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Ask Slashdot: What Are Some Cloud Backup Solutions That You Recommend?
New submitter OneHundredAndTen writes: After having used the services of CrashPlan for my backups for a few years now, I have just learned that CrashPlan is exiting the home backup business. Although this won't be happening for another 14 months, they have the chutzpah of recommending a provider (Carbonite) that does not support Linux. Looking in the net, there are not so many alternatives available -- unless you go with somebody that charges you $5/mo and up for a measly 100GB, or (occasionally) 1TB. Fine for a little phone, but not for the several TB worth of video I have shot over the years.
Anybody aware of decent cloud backup solutions that support Linux, and that offer a maximum backup capacity that is not ridiculously small? Reader cornjones asks a similar question: My use case:
Backups for several computers, both at my house and scattered family machines
Encrypted locally by a key I set, only encrypted bits are stored offsite
I have a copy of my data onsite. I primarily want to protect against lost drives or fire (or ransomware attack)
Ideally, I would be able to point it at a NAS, which I don't have now.
The plan I was on was 10 computers, unlimited data, for 4 years @ $429. Lower is better, but I am willing to pay in that range.
Across my machines, I probably have about 1TB of bulk storage and 10 or so machines w/, say, 60GB backups each.
Anybody aware of decent cloud backup solutions that support Linux, and that offer a maximum backup capacity that is not ridiculously small? Reader cornjones asks a similar question: My use case:
Backups for several computers, both at my house and scattered family machines
Encrypted locally by a key I set, only encrypted bits are stored offsite
I have a copy of my data onsite. I primarily want to protect against lost drives or fire (or ransomware attack)
Ideally, I would be able to point it at a NAS, which I don't have now.
The plan I was on was 10 computers, unlimited data, for 4 years @ $429. Lower is better, but I am willing to pay in that range.
Across my machines, I probably have about 1TB of bulk storage and 10 or so machines w/, say, 60GB backups each.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/crashplan-alternative-backup-solution/
I'm lucky enough to manage IT and servers for a pair of businesses in physically different locations. Both are running FreeNAS for their local storage. Both cross backup to one another using ZFS SEND/RECV. This gives full snapshotted history on both physical locations of both's complete storage. Pretty handy!
Amazon is not going under. S3 will be viable for longer than you'll need it to be.
Don't for get an cap free ISP as well!
I like this site. https://www.backblaze.com/ They have the basic backups, and also cloud storage options. It seems to met most, if not all, of your criteria.
you dont need to keep that shit
... that my recommend does what with, exactly?
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
You can put as much data on it as you wish.
I use Backblaze as well. I have everything in the house backed up to a local NAS then I back up the NAS using Backblaze. I don't currently use a linux client, but it's on my list of things to set up.
Such things might not be ideal for everyone, but I prefer the peace of mind having control over my own data. And there's enough good options out there that you can set up system pretty easily.
Do an internal backup and ship a copy to AWS S3 Glacier
Spideroak supports linux and allows multiple computers (and de-dupes for you). And it's fully encrypted.
When dealing with large collections and video the last thing that you really want to deal with is the slow backup / restore process to the Cloud when something goes wrong. The Cloud is not really a good option for backups IMO.
If you have a public facing IP and a satisfactory enough upload then home-hosting sounds like a decent solution. A small Linux / Unix box like a FreeNAS or something similar running Seafile or OwnCloud can provide you a cloud server. Clients are available for every OS and even mobile devices for remote access. And for actual backups, an Archive HDD like the 8-10TB models on the market should suffice. Leave that at work, at a friend's house or in a deposit box.
This gives you:
- cross platform
- no cost
- in your house very fast access to the "cloud" (remote access speed will depend on not being in Australia an hampered with shithouse internet)
- your own in control backup strategy
- your own in control deleted file retention strategy
- the ability to share content easily as with all other services
- security of being your own small self and thus a less likely target than a big provider
https://syncedtool.com
The only way backing up to someone else's computer can make sense, is that someone else's computer is physically far, so whatever happens to you is unlikely to happen to them.
