Recommend Online Backup Service?

Zarathustra[H]

Zarathustra[H]

Extremely [H]
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Oct 29, 2000
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So,

I have been considering signing up for an online backup service lately.

I went online to do my research, and it turns out there are A LOT of them out there now.

I'm looking for the following:

1.) Not expensive

2.) Secure

3.) Must have unlimited storage

4.) Must have Linux command line client

5.) Must not have any restrictions on file types or sizes

I don't need any of the fancy cloud options, like syncing between devices, or the ability to access my data anywhere. Just basic backup.

Any thoughts on what might be a good service?
 
Last edited:
Crashplan is cheap, but...

They don't backup your data. If they do a mistake, you data is gone and needs to be reuploaded.
Uploading is slow...speed will vary between 20kbps to 1000kbps(average 200kbps)
With 200kbps you will spend a month uploading 500GB

If you're going to use Crashplan, then I would highly recommend getting a secondary online backup service too like Backblaze. Backblaze is similar to Crashplan, except that Backblaze has data retention for six months https://twitter.com/backblaze/statuses/221135129853181952

I belive Strongspace fits most of TS requirements, except pricing.
There is however a new startup that I know about that will release a similar service as Strongspace, but 10 times cheaper. Still though, not unlimited.
 
Essentially, I'm just trying to back up the house NAS.

It currently only really has ~1.5TB on it, and while it is growing, it's growing very slowly.

It's already on a dual drive redundant raid 5 like array, but that only protects against disk failure, not other types of loss.
 
I'd very much recommend a combination of Crashplan + local backup. They seem to have their stuff in order (they're up and running fine with only minor complaints for a couple of years now, something that cannot be said of many other cloud backup services) and they have very competitive pricing. The only problem as stated earlier is that 1) much like all cloud backup pulling and pushing anything from/onto the cloud is super slow and 2) they have no guarantee on record integrity or retention. In other words: it cannot be your only backup.

But especially in the long run any other service is significantly more expensive than crashplan + some kind of local backup (external HDD, etc.). Crashplan costs something like $120 for a 4yr plan, AFAIK Strongspace is one of the more competitively priced services with a guarantee on your backup integrity and retention but it's $190 a year for just 200GB (so you'd need a couple accounts, maybe they have a bit of a markdown if you want to go higher). That's easily the cost of a local backup hard drive.
 
Keep in mind the target audience for glacier. It is for archival storage, getting data back is much more expensive than backing it up, and could take hours (or even days). It is intended to complement their S3 service (which I use), and S3 is a better match to things like crashplan.
 
Thank you all for your input.

I've also gone through the table on the Wikipedia page.

I copied and pasted it into excel, and then sorted out the services that don't meet my needs.

These are what remained:

usenet backup
StoreGrid Cloud
AltDrive
Egnyte
Infinit
Handy Backup
Crashplan
IASO Backup
Bitcasa

I've heard Crashplan mentioned a bunch of times, any comments about these others?
 
olavgg said:
Crashplan is cheap, but...

They don't backup your data. If they do a mistake, you data is gone and needs to be reuploaded.
Uploading is slow...speed will vary between 20kbps to 1000kbps(average 200kbps)
With 200kbps you will spend a month uploading 500GB

If you're going to use Crashplan, then I would highly recommend getting a secondary online backup service too like Backblaze. Backblaze is similar to Crashplan, except that Backblaze has data retention for six months https://twitter.com/backblaze/statuses/221135129853181952

I belive Strongspace fits most of TS requirements, except pricing.
There is however a new startup that I know about that will release a similar service as Strongspace, but 10 times cheaper. Still though, not unlimited.
Click to expand...

My experience with Crashplan is much better then what you are describing. I typically upload to them at around 3-4mbps. I've got roughly 30tb backed up with them and haven't had any issues.
 
Zarathustra[H];1039135098 said:
Thank you all for your input.

I've also gone through the table on the Wikipedia page.

I copied and pasted it into excel, and then sorted out the services that don't meet my needs.

These are what remained:

usenet backup
StoreGrid Cloud
AltDrive
Egnyte
Infinit
Handy Backup
Crashplan
IASO Backup
Bitcasa

I've heard Crashplan mentioned a bunch of times, any comments about these others?
Click to expand...

What do you mean by usenet backup?

I am using Crashplan with their free 1 year trial. It seems to fit my needs so far. My plan, if I ran a NAS, would be to backup everything to the NAS and then run Crashplan on the NAS for offsite backup. BackBlaze is nice, but doesn't do Linux yet.
 
I am using Carbonite due to their firesale pricing they had after the big data loss of a couple years ago.. I do keep important data in a few places, for the cost I couldn't pass it up. (it was 3 years for $60 unlimited data, that won't happen again) When the time comes to renew, I will have to decide again, but it has worked well for me in the time I have had it.
 
atbnet said:
What do you mean by usenet backup?
Click to expand...

I'm not sure.

It was linked from Wikipedia's "comparison of online backup services" article.

It looks like people have written scripts to encrypt and back up their files to usenet, which seems kind of sketchy, and abusive to me.

I probably won't be using that one.
 
Usenet is used to store lots of stuff, I use it instead of torrents/emule/megaupload. People have been using it to store their stuff for a long time, even if most of the content is movies/music/tv shows/XXX. Now some providers have a separate offer to compete with cloud storage services, for example my provider, Giganews, has dump truck : http://www.giganews.com/dumptruck/

It's competing with dropbox and similar services rather than backup plans, for large amounts of data it's uncompetitive, the regular usenet has no limit however, but I don't know what would happen in practice if you tried storing TBs of data, if nobody is downloading it I wouldn't be surprised to see it disappear.
 
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