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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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.
> I also tried the free tests of Backblaze and IIRC, they allowed only one machine
Backblaze has evolved quite a bit in the last couple years, I don't know when you last tried it. First of all, you can backup several computers under one email address in Backblaze. Second of all, Backblaze recently released "Groups" which is where one IT admin can administrate and monitor backups of hundreds of different users each with one or more computers.
For Backblaze Groups, there are two security models (both valid depending on your situation): 1) where the group administrator can prepare restores on behalf of the group members, or 2) the group members have absolute privacy yet the group administrator can monitor the backups and make sure they are healthy and up to date and get alerts if one client has not backed up recently, etc.
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 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.
RAID 5
Don't do that to yourself. The only thing you'll achieve with RAID 5 is slow death by failed rebuilds and corrupted arrays.
The bigger the hard disk, the bigger the odds that your RAID 5 scheme will shit itself; the smaller the hard disk, the smaller the savings. It's a lose-lose proposition.
lucm, indeed.
Looks a nice service, but seems pretty pricey. So say 4 TB of data, at 6 cents per GB, would be $246 per month.
I personally use Storage Servers from Time4VPS, if payed in advance for 2 years €11.99 per month.
Now rsync.net probably do more (backup their servers) but this is maybe unnecessary if a backup of home server data.