And that's it. They will necessarily cost more than doing it yourself. (You know that, right?) It's not like they have magic disks.
It's easier to just rotate your backups offsite. Then you don't have to worry about using "special" software.
Anyone try IDrive? The pricing seems too good to be true, and they are offering 90% off the first year for Crashplan users.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Very cheap to store per Gb
Additional charges to download your data
Cannot download an archive instantly (you are put into a queue)
Command line interface but 3rd party GUI's are available
Works great with Linux
Overall, it is a cheap backup solution for the long-term storage of large amounts of data, but it requires a time investment to learn.
For Linux? Amazon S3 and duplicity
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
Not only does Carbonite not support Linux but neither Windows Home Server. One gets emails from them demanding that as a business using a server, they are cancelling the account unless it is upgraded to a business level. Trying to explain that WHS is a personal home system get only mindless "Server! Servers are for businesses! You are running a business!". Total morons.
I don't know of a good cloud backup provider with a Linux client. However, you mention wanting to point it to a NAS, which opens another possibility: You could have the NAS backup directly to the cloud.
For example, if you get a Synology, it has a built in backup application that can backup to various cloud providers. I don't know any that will backup several TB for a fixed price, but you could backup to BackBlaze B2 (BackBlaze's service similar to Amazon S3) for as low as $0.005/GB. That's likely to be about as cheap as you'll find.
As someone else mentioned, BackBlaze's backup service is pretty good ($5 for unlimited storage), but it's only Mac/Windows, and I'm not aware of a way to get it to back up a NAS.
I am in the same situation as OP - I use CrashPlan on Windows & Linux computers. I am genuinely considering using CloudBerry Backup and backing up to an S3 bucket in my control. Anybody have experience with this?
FreeNAS and rclone should give you all you need. If you're looking particularly at only-cloud, look at Duplicati. Then pick a storage plan, not sure what you expect as far as availability, throughput and cost but there are Google, Amazon, Box, Dropbox.
I would recommend rsync.net, not only do they have native rsync, they also have native ZFS send capacity.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I have had (for the moment) a good experience with iDrive. Not the cheapest, but the client is flexible, you can have several machines, and it seems to have plenty of bandwidth, I also tried the free tests of backblaze y carbonite, and found the clients sorely lacking in features, and IIRC, the allowed only one machne.
iDrive makes incremental backups, saving only the changed pieces of big files. That is interesting if you have big files that change fairly often, as it's my case. Never have had to recover from any disaster with them, but up to now, I can recommend them, cross my fingers.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
I'd suggest backing everything up to a hard disk and sticking it in a safe deposit box at a bank. To save trips, have two disks; drop one off and pick the other one up, swapping them out again next cycle. It takes more work than an internet-based solution that runs automatically overnight, but it may be cheaper and (if you encrypt the drives) the security is hard to beat.
It may be my age, but I utterly fail to understand why someone would make a BACKUP, something I consider important, to something hidden by so many layers of indirection that it has all the trappings of a stock market 3rd level derivative.
Come to think of it, I fail to understand why one would trust any computing at all to such a construct...
Except for, okay, short-term mass computation with data that was public in the first place.. I see the use case there.
Otherwise, I say: Avoid Clown Computing! Known where your data is, and who has access to it.
Know that provisioning is REAL and not oversold, etc..
Does madness come with youth? Or wisdom with age?
WKR,
-f
Had family who had no ISP data cap or overage charges so I setup this:
Buffalo Router with USB attached drive. Running OpenWRT firmware.
Why? Low power usage and easy to install Linux packages.
Home NAS (dual-core, 8GB ram, Ubuntu LTS) server collects all files. The offsite-router (nas) uses ddns to find my home NAS and connect to it via OpenVPN.
Home NAS does rsync to offsite-router on a nightly basis. The first time I did seed the drives on the Home NAS since I was backing up 3TB.
Nightly runs complete in a few hours even for 200GB of new data. Uses about 15 megabits / second bandwidth during a run.
I also do an md5deep on both so I can compare all the hashes to look for any data corruption.
