Online Backup Services - Experience with iDrive

Garageguy05

Gurus,

Anyone here used or using iDrive as an online backup solution?

If so, are you satisfied? If not satisfied, what were the issues you dealt with?

TIA
GG

run_kmc

I've heard a few things about this service, but not enough to say anything about their quality or reliability.

It does strike me as expensive, however. $100 per year for 50 GB. If I'm spending that much for an offsite backup, I'd buy a 320 GB USB drive and find a place to store it. (Office, safe deposit box, etc.)

Garageguy05

Cheaper than you think - esp. for multiple machines
The pro version provides 500GB of shared storage a year for up to five different machines for $150 / yr. While Mozy is $50 per machine unlimited, I'm using this on three machines at the moment and only backing up ~200GB, so it's a wash cost-wise.

I also do onsite backups on an external 1TB drive, but I want something offsite too, just in case the house gets hit by lightning, the basement floods, my equipment is stolen, etc.

GG

MJStevens

Moxy does have a network drive option, but you have to install a separate plugin and make a small registry change.

http://www.runpcrun.com/enable_network_share_support_in_MozyHome

Pupator

run_kmc wrote:

It does strike me as expensive, however. $100 per year for 50 GB. If I'm spending that much for an offsite backup, I'd buy a 320 GB USB drive and find a place to store it. (Office, safe deposit box, etc.)

This is not a legitimate comparison. Yes, you can buy a bigger drive for less money. Then you (as you said) have to provide somewhere off-site to store it. Then, every time you want to use it you have to bring it back and forth between the off-site location and home. This kind of arrangement discourages frequent backup procedures.

denisegoldberg

If you're looking for feedback on the different services, there are a few discussed in this thread - http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=146355.

--- Denise

Garageguy05

Great pointer, Denise.

Thanks
GG

aquaticvideographer

Backblaze
I'm with Andy, in that other thread. I've been using Backblaze for a year now and I'm very happy with it. You can download whatever you need whenever you need it, but if you need a bunch in a hurry, they will overnight you DVDs or a USB hard drive with your files on them.

pathfinder

aquaticvideographer wrote:

I'm with Andy, in that other thread. I've been using Backblaze for a year now and I'm very happy with it. You can download whatever you need whenever you need it, but if you need a bunch in a hurry, they will overnight you DVDs or a USB hard drive with your files on them.

Backblaze is for data b/u, but not operating system and applications, isn't it?

It seems inexpensive for $5/month for unlimited data storage if I read their website correctly.

http://www.backblaze.com/

Dan7312

That's correct, in fact there are some files the specifically exclude so you can't do an OS/app backup. But for data or photos it's works just fine.

Another entrant in the backup derby is Cloudberrylab.com Backup. It's another backup to Amazon S3 so it has the costs associated with that. But it does let you do a restore with any S3 app, as long as you don't turn on chunking, encryption or compression. Even if you do they it's pretty easy to put the chunks together or even decrypt, if you want to do the restore on your own, but it would take a custom program. But they don't hide anything.

pathfinder wrote:

Backblaze is for data b/u, but not operating system and applications, isn't it?

aquaticvideographer

pathfinder wrote:

Backblaze is for data b/u, but not operating system and applications, isn't it?

It seems inexpensive for $5/month for unlimited data storage if I read their website correctly.

http://www.backblaze.com/

Here's where they explain what they back up. Apps and OS no, data yes, except files over 4GB in size. However, they do backup iPhoto, Aperture and Lightroom data no matter the size. I've found that they also back up video files from iMovie HD no matter how large.

Terrence

I have tested Mozy, Backblaze, and Amazon S3. Of all of them Amazon S3 is the best, but it will cost you, since they charge per GB transferred and stored. SmugMug uses Amazon S3 as the actual storage component of SmugVault I believe.

I used Amazon S3 as my photo backup solution for about a year. As my collection of RAW files grew from about 20GB to 100GB I was getting bills of $20+ per month and it ceased to be a viable solution.

If you ever need to restore data from one of these services of any appreciable amount, it is absolutely agonizing. Many of the services offer a restore solution where they send you DVDs or an external hard disk of your data and that is costly.

Here's the setup I use and have no problems at all. I'm a Mac user, but this is all translated to PC with similar software.

Hardware:
- 2 external 1.5TB FireWire 800 drives for all my data (MP3s, photos)
- 2 external 1.5TB USB drives for all my backups

Software: ChronoSync, chosen after trying to make rsync, DataBackup, Carbon Copy Cloner, and SuperDuper do what I want. I don't like Time Machine at all.

My two data drives are marked "d1" and "d2". d1 is my primary drive that I do all my read/write operations on. d2 is an exact mirror of d1, updated by ChronoSync every hour.

My two backup drives are partitioned for OS and app backups and data backups as "os1" "data1" and "os2" "data2". Every morning at 1:00AM the "user data" for all users is backed up to "os1". Every morning at 3:00AM the music and photo data from "d2" is backed up to "data1". Every Sunday at 5:00AM the entire OS and apps are backed up to "os1".

Every Monday, I take "os1" "data1" to my office and lock it up in my file cabinet. "os2" "data2" comes home with me and takes the place of "os1" "data1".

So, I end up with 3 copies of all my music and photos available at home, online any time. The lag between syncs gives me time to recover an accidental deletion or mistake. I always have 1 copy of everything off site that is never more than 8 or 9 days old in case of a true disaster.

Based on what I was spending on online backup, the hardware expense was not a problem to justify. The better thing is I have complete control of my data and how it is backed up. I always worried about the day when Amazon S3 would have a glitch and lose my data. I was educated as a Physicist and I've worked in IT long enough to know that nothing in this world is a certainty and on a long enough time scale, something will go wrong.