Filed under: Security, Ask DLS
What's your offsite backup solution? - Ask DLS
A friend of the Squad, (we're not naming names here Ben), recently had a little mishap with his data backup plan. He was doing a fresh install of Leopard on his Mac, and so he backed all of his data up to a external hard drive, installed OS X 10.5, and then found out that the drive was corrupt.No problem, he logged into Mozy, his online backup service to access his 60GB of offsite data. But he had to wait 12 hours before the data was ready, and then he had to download 100 different dmg files. He wasn't pleased.
We've mostly heard good things about Mozy, but we've also heard people rave about Carbonite, Amazon's Jungle Disk, and several other services. And we're intrigued by, if a bit disappointed by ADrive. But honestly, we're not sure which is best, so we thought we'd ask you, our trusted readers. What do you use for offsite data backups, do you like it, and why?
I love World of Goo. I bought it a while back, and it's one of the most addictive games I've played.
That's part of the reason why I was so excited to find Moonlights. It shares a lot of elements with World of Goo, but is very different, too.
Like in World of Goo, you have to construct something stable out of unstable elements, and your structure needs to get to a certain destination. But that's where the similarities end, really.
Where World of Goo has a ton of personality, Moonlights is minimalistic, almost austere. ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Paul said 12:17PM on 11-19-2007
Easy - two external hard drives.
Nothing is faster or easier.
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LySiNe said 12:44PM on 11-19-2007
S3cmd + amazon S3. I like command line apps.
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james said 12:58PM on 11-19-2007
Nothing beats Amazon and Jungle Disk.
I can see all my backups and restore at any time as it provides a mapped J: disk for my files.
Beats all the opposition.
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Peter said 12:54PM on 11-19-2007
I love Mozy. After you get it configured, it runs in background and just does it's thing without you having to think about it. And you can't beat the price.
Restoring data isn't quite as easy as you might like, but it's still better than losing data.
If you have 60 Gigs of data, there is no easy offsite solution. That much data is going to be time consuming no matter what.
Use my Mozy referral code and we both get additional space for free.
https://mozy.com/?code=F5AS78
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ryaninc said 12:55PM on 11-19-2007
I've been using Mozy for a while now and I love it. Now, granted, I've never had to do a complete restore, but the way it auto backs up whenever I want it to is excellent. Plus, I can get my full directory structure from anywhere. I've already had to pull files backed up at work onto my home computer. Saved me more than once. :-)
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John Laur said 12:56PM on 11-19-2007
I can echo the Mozy problems -- I started using them when they first announced the mac beta and although I have stayed with them and their product has improved, it is not fast, not convenient, not trouble free and by all means it is not easy to use. However it did save my ass when my hard drive died recently. I feel kind of bad trashing on the service that saved my data, but it really is that bad. I've contacted their support a lot of times offering my troubles and assistance in debugging, but I have never really felt they are listening -- anyway they've had their fair chance on this; now they get blasted. Here's the nitty gritty:
1) Even if you have a slow upload speed, most of the time running a backup is apparently spent idle, waiting for Mozy's servers to request files or perform deletions. For instance with my 1mbps upload speed, I will sit with an idle connection for as long as 30 minutes before mozy will begin uploading 10-15MB of data which takes a bit less than a minute. The product is abysmal about this. So let's say in my case I'm backing up about 15GB. With a totally saturated 1mbps connection that takes about 35 hours - I can live with that. With mozy, however, it takes over a WEEK (no joke).
2) The "Mozy Status" program (which sits in the mac menubar monitoring the status of the backup) eats CPU resources like a madman. It sends my Powerbook G4 into fits. Simply quitting the status app allows the backup to continue to run and uses very few resources. To me it stinks of bad software or lazy developers -- either of which do not inspire my confidence.
3) Restore is an unholy nightmare. If you have more than a handful of files, the web interface won't even load 90% of the time, and even when it finally does, expect to spend 5 minutes everytime you open or close a directory tree browsing for files to restore. Like the fellow above, when I finally got my restore set selected, I was rather upset to receive all of my files in 60+ .dmg files. Since OS X has no easy mechanism for merging the contents of folders I found that it was actually easier to WRITE A PROGRAM to complete the restore. How do they even expect normal people to restore files? It would be impossible.
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sparky said 1:06PM on 11-19-2007
Carbonite has been just about perfect for me on Windows XP. Install, mark the folders or files you want backed up and then it just works. Restore is easy and fast. It restored my 75GB of music files (plus other stuff) in no time at all (I actually can't remember how long it took, but just that I was surprised at how fast it was).
The user does all marking of folders/files in Windows Explorer. You just right click on folder and select Back this up. Or you can request to back it up Now and it will immediately start backing it up. It cascades backup requests to subfolders and files. It indicates which folders/files are set to be backed up with colored dots that are displayed in Windows Explorer. To restore, just go to Carbonite under My Computer and select the files to restore, the location to restore to and you are done. If you are transferring to a new computer, just reinstall Carbonite once you have a web connection and then restore.
I currently pay $50/year for unlimited backups. The ease of use and my large collection of MP3s makes it totally worth it to me. I have never been disappointed or even inconvenienced by this program
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Shawn said 1:16PM on 11-19-2007
I use FileHampster with two libraries:
1. A USB hard drive
2. I use NetDrive to setup an FTP connection (to my web server) as a drive.
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kingkool68 said 1:19PM on 11-19-2007
I was thinking about this the other night. I think the best thing to do would be to buy two external drives. Back up everything on both and then send it to your parents who hopefully don't live upstairs from you. That kind of defeats the whole "offsite" thing. Then every month they can mail your hard drive back to you and you send them the other, more recent, back up drive.