Plus is I still get an offsite backup in case a tornado destroys my house and fireproof safes :)
Electric cost is low for the remote backup. A power loss is no big deal since it uses ddns to find my new ISP issued IP address.
For the cost of a subscription service each year I can buy a larger capacity drive as my data grows.
Obviously this combination is not full-proof, nor will it allow you to recover instantly from data loss -- access times for Glacier are measured in days -- but it is cheap and simple. You're going to need to write some shell scripts though.
unfortunately, for the best plan they have -- 5TB, unlimited devices, end-to-end encryption, point in time recovery, etc, etc -- it is $25/month or $279/year.
Still, you might want to check them out at https://spideroak.com/one/
Hope you find what you're looking for. No, I'm not Bono. Wish I had some of his money though...
Maybe this ? http://www.tarsnap.com/
It's a bit deep on the techie scale, but learning isn't out of the world, no ?
I'd recommend switching everything over to dev null as soon as possible. Any of your Linux friends should be able to set this up for you in under an hour. I hear your backups to dev null have great throughput and won't impact your other network activity at all.
Tarsnap
I just use hubiC. They give you 25 GiB for free, 10 TB is only €50/year (though I've never needed that much!). It's compatible with Openstack swift, and it works with Duplicity (which I use), rclone, etc. They have a Linux client, but it's written in Mono, hasn't been updated in years and is pretty bad.
I just realised this sounds like a marketing push, but that wasn't my intention! (I won't share my affiliate link here.) I'm very much interested in learning about other solutions that are better supported on Linux and more affordable.
what if your house burns down or falls into a sinkhole or is swept into the river?
There are any number of ways for your house and all its contents to be completely destroyed, many of them happen fast enough that you will not be able to grab your data before escaping.
If you encrypt your data properly, there are any number of places that will store it for you, you don't need to worry about their ability to keep your secrets, only your data.
I've been using Resilio to sync files between PC/Mac and Synology NAS, NAS packages are available and it supports Linux as well as Android/iOS. Rock solid.
You could roll your own remote/Cloud backup with Duply/Duplicity and AWS S3. It will be a few dollars per month
http://duply.net/
https://www.strato.com/en_us/c...
They are not exactly cheap, and max out at 5TB (at the moment, it will probably grow in the future). But you don't need a special client since the support e.g. rsync (even over SSH), SFTP or SCP. This means you can use standard tools. And they back up your storage separately (so you can restore older stuff if needed).
I use them since ten years or so, and never had any issues (my Synology NAS has a HiDrive app so it can sync with the cloud storage automatically).
What I would do is keep CrashPlan. Have it back up your Synology or QNAP NAS.
Then, from there, just back up your local files to the NAS. Done.
Not Crashplan. Those cunts just gave up on the home market. Fuck them very much!!!!
here.
To be resistant to fire problems, swap multiple disks through a fireproof safe. If you have time when a disaster happens, grab the disk on the way out the door.
people like you are LOSERS because you inevitably end up saying "oops I lost the data"
This is easy:
* Get a used Apple Airport 2 off of ebay.
* Replace its internal hard drive with a WD Red (or a NAS-worthy Seagate).
* Plug the Airport into your router via CAT-5 cable.
* Turn off the Airport's WiFi capability.
* Use the public IP address of the AirPort to log in and remember for each machine.
Alternatively, buy a small web-host or host package from an internet provider (like HostGator.com). Set up your backup script to do it there. I think Carbon Copy Cloner, which does scheduled backups, will back up to an sftp address. If not that, there are plenty of others. Or set up a cron job to do it (or use Apple's "Automator", which records your actions to create macro scripts).
Being in the same situation as you i am considering the following solutions : ...
Backblaze, looks like carbonite but with linux support. unlimited for 5$/m/computer .
Hubic : 10To/50$/year with all OS support
Seafile : Buy a dedicated server with huge discs and just install seafile on it and have it sync from your different computers
Swap the disks through a bank safe deposit box too.
Also be aware that many home fire safes are only designed/rated for paper, make sure the safe is rated for electronics/media.
