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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
B2 works on Linux. https://www.backblaze.com/b2/d...
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.
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... 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.
Just to add to this, when you get the backup drive/thumbdrive, you can either keep it or send it back. If you send it back, they refund you what they charged you for the drive/thumbdrive. So you can essentially restore your data for free.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze.
> it doesn't sound like they have a Linux client
For Linux, Backblaze offers "B2 Object Storage" with a large list of established Linux clients supporting it. You can see the list on this web page: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/i... (for Linux, look for the little pictures of a penguin).
Solutions that backup to Backblaze B2 include: Duplicity, HashBackup, Transmit (by Panic), and rclone
Disclaimer: I work for Backblaze.
> if your out of touch with the server for 30 days it's deleted
Some clarification: For any computer that does not "phone home" we allow up to 6 months before even threatening to delete your backup, and we warn you first quite a bit (after that).
However, if the computer is backing up every day but you have an external hard drive (like a Drobo) and you leave the Drobo unplugged for more than 30 days, we warn you profusely by BOTH email and by popup dialogs and then we delete the data. If at some later date you plug the Drobo back in you need to repush the contents from scratch.
We are actively researching whether we (Backblaze) can extend this to be longer (like 60 days or 90 days) without losing too much money, but if you install today you have to live with "external drives must be plugged into the laptop host at least once every 30 days".
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.
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.
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 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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