On second thought, why not just invest in a big, fire-proof safe and store your back ups in there.
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Rick said 1:51PM on 11-19-2007
I use FreeNAS on an old machine with three 'similar' drives (they don't all need to be the identical for software RAID) with RSYNC enabled and then RSnapShot on my Windows box for a 'full' daily snapshot of my harddrive. They are both free OSS and work beautifully. You can also configure it to SSH to an offsite location at a friend's or relative's house.
www.freenas.org
www.rsnapshot.org
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Ben said 1:51PM on 11-19-2007
The problem with multiple external drives and shipping them off is that it'll never get done.
Lets face it, if it isn't automatic it's flawed.
Jungle Disk works pretty good, but the OSX GUI isn't that great and so far I haven't figured out how to backup what I want (exclusions, schedule etc).
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Vanilla Cokehead said 1:57PM on 11-19-2007
I second the thoughts on Mozy Home. After taking about five days to do an initial backup, it now takes about an hour a night to do an incremental backup on my home machine. Well worth the $4.95 a month IMO.
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HarleyDog said 2:07PM on 11-19-2007
I've tried offline storage, several times...some details below. But found a second internal and two external usb drives works perfect. Use "SyncBack SE" synchronization software, although others would work just as well. One external drive is software apps backup primarily. The internal is primary backup for C drive's data. After that, I have them synchronizing to different clearly named folders between themselves at various times per day in a cascading fashion, so I have at least three copies of everything at any one time. I never have to touch it.
Then I have a manually run backup to my notebook as my "off site" backup, not touched by the automatic syncs. Every few months, I update a set of DVD backups to have hardcopy. Overkill? Perhaps, but once it's set up it takes care of itself, deleting when I delete and not continuing to grow.
And the price is right for my localized system. The online offerings are either too slow or small, and/or offer upgrade packages with a monthly fee. No thanks.
Have tried online backups, but too slow and small. The storage size for free sites is changing--the "safe storage" that comes with our time-warner cable company holds my critical data files only...those ones I can't lose if the house burns down. DriveHQ offers 50GB, but that's not big enough for everything, and weirdly you can't select multiple folders/files into a single backup. You read right...when I asked them about that, their reply was basically that it is an intended "feature," to give it the flexibility to have multiple independent backups...blah, blah, blah... And then their's the speed thing. Upload speeds are slow, and while only the first time is the slowest it's just not ready for prime time for me.
I've tried XDrive, and others as well. All earn similar comments. Lastly, I'm still not comfortable with my data sitting out there somewhere, even with SSL, compression and encryption, it's only as good as the person that designed it and who's to say it's really getting encrypted properly? I like my backps readily available when I need them, in standard file structures. Theoretically, my CPU could melt down and I have external USBs ready to go on my notebook with EVERYTHING on it. Can't get much more convenient than that.
All these links and more are available at our family's personal home page, at the "other links" at the bottom of the page. No ads, just a Hawaii information page built for our friends and family, but we recently added the content of our favorites, and most of these are already in there, plus many others. Find it at http://home.hawaii.rr.com/gonebananas
Aloha
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Manny M said 2:42PM on 11-19-2007
I really like Logmein Backup. Logmein Backup is different from Carbonite or Mozy as it lets you backup to a remote computer. I back up my office pc to my home pc. It is very fast plus I get to control where my data sits and I have unlimited storage.
I feel better knowing only I have access to my backups.
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Vance Checketts said 2:48PM on 11-19-2007
The Mozy restore process has needed improvement in the past, but we’ve made changes in the code and are seeing a positive impact. We’ve also started shipping external drives to those who need to restore large amounts of data in the event of a disaster. Our support team is here 24x7 to help anyone with their backup or restore. EMC is committed to investing in the MozyHome consumer service, so you’ll see even more updates and enhancements. - Vance, Mozy COO, support@mozy.com
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Vance Checketts said 3:07PM on 11-19-2007
The Mozy restore process has needed improvement in the past, but we have made changes in the code and are seeing a positive impact. We have also started shipping external drives to those who need to restore large amounts of data in the event of a disaster. Our support team is here 24x7 to help anyone with their backup or restore. EMC is committed to investing in the MozyHome consumer service, so you will see even more updates and enhancements. - Vance, Mozy COO, support@mozy.com
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Ben said 3:07PM on 11-19-2007
Vance,
In the end I got my data, but what would have been nice is if I could've restored, as easily as I backed-up.
I understand having to wait 12 hours in some cases, but I was given no expectation of when I could expect my data to be ready. On top of this, it was made available to me in over 100 dmg files, of which I had to download one by one, mount, copy my files. This literally took me two days despite from very fast download speeds (on 20/5 FiOS connection).
I don't know what your windows restore is like, but I can tell you that your mac restore has me looking for another solution.
As a side note, I love the EMC products I use at work (CLARiiON CX3 and VMware).
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allen said 3:24PM on 11-19-2007
I've been using Mozy for about 2 months now. So far I've only needed to restore a couple of files, so I can't say much for the restore either way.
However, the backup is simple to install and runs silently every night.
I'm only backing up my documents at the moment, but if I continue to have a good experience with it, I'll be upgrading backing up my 75GB music collection as well.
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Pär said 3:31PM on 11-19-2007
Been using Mozy for a couple of months now and so far I'm happy with it. It's a bit slow at the beginning of the backups, but when it gets to the point where it's actually getting and uploading files it's barely noticeable.
I'm on windows btw.
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Michael Buckingham said 4:59PM on 11-19-2007
Amazon S3 + Jungle Disk. Nothing could be simpler, I feel better about my data being encrypted and complete restores have been no problem. I have almost 100 gigs and I smile everytime I get the monthly invoice. previously used rsync.net.
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