I'm very sad to lose crashplan. I formerly had Carbonite, however I noticed after 2 days of backing up my initial load of pictures/home movies/etc, that it had slowed to a crawl and it estimated 2 more years (or some ridiculous amount of time) to complete the upload... Come to find out that they throttled uploads after 200gbs and only uploaded 1gb per day. I had 3TB of data left to go :( I canceled the plan and switched to crashplan.
I just googled, apparently carbonite has since eliminated these uploads a few years ago. But I'm still hesitant to switch back due to whatever any other gotchas are.
The Wirecutter used to say Crashplan Home, but in light of recent events they're now going with Backblaze:
* http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-online-backup-service/
If you aren't trying to restore your backups often, then AWS Glacier will give you a terabyte of storage for $48 a year (check my math on the pricing)
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
To be resistant to fire problems, swap multiple disks through a fireproof safe.
people like you are LOSERS because you inevitably end up saying "oops I lost the data"
Citation ?
With that much data, I'd be tempted to spring for a high-capacity tape backup system and avoid the hit on my bandwidth.
I have been using hostmonster for many years, and am considering switching. I've looked a few and will make a decision when my current contract comes to an end. I've looked at InMotion and a few others.
Basically find a web host that has unlimited storage, or storage limits you are comfortable with (but check the TOS and make sure they don't have a limit on number of files [HOSTMONSTER!]).
As far as backups, some basic scripts and you should be good to go on linux. I am sure there are some free backup tools out there that will work for windows machines (but haven't looked).
Might not be as convenient as one of the cloud hosting companies, but YOU control it.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Do those old videos really need to be online all the time? Probably not.
Use cloud storage e.g. DropBox etc. for things you need access to away from home.
Use cloud backup for things you may need to recover within hours or a day if there is a disaster. Use this for anything else important that isn't backed up some other way.
For everything else important, make a full backup every few months or years and store it offsite. Hard drives are cheap and you probably have relatives who are willing to store your backups for you for free.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Then use the Crashplan business offering to back up that machine?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Duplicati is a free as in beer (LGPL) backup software that:
- is open source
- supports linux, windows and some more environments
- includes deduplication !!! (while relatively fast even on large sets of data!)
- supports multiple online storage locations ondrive, gdrive, amazon, and otheres - as well as local (network (FTP, SSH, WebDAV ) or filesystem location)
- is rugged for online placing of backups
- supports AES 256bit encryption
- supports strong compression ( LZMA2 )
I use it, it's pretty neat, you won't pay for anything other than storage, you control everything - haven't seen a downside so far.
Hope this helps.
Your broadband provider may be your bug-a-boo. Comcast has a 1TB/month cap. Upload rates for many are 10x slower than download. Buy some external HDs and give them to a friend. Faster, cheaper.
Old saying:
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes.
So recently (gave on on the idea last week) I looked into starting a business offering offsite backups for NAS owners. After surveying the market I focused on a price of $5/TB/mo comparable to BlackBlaze. Turns out that price point is pretty hard to beat. The minimum scale needed to break even over the expected lifetime of the hardware at that price point for me was 50TB at 80% utilization of storage*. Now I won't go into all of the numbers and there are some economies of scale but for a company to offer $5/TB/mo to businesses (which tend to have lower support costs though higher liability) is cutting it pretty close. To make a living at it, and employ the sorts of people needed to get to that scale I figured out I'd need to scale into the 10,000TB (10PB) range. That's possible I suppose but if you are selling primarily to consumers with their high average support costs on already thin margins, well it is not a recipe for financial stability or success.
*It can be done cheaper of course but I was looking to do things right™; sufficient UPSs (30min) and redundant power supplies, drive and enclosure level fail safes, redundant internet connectivity, reasonable insurance coverage... I also thought about having offline snapshots but did not in the end include that in my cost estimations.
