Backup / cloud storage chat

The importance of still doing a local backup despite using a cloud one is that you can bulk recover rapidly from your local backup if your hard drive failed etc. Then use the cloud just to retrieve the latest data since your last manual local backup.
I've never attempted it, but I'd hate to try and recover 500gb from the cloud!

Personally I can't see how it would work. As a reseller now it costs £480 a year including 5tb across all customer accounts. Charging £1.99 a year would only allow an average of 20GB per customer across 240 customers JUST to break even. I cant see how they would do it. They're either newbie idiots and they'll panic when they realise that an extra 5TB costs them £50 per month automatically billed - instantly give up and leave you in the shit, or they have more money than sense. My guess is the first of those two.

One other slight possibility is that they are selling a retail disc at £1.99 that they acquire almost free from Livedrive and that Livedrive hope to earn that customer at full pricing of £5 per month the year after. Who knows!

 

This might be of interest on the subject of backups.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techradar/allnews/~3/vR7acM5-JnE/the-best-free-pc-backup-software

 

It's a strange thing, modern living

Everyone desperate to not lose their data

And yet government's and drug cartels still can't manage to encrypt theirs to destroy it

No need to back anything up, just label it Top Secret MI6 Colombia contact lists

Job done

 

Make FARC Great Again

 

ETA Restore times are a bit of an unknown quantity as well.

 

• Dropbox for a lot of my files (1tb subscription)
• Version control (Git via Github, etc) for anything code-based
• Google Drive via G Suite currently with a 1tb limit but it goes up by 1tb for every user in my G Suite organisation then goes unlimited after 5. Mostly use this for sharing folders with clients as it’s more likely for people to have a Google account than a Dropbox one
• Home server with an attached 3tb HDD, mostly filled by my Plex setup so I need some more storage I guess... more refurbished WD drives!
• I did have Time Machine on my Macbook setup to my Time Capsule but I now use Unifi Security Gateway and WAPs so that’s been decommissioned

Been looking at Backblaze at $5/month/PC lately, no limit and they’ll ship you a HDD with your data on at the cost of the drive (refunded when you return it). Backblaze are the go-to for HDD reliability benchmarks due to their high drive turnover and absolute trashing they give them, so they’re pretty reliable I’d say.

 

Anything free is a real temporary measure

Anything online is a real temporary measure

Like helicopters all drives will fail eventually

Print off your photographs and documents

Everything else is just when

 

Everything I have is cloud based these days, google drive for docs, google for pictures and play music for my music. Due to idiot tax I lost everything once on a failed hard drive so everything is in multiple places. External HD, work laptop and pictures regularly backed to DVD.

 

Has anyone had any more thoughts on Backup solutions?

I've been using a 1tb external hard drive for the last five or six years, backing up every 3 to 6 months, usually just after I've edited a load of holiday photos. But it's running out of space and is down to its last 100gb, this morning's backup using up 125gb.

I could be a bit more selective and get one more backup onto it, but I really should start thinking about the next solution.

Suggestions, please?

 

I use 2 servers , both hold around 8 TB so 16 TB in total.
They are connected to the home network so everyone in the household can transfer to and from them .

HP do some quite cheap servers , load a copy of windows 10 on the first drive then the remaining three slots can be used for storage and backups.

( I also use mine as a media server to send films/TV series to the televisions in the living room and 2 bedrooms using PLEX media server)

@tek-monkey is your man to ask , he could prob explain it better than me and point you in the right direction.

 

...also , another solution would be to buy a NAS ( network attached storage) solution.
pretty much the same thing , just add more drives when you need them .

( the server solution usually works out cheaper though )

 

If you are backing up that little then why not just buy a 2TB hard drive and back up to that. You will have double the capacity you have now.

 

Those microservers are great, although I inherited a proper 6 bay qnap a while back so tend to use that as my main storage now (2tb drives with one for recovery, so 10tb available). Even so I use Google photos to store all images off site, and gdrive for really important documents. I've realised lately that it's only my photos I care about, so have 3 copies of everything taken spread across cloud and 2 servers at home.

 

It is really only the pictures that I care about and could not obtain again. I save to disc every now and then, leaving it at a separate location. A lot of pictures still exist in the cameras, too - one usually in the car and one in the house, when I'm there. The pictures are in two machines, though they are bought in the house together, when I'm here. I do think about having a back-up drive, but I would need to keep it at another premises, to avoid a fire-loss risk.

 

Thanks for that, guys,

I've just run WinDirStat just to get a better handle on what storage I'm using, and as @Jonah says, there really isn't very much. I've got a 1tb hard disc of which I'm using 215gb in total, which includes 33gb on documents, 33 gb on videos and 29 gb on photos. And that's probably all I'm backing up.

So something like an external hard drive would probably fit the bill.

What I'm most concerned about are my documents as there's a lot of work I wouldn't want to lose. Photos? A lot are on Facebook anyway, and I wouldn't worry too much if I lost my videos as they're not family videos or similar.

Anyway, I reckon I 'produce' about 30gb of new output per year. I'll have to check, but is there any way to just do incremental back-ups i.e. just those files that have been updated since the last backup?

 

I used to have 4 different cloud storage systems, all synchronising the same folder. All were free, but only for a few gb.

 

Good old photo album?

 

I've got a cabinet full of those and a large box full of photo envelopes. I've always had thought of scanning the best, and cropping and colour-balancing them, but somehow it's never quite happened. A bit like me moving my VHS videos onto DVD.

 

I had planned to interrogate Ecker about the best way to tackle all my old slides, negatives and prints, but I never did get round to it.