what appeared to be gotcha' on both Backblaze and CrashPlan that was later cleared up. Both excluded "commercial use" in terms of their service. Backblaze did not define what this meant but CrashPlan was quite specific, you cannot use it service to backup any files associated with a business... you can see that on its web page:

So I checked with both for some clarification. The CTO of Blazeback (seems a lot like SmugMug in terms of accessibility

) got back to me and said that the "commercial use" term must have been snuck in by one of their lawyers and it confused even him. He said that absolutely small businesses and professional photographers can use their service and in fact 20% of their business comes from small businesses.

CrashPlan also got back to me and said the "commercial use" term meant what it seems to and that their service could not be used by any kind file associated with a business. However in the near future they will have a plan that can be used by small businesses like me and until then they would make an exception for me. When their small business plan does become available, however, I will have to switch to using it. They didn't tell me what it would cost.

So overall, for me Backblaze is a more simple, less expensive solution and I don't have a problem making sure my external drives are plugged in once a month (now watch me eat my words when I get a two month programming gig in Hawaii or something). Your mileage may vary.

cmason · October 12, 2009

Dan7312 wrote:

I've been looking at both CrashPlan and Blazeback for offsite backup and have decided to go forward with Backblaze. I thought I would write down my reasoning for this in case it helps someone else.

I am trying out Crashplan to see what it is about. It is priced just as BackBlaze and Mozy, except when you add additional computers. Otherwise, the prices are the same. I will post my views once I have had a chance to test it.

However, Crashplan is for business, in fact they offer Crashplan Pro exclusively for business....click here : https://www6.crashplan.com/landing/index.html

Dan7312 · October 12, 2009

CrashPlanPro doesn't give you access to CrashPlan Central (their cloud backup), but the CrashPlan company does have backup server hosting plans, though I don't know the pricing.

I find the info on their site pretty confusing, but that may just be me, so I may have mis-understood it. But there support was pretty clear that the business version of CrashPlan Central was not online yet. Here is what they told me.

"5. Regarding personal vs business use. Later this year we are planning to offer a plan to allow small businesses like what you described to back up to CrashPlan Central. In the meantime, we are making an exception for users like yourself whose computers have a combination of personal and business data on them. When the new business service is announced you will need to switch to that product (you won't need restart your backup)."

I like CrashPlan technically better than the others, but their terms of service don't seem to work for me, at least at the same pricing level that Backblaze provides.

In any case I'm still interested in how it works out for you.

Dan

cmason wrote:

I am trying out Crashplan to see what it is about. It is priced just as BackBlaze and Mozy, except when you add additional computers. Otherwise, the prices are the same. I will post my views once I have had a chance to test it.

However, Crashplan is for business, in fact they offer Crashplan Pro exclusively for business....click here : https://www6.crashplan.com/landing/index.html

cmason · October 12, 2009

I am only trialing Crashplan for the next 30 days. I did note that they provide for business use of their service, but not for the online storage, which defeats the purpose if you ask me. Perhaps it is the commercial online service that they are referring to adding:

Personal Use

CrashPlan is free and for personal use only.
CrashPlan+ may be used for both personal and non-personal use.
CrashPlan Central is our online backup service and is for personal use only.

Attention: CrashPlan+ does not give you a commercial license to back up to CrashPlan Central.

One thing interesting is that you can use the CrashPlan software to backup to attached harddrives, other PCs or their online service. The software is free for personal use, or $69.95 for commercial use. You can then pay a yearly fee for online storage, which as they indicate above, is NOT available for commercial use.

Dan7312 · October 12, 2009

My guess is that CrashPlan they started out as a shrink wrap backup software vendor, then started hosting backup servers. Then they saw the market Carbonite and Mozy opened up and are trying to figure out how to get into it with canabalizing their existing business hosting base.

BTW I currently use MozyPro... when I originally signed up for it you could not use MozyHome (the cheap version) for business use. I've got a query into Mozy about whether or not that is still the case. MozyPro is way to expensive to backup raws.

CatOne · October 12, 2009

Dan7312 wrote:

My guess is that CrashPlan they started out as a shrink wrap backup software vendor, then started hosting backup servers. Then they saw the market Carbonite and Mozy opened up and are trying to figure out how to get into it with canabalizing their existing business hosting base.

BTW I currently use MozyPro... when I originally signed up for it you could not use MozyHome (the cheap version) for business use. I've got a query into Mozy about whether or not that is still the case. MozyPro is way to expensive to backup raws.

No, Crash Plan's beginnings were actually peer-to-peer. So, you would back up your machine to a Firewire HD attached to your friend's computer in another location. Pretty cool, really. Crash Plan Central came soon after, and Crash Plan Pro has been a business-hosted offering available for about 2 years now.

The free version of the product has the non-commercial restriction, it backs up daily (instead of "on demand"), it has 128-bit encryption instead of 448, and it shows some ads. I'll say the technology behind it is _very_ solid, I know of a number of very large business customers that use Crash Plan Pro to back up their enterprise data as it was the only product that was workable cross-platform. The Windows "gold standard" for this is Iron Mountain's Connected product, which ensures job security for the administrators due to its complexity. I actually set up my own Crash Plan Pro server in 15 minutes and used it for a year, before punting that and going to Crash Plan+ because I wanted an offsite solution that didn't involve me creating an encrypted disk image so I could securely leave my data at a friend's house.

Pupator · October 12, 2009

Mozy does not, I don't think, allow business use for their Home Plan.

The real bummer was a few years ago (was it that long?) when Mozy didn't allow you to back up external drives either. That was a deal-killer for me. That restriction is no longer present as I'm backing up my external as we speak. *Sigh* Still working on my initial backup of the 96GB of raw files!

ian408 · October 12, 2009

Dan7312 wrote:

I've been looking at both CrashPlan and Blazeback

I removed the color formatting from this post and from a quoted reply. In general, color and size aren't required and may make it difficult to read text if the user uses a darker 'skin'.

Dan7312 · October 23, 2009

Hi Denise

In my seemingly infinite quest for the prefect backup I've been looking at JungleDisk. I like a lot of things about it. The problem with it for me is that the only restoration available is via the web. JungleDisk can't send me a set of DVD's or a USB Drive like, for example, Backblaze can. So in my case if I had to do a full restore it would take weeks because one I'll have over 100G once everything is up on the backup server.

Of course I could restore in pieces, but in the end it might take me 4 or 5 days to get to a workable systems. With Backblaze for the cost of an expansive overnight I could be completely back on line in 2 days or so.

So I don't know if you have looked at your internet bandwidth and the amount of stuff you have up on JungleDisk, but you might want to do a quick back of the envelope look at how long it would take you to do a restore if you had a catostrophic failure.

So even though I Backblaze isn't exactly what I want, it seems to be the best choice for me so far. Once CrashPlan has a business offering for the cloud storage, if the pricing is reasonable I'll take another look.

Just a heads up,
Dan

denisegoldberg wrote:

I'm glad you started this thread. I have been using Jungle Disk and S3 for over two years now. I was getting pulled in by the price and recommendations for Backblaze, and I was about to switch when I saw that if a drive isn't connected for 30 days that the files will be deleted. Looks like Mozy is the same from that standpoint.

As Dan mentioned above, Jungle Disk/S3 and SmugVault/S3 are both archive solutions, not just backups. I have a good chunk of my files on an external drive, and while that is usually plugged in to my computer... For now I think I'm going to stick with my more expensive Jungle Disk/S3 solution.

Your post and the discussion opened my eyes, so thanks!

--- Denise

Smugvault vs.

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