I'm probably getting hanged here for using onedrive, but I get 1 TB of storage for around 60$ per year including office. It's nice to be able to access your data from anywhere and have it all synced to the main computer at home. It also works well with smartphones. I also irregularly take a copy and put offline, in case I should accidently delete something. Sensitive stuff like password safe is encrypted.
https://www.backblaze.com/b2/i... - Use an application that works, and you're set. If you want to be more cost aware, doing a local NAS and sync'ing what matters up to B2 centrally allows for more instant restores locally, but if the worst of events happens, you can pull the offsite data.
https://www.backblaze.com/blog... has more info
Some of them are only certified for ridiculous periods of time like 30 minutes as well. Pretty much, if you don't put the fire out yourself with a fire extinguisher, your stuff is toast.
Get yourself an external hard drive (or TWO of them if you're paranoid) and a safety deposit box at your bank (if you really want 'offsite' backup storage). Backup and store your own data. Now you'll never have to worry about some 'service' folding on you and taking your data with them, or ever having to worry about your data being stolen or snooped on.
Windows client with support for MSSQL. Linux cli client. This is extra cost though, windows servers included. Annoying daily "all good" email reports that can't be set to trigger on fault. You'll need to look into things like; own key, encrypt before backup as by default the online file browser shows all files so it probably doesn't, etc. Seems reliable for me but perhaps not as secure as OP wants.
1) Zero fuss + reasonable safety and privacy: Apple iCloud + big fat Timevault. It's a hideously expensive setup but it's about as safe and easy and reliable as it gets. ... This is, of course, when you're in the Apple ecosystem already.
2) Google + automated takeaway downloads. There is a huge advantage and a huge disadvantage with Google, and both spell out exactly the same way: Google watches over you. Price-performance is second to none with Google, but, of course, here you have to be part of the ecosystem aswell for it to make sense in any reasonable way.
3) rented server/nas on three internet+ local storage + rsync scripts. Future safe, zero lock-in, cheap, total control but requires a little work and someone who knows what he's/she's doing.
Other than that I don't have enough experience to recommend anything else. Either way I would always keep an on premises copy of anything mission critical, no matter what service I'm using.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
ARQ seems to be working just fine for me... Non Linux, sorry. Pay for your own hosting of data.
https://www.arqbackup.com/
I've switched my backups to wasabisys.com - it's fully S3 compatible and is reasonably cheap. You'll pay $47 per year per terabyte of data which is significantly more expensive than some other cloud solutions. However you'll get full 100Mb through and random access to your files, any time. And there's a multitude of ready-made OpenSource solutions for S3 backup so they can immediately use Wasabi.
they store it all offsite somewhere or another. Getting data restored is turning out to be a problem however.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Zoolz yet. They are a legitimate business and have been operating for years. You can find a "for life" 2 TB deal for $49.99 this week.
No Linux client but given it's developed in .NET with no obfuscation, I guess it won't take long before someone decompiles the code and implements the feature in Duplicati or rclone.
https://deals.fossbytes.com/sa...
Encrypt. Name it something memorable, but not something that is going to get a DMCA.
Upload. Enjoy 3 years of free off site backups distributed throughout the world.
https://cipherlocker.com
Free.
Fully encrypted client side.
NSA proof.
Backblaze, Amazon S3 and Google Storage all provide great cloud backup capability. What you need tho is the NAS to support sending your data to your preferred provider when required - daily, hourly and so on. Additionally, you want to be able to store that data encrypted at rest either locally and store (or optionally the unencrypted data) the encrypted data in the cloud as well. Have a look at MyNAS Storage Appliance (www.mynas.com.au) as it seems to have the cloud replication, encryption and local data integrity part sorted out
with all of its easy customization
Sync.com or look into disk NAS via blockchain solutions. Both cheaper and meet all the marks
I was/am a user of Crashplan Home. I have previously tried Backblaze.
Reasons I will never use Backblaze again (unless these things change):
1) They only have a Windows client.
