Off site backup solution for my iMac - Any suggestions?

Feek

Feek

Feek

Commissario
Joined
16 Oct 2002
Posts
342,941
Location
In the radio shack
Now that I've got a decent broadband connection with 20Mbps upload I think it's time to look at a proper off site backup. My native Apple app documents are in iCloud and I have my main Documents folder linked into Dropbox along with a Time Machine backup but hey, one can never have too many backups.

What I'd like is one of the online backup services and just dump absolutely everything in it. All my films and music are stored in iTunes and I serve them out to the house. I've had a massive failure before after a near lightning strike and it was an utter ache to get everything back.

If I could dump everything onto an online service, that would be fantastic.

I appreciate the initial backup time wouldn't be quick but it would be a lot faster now compared to my old ADSL connection and once it's done, it would just be a case of it keeping itself up to date. I want this to be an automatic process, just a case of kick it off and forget about it until I need it.

So, what online backup service do people use? What does it cost, what do you recommend?

Thanks.
 
Crashplan. ~£3 per month, truly unlimited. I have over 3TB with them and they haven't said a word. It's also in their FAQ that it is truly unlimited.
 
http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/mobility/mobile-apps/amazon-unlimited-cloud-storage-165302

For the cost of $11.99 (£8.04) per year, users can upload as many photos as they want to the Cloud Drive. This plan also includes 5 GB of additional storage for videos or other documents and files. This plan is very cheap indeed, as it works out at just £1.50 per month.

The second unlimited plan is called the “Unlimited Everything Plan” and is a little more expensive. For the cost of $59.99 per year, or £40.26 in real money, users can store an infinite number of new and existing photos, videos, files, documents, movies, and music in Cloud Drive. This plan is also very cheap as it works out at just £3.35 per month.
Click to expand...

I've no idea if the second option is available in the UK. May be worth a look?
 
S2KIP said:
I've no idea if the second option is available in the UK. May be worth a look?
Click to expand...
That's interesting but it's not clear whether it's a fully automated service, ie set it and totally forget about it. That's a big requirement for me.

I've been doing a bit of reading over the last couple of days and Backblaze seems to be coming out favourite at the moment.
 
Moses said:
Are you a student? Or do you work somewhere you can use the internet connection? I remember needing to upload some stuff for someone and only had a bang average broadband connection at home... so pretty poor upload speeds... so I just walked down the road to the university's library and uploaded it there. You could do that kinda thing for the initial upload?
Click to expand...

I could take it into work.... But I just don't know whether it's worth all of the hassle :rolleyes:
 
With some of the services, you can send them your hard drives and they will back them up for you and send them back (if you're worried about speed). I left my machines on for about 3 months 24/7 in order to upload everything.
 
I started a Backblaze trial yesterday, this morning it told me it's backing up at an average rate of 98Gb/day which I think is quite acceptable.

I've told it to use all my bandwidth but if I decide to go with it, I'll drop it down a bit once the initial backup has completed.
 
SentineL-X said:
I've just tried BackBlaze and it seems decent...

My biggest issues is I have 3.5TB of data to upload but only 400kb/s upload speed, that's clearly not going to work!
Click to expand...

I dare bet that's not all legal data! If it is you need to re-think as an off site solution for that amount of data for a home user is silly!

One way to do it is just buy a couple external HDDS, take a backup once and take it to someone who can store it for you.

Don't forget how long it will take to download it all again if you ever did loose local data.
 
Last edited:
I'm very happy with the performance of Backblaze for the first week of the trial and I've done a couple of test restores so I just signed up for a year. That works out at £2.65/month which is more than reasonable.
 
CrashPlan user here, for the past 3 years on 3 Mac's - very pleased with it.

Initial upload on that amount will take days/weeks - but it's not a problem, you just leave it running in the background. Once it's done, you'll never notice speed being a problem, as you're only uploading the deltas.

Crashplan is very configurable in terms of schedule, network and cpu utilisation etc. The mobile app also lets you access all files from your iPhone/iPad too, which is useful.

Backblaze is also supposed to be very good - I haven't had experience of it personally though.

Grant
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom