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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/
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.
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
Disclaimer: I work for Backblaze.
> I'm currently backing up 210GB and the estimate is 21 days
If you are using Backblaze, make sure you "Check for Updates" (menu option) and make sure you are running the 5.0 client we just released last week. Then if you want to make faster progress, turn off all power savings modes on your computer so it won't sleep, and then go into Backblaze "Settings..." menu and turn off "Automatic Threads/Throttle" and manually set the number of threads high enough to saturate your network. Let it run all night long for several nights in a row then check the time estimates again.
Disclaimer: I work for Backblaze.
> They will necessarily cost more than doing it yourself.
This may or may not be true. Backblaze purchases up to 10,000 hard drives at a time DIRECTLY from the manufacturer at a discount of list price. You pay list price. You also have to pay for unused hard drive space, while Backblaze sells the unused hard drive space to other customers. Then Backblaze locates our datacenter in an area with cost effective electricity. If you live in Hawaii you are paying 50 cents/kWh, at Backblaze we get electricity for about 10 cents/kWh. On the other hand you might be beating our price on electricity if you live in Oregon (3 cents/kWh). Backblaze does charge an (extremely small) profit. Anyway, the point is this calculation is a little subtle. My goal would be to actually save our customers money over doing it themselves even while pocketing a small profit for ourselves. That's nothing but good business for all of us.
> It's not like they have magic disks.
We use the same hard drives as the you do but with two important twists:
1) We Reed Solomon encode your data replicated across 20 *separate* hard drives in 20 *separate* computers in 20 *separate* locations in our datacenter. We can lose 3 entire computers and your data is FINE.
2) We monitor every hard drive, and when one hard drive goes bad we send a datacenter technician over to replace it 7 days a week. We care DEEPLY about the health of your files. If two computers fail in the same logical Reed Solomon group of 20 computers we have pager systems that wake people up in the middle of the night and they start driving towards the datacenter (maybe 15 minutes away) to get it fixed NOW. And it is a "dead man's switch" in that if our datacenter techs do not "silence the page" (acknowledging they are going to fix the problem) we keep paging more and more and more people at Backblaze up to and including the CEO. When you backup to a single local hard drive, how many employees get paged when some of the sectors go bad?
Anyway, at Backblaze we have been doing storage for over 10 years and we really care deeply. It is all we care about. My goal is to get the price down below where you can be free to solve other problems.