2) Their restore process is horrid. You must select folders and files on their website (thus ensuring that they at least no the names of your files). These are zipped up, which you have to wait potentially multiple hours while your zip is prepared. If you have too much data, you have to manually divide it into multiple zip files because they have limited sizes. You can only create one zip file at a time and download only one at a time (maybe two, it's been awhile). If your download fails, and I had multiple failures, you can't resume the download, you have to start over. They cap both backup uploads and downloads (they say they don't but their speeds suck compared to Crashplan). If your zip is not fully downloaded in 48 hours, it gets deleted and you have to start completely over.
Now to CrashPlan:
I have used it before and after BackBlaze and their interface is amazing. They supported unlimited data, unlimited file sizes, effectively unlimited revisions of files, and did not delete your files when you removed them locally (unlike Backblaze). Their speeds are blazing fast. When I recently lost everything on my NAS due to a PSU frying everything, their restore saturated my 100Mbps connection the entire time until the backup completed (this is adjustable, but the point is that they could). Crashplan is also one of the few services that supports Linux and also doesn't care if you backup network shares. In short, all unlimited backup solutions are not equal. I have spent several hours today looking for alternatives that have similar features per price. I have not found any yet. Crashplan is honoring the rest of any current plans + 2 months free, plus giving current home users their Business edition (which is pretty much identical to the home one, but without pc-to-pc backup and costs $10 a device a month), for $2.50 a month (per device) for the first year after the completion of the user's Crashplan home license. I went with that option. As much as I am unhappy with the ending of their home edition, I feel like they have more than been fair to their existing customers. They've saved my bacon three times on serious system failures.
Going forward:
When my cheap year of CrashPlan Business edition ends, I will be looking around for another, cheaper, solution. Any solution I choose must have many revisions of every file, support Linux and have a similarly priced unlimited data plan, or data storage that is so cheap that it is effectively unlimited. They must also have a hassle free restore process. At present, I have not found something better than CrashPlan so I will likely keep paying the new $10 a device per month rate. To save money I have already reduced my backup needs to a single device. I created a home NAS. Everything of value goes on this NAS (just linux with ZFS RAIDZ2 and SAMBA shares, plus some alerting and maintenance scripts). Crashplan goes on the NAS. I access the NAS via NFS and SAMBA shares. All my other remote systems like laptops and things, sync their data to the NAS via Syncthing.
No really. Tarsnap.
Um.
You do realize that fireproof safes are intended to protect paper, right? They don't keep the interior *cool*, they keep it cool enough that it won't ignite paper in the limited amount of oxygen inside.
If you're lucky your disk might be readable afterwards, or at least Overland or someone like that could retrieve it, but I don't think I'd make that my primary plan.
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
I'm rather shocked that no one has mentioned it yet but check out OpenDrive. If you need a backup tool that supports OpenDrive, here's one that I actively maintain: https://github.com/cubiclesoft... It looks like OpenDrive recently lowered their prices from $13/month and added more options. For $9.95/month or $99/year, you can back up "unlimited" data. I use their service. Faded out in one spot in their per-user configuration, I once saw a user quota box with a faded out "1,024 TB". In my experience, both OpenDrive and Amazon Cloud Drive are extremely flaky cloud backup services that like to completely break in the middle of a backup for inexplicable reasons. The services could also vanish at any time. Amazon's service certainly looks to be headed that way. You can probably blame the DataHoarders subreddit for the service shutdowns.
I recently ran into Sia and Storj. Both of those are relatively new cryptocurrency blockchain based backup systems. If you are into that sort of thing. Basically, you obtain bitcoin, convert it into Sia or Storj currency and then use the respective software to form contracts with hosts around the world to host your (encrypted) data. What turned me off to these options are two things: Becoming a host requires 99.5% uptime, the host must place collateral into the system to begin hosting data, and requires running a Linux daemon whose source code is of unknown quality (because I can't be bothered to read that much source code for network-enabled software - sorry). Beyond the self-hosting requirements, the requirement to start up the client every few days and let it settle was a complete showstopper. Also, the lack of a simple programmatic API for sending and receiving data externally was the other major problem: I can't easily point my own software at the system and make it work for me. But, hey, the estimated $2 per TB per month could be right up your alley. So I figured I'd mention these options.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I use arq
https://www.arqbackup.com/
it lets you chose were to store your data
This is probably the most expensive option. Buy the hard drives you plan on backing up data to and then use a secure hierarchical file management tool like Cloud Storage Server:
https://github.com/cubiclesoft...
