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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.
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!
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
... honestly if I've lost my primaries, AND my backups I'll be thrilled to pay $20/TB to retrieve them!...
They also have the option to copy the file(s) to a drive or thumbdrive and ship to you.
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.
> I'd love to see some hard data on the chance of data loss on those cloud services vs. typical home set-ups.
Backblaze uses a Reed Solomon encoding where every file is replicated across 20 different hard drives in 20 different locations in our datacenter. We can lose up to three full computers out of the 20 and your data is still both safe AND available. And a really good feature is we monitor EVERY SINGLE DRIVE and have datacenter employees replacing drives that have gone bad 7 days a week.
However, a counter point is that if you forget to pay Backblaze your monthly bill for as little as 60 days we delete your data to make room for paying customers. I really think people underestimate how easily this can occur purely by accident. For example, the credit card on file expires, and the employee who was signed up to get alerts retired the year before and the emails are not being read anymore.
For all of the reasons above, to my closest friends I recommend BOTH for data you would be really bummed out to lose. Keep the live copy, plus a backup at home on a hard drive, and a copy in Backblaze for when your house burns down. This is what I do, and it lets me sleep at night.
I back up computers in my house to a FreeBSD NAS and I'm looking for an off-site backup solution. I want to be able to send ZFS snapshots, encrypted, to a remote location. Do you know of any tools that work well for this kind of use, or do I need to roll my own.
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