You can use the recommended Cloud Backup software or use whatever reliable backup software solution you prefer. Put all of your data onto the drive(s) first to save yourself the pain of the initial upload and then, when you are ready, drive them over to your friend's or relative's house and hook them up to their network. Then push regular incremental changes at night. Be sure to reciprocate and offer them the same service.
This approach backs up data off-site but still in the same town/city, meaning your data is fully recoverable within hours of most major data loss disasters. The only exceptions to this that I can think of are area flooding and nuclear attack. However, someone might prefer this option over dumping their data to some unknown data center or having it sit on a complete stranger's system. At the very least, it can be another place to stash data, is a fixed purchase, and you know exactly what "unlimited" means because you can't exceed the amount of physical disk storage that you purchased.
This approach is completely custom as you are basically building your own cloud storage hosting service in someone else's house.
I usually dislike when people start with "Disclaimer: I work at ..." and then give a sales pitch.
But in this case every answer you provided (7 so far) has been genuinely helpful and candid. From the look of it you guys are a pretty decent outfit.
I use tarsnap for my business and was using S3 so far for other stuff but I think I'll dump S3 and try Backblaze.
lucm, indeed.
What about MEGA? It is in New Zealand (so protected from the NSA) and highly encrypted. 50GB for free.
I used to use tarsnap for this purpose. http://www.tarsnap.com/
From their website:
Tarsnap is a secure, efficient online backup service:
Encryption: your data can only be accessed with your personal keys.
We can't access your data even if we wanted to!
Source code: the client code is available.
You don't need to trust us; you can check the encryption yourself!
Deduplication: only the unique data between your current files and encrypted archives is uploaded.
This reduces the bandwidth and storage required, saving you money!
Tarsnap runs on UNIX-like operating systems (BSD, Linux, MacOS X, Cygwin, etc).
I'll just do exactly what I did before their family plan was cheap- use (Resilio) sync on all machines with my server as one of the peers, and an unlimited Crashplan subscription on the server backing up all of the sync directories. It's not necessarily quite as convenient as just having the Crashplan client on all of the machines, but it's pretty much set-and-forget, and still only $10/month.
Too bad too, I was just singing praises of Crashplan yesterday. Oh well.
There a no cloud backups that i recommend they are all insecure
I spotted that there are no good solutions for this currently in Linux land so I'm tackling this issue right now via a NodeJS Streams / GPG / AWS S3 project that is [open source on GitHub](https://github.com/forbesmyester/binary-repository). It's not complete yet by any means but it has good test coverage and is getting close to having a functioning command line app.
It is primarily designed for MP3 / Photo collections and similar use cases.
All of my machines are Linux, as are my parents and some of my friends. Spread geographically.
/usr/bin/flock -n /var/run/timemachine-backup-to-johns-laptop.lockfile -c "/usr/bin/time /usr/bin/rsync -azP --stats --log-file=/home/backup/rsynclog-timemachine-backup-to-johns-laptop.txt --quiet --delete --delete-excluded --include-from=/home/tom/timemachine-backup-scripts/timemachine-backup.includes --exclude-from=/home/tom/timemachine-backup-scripts/timemachine-backup.excludes --link-dest=../current $HOME tom@SOME-REMOTE-IP:/home/tom/Documents/timemachine-backup/incomplete_back-$date && ssh tom@SOME-REMOTE-IP 'mv /home/tom/Documents/timemachine-backup/incomplete_back-$date /home/tom/Documents/timemachine-backup/back-$date && rm -f /home/tom/Documents/timemachine-backup/current && ln -s /home/tom/Documents/timemachine-backup/back-$date /home/tom/Documents/timemachine-backup/current'"
The computers all have drives of at least 1TB with very little foreseeable data use. There is at least 750GB available on each computer, so I use each computer as a backup for the other computers. Why have space just sitting there idle, may as well use it for backups!
All drives are running full disk encryption and home directories are encrypted as per standard Ubuntu installation routine.
Rsync runs over SSH so the communication is encrypted between computers.
I have preshared keys setup between systems.
All computers in the backup regime have a user account with encrypted home directory for each persons set of data.
My script fires every 30 minutes (I am using Linux tool called flock to ensure that the script does not fire again and again if a backup is still taking place).
I used scripts on the following site as a basis for my system:
https://blog.interlinked.org/tutorials/rsync_time_machine.html
My script is like this to backup to each specified computer. This particular snippet backs up Toms data to Johns computer:
This is working very very well for myself, family and friends. Just making best use of what we already have available.
Cloud means a computer you do not control, do you want to rely on backups at a computer that can disappear suddenly?
Answer to the original question is: No, I do not recommend any cloud backup.
I personally use Storage Servers from Time4VPS, if payed in advance for 2 years it's €11.99 per month for 4TB of data, other tiers exist.
https://www.time4vps.eu/storag...
Now they do not do backups of these servers, but these are supposed to be backups of a home box say.
They give full shell access so I use rsync of a encrypted version of my home drive (gocryptfs in my case, cause it can handle full length Linux filenames which some of the alternatives can't but choose your poison).
Software for managing your backups, but supports multiple cloud based storage vendors (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc...) Don't get locked into one storage vendor.
I have a "rolled-my-own" solution which leverages Amazon AWS. Though this is kind of a mess of scripts, I like it for many, many reasons. First of which is that AWS is VERY cheap. You can also use the Glacier service (offline "tape?" backup) to make it even cheaper. You can set it up to automatically "destage" stuff over time from the "hot" (more expenseive) S3 tier to the cheaper glacier. It also has facilities for automatic versioning. One of the (oddly) most important things, is that you can specify very fine-grained permissions. For example, most of my machines only have key which are sufficient for *adding* more backup content. i.e. they cannont overwrite, delete or even read existing content. This is particularly important when things like ransomware attacks will try to compormize existing data. There is also the case where either ransomware or accidental actions wind up wiping/changing/corrupting files, whch are then backed-up, compromizing the backups (classic problem with using a "mirror" as a backup). I also have scripts which do incremental and full backups at different intervals, and others which "prune" out old backups after an extended period of time. Another good AWS thing is the ability to specify what kind of reliability you need - and also the ability to migrate/mirror/copy data to servers in DIFFERENT geographic regions. All said, it took some doing, but it is VERY cheap, safe, and extremely robust.
I'm very late in the stream here, and I also know it's quite overused to start a comment with "I am surprised not seeing product XYZ" ;-)
But still, come on, nobody here mentioning shared, end-user-based storage like for instance https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/ta... ?
My understanding is as soon as you can provide a machine permanently connected to internet, offering a given storage volume, the very purpose of systems like Tahoe-lafs is to provide open-source, shared, encrypted and redundant storage -linux-based... And they are very active...
Herve S.
Just find one or more friends who also want to maintain good backups, build encrypted boxes for each location and be each other's off-site storage...
I used CrashPlan too, so I spent some time researching what to do yesterday. There were good features that aren't easy to replace. I only have about 100g to backup, having whittled it down over the years to only what is important to me and irreplaceable.
Right now I'm testing arq to s3. That should cost about 3usd a month, but arq itself is 50usd. Good feature set though, and fast.
I wouldn't have minded if CrashPlan had either raised their prices or added caps to make their business viable. I'd pay their 10usd a month cost for the small business plan but it doesn't have feature parity and I no longer trust them.
Our company uses various StorageCraft products...they support Windows or Linux and do local and cloud backups. It can be used as simply as Carbonite or scale up to more advanced features and do normal or full image backups. We've been enjoying using it as it's pretty simple, even for more advanced backups. https://www.storagecraft.com/
Marky Mark Killed Jason Bourne!
Why should I have to check for Backblaze backup client updates manually?
That's not entirely true. There is a specific ANSI fire resistance rating for digital media. Most modern fireproof safes meet some level of that rating.