[johnbryanpeters]

Driven by the failure of the C drive on my desktop, I'm starting to consider cloud storage and/or backups once I have the computer back up.

We have limited bandwidth, 7 mbps nominal. I'd like to be able to throttle traffic required during initialization.

Security is, of course, of interest, as is cost.

Experience, recommendations?

J

 

[canadmos]

Get a second hard drive and use the "File History" backup tool in Windows. It will backup your important stuff (or all of it) to the second drive. You even get versioning with this, so its nice. As long as both drives don't fail at the same time, you won't be hosed.

Then depending on how much data you have, back it up to Google Drive or something similar. I've made due with the free version of Google Drive up until now, which gives you about 15gb of storage.

 

[SkaredShtles]

What he ^^ said. If you're like most people, backing all your user data up to the cloud is usually not particularly feasible (too much data/too small of a pipe/too expensive over time).

I protect against hard drive failure with a 2nd "backup" drive and Acronis backup software. I use this app to backup my user data separately (but to the same drive).

I'm not protected against Acts of the @FSM , but I'm willing to accept the small risk of that sort of event...

 

[binary visions]

I generally don't agree with the manual process of backing up to hard drives and/or manually rotating things.

It's fine if you also have a cloud backup, it just shouldn't be your only source.

One of the most likely causes of data loss is something affecting your home or the environment - a fire, a flood, burglary, etc. My home was burglarized and they took both the computer and the backups. I was rotating them, but I lost everything since the last rotation.

In addition, your off-site rotation drives are not always online and not always verified. So if you do lose everything, you're just praying that you don't plug the drive in and hear it go "click click click."

Get stuff on cloud storage of some kind. Some options I've used:

• Backblaze is excellent and fairly cheap. You can encrypt prior to transmission for privacy (you are trusting them to encrypt this correctly and not copy your keys, of course). Their standard backup model is a flat rate for however much you back up. If you want to get fancy, they have a blob storage destination you can use instead called B2. Both options have version history.
• If you use Microsoft Office at all, you can subscribe to Office 365 and get 1 TB of OneDrive storage as well as Office pretty cheaply. Plus a variety of other little bonuses that you may or may not use (e.g. vanity domains for Outlook.com email). It's a really good deal. If you enable 2-factor authentication on your Microsoft account, it's pretty secure, and they have a "vault" in OneDrive now that adds an additional security layer to the files inside. OneDrive has version history, but it's not as robust as Backblaze.
• Google Drive is basically similar to OneDrive, except you don't get Office in the cost, so it's less of a deal.

You can throttle Backblaze and OneDrive. I assume you can do it with Google Drive.

 

[eric strt6]

I keep documents that I use and modify all the time on a thumb drive back up . I also have a 1 TB drive that I back my computer up to on a regular basis. Cloud based is not viable on DSL ( we don't stream anything so we never went to any high speed service) too dam slow.

 

[jonKranked]

this all has reminded me that i need to figure something out, we have a ton of family photos we want / need to back up and make sure are secure. i've long entertained a RAID setup for redundancy/recovery. any thoughts on that approach? i should also note, that i've now got 5 years worth of pics of my kids, a decade of photos with my wife, and digital pictures from high school through college, easily a TB worth of photos now, and that will only be growing over the coming years, so cost is something i want to be mindful of. i already have 100gig through google one, looking at their prices, it could get expensive quickly; the 10 TB plan is $600/year, a quick google turns up a WD RAID 1 12TB for ~$400.

 

[jonKranked]

I ended up with a Synology Diskstation DS418 a month or so back. Have it set up with 4 x 4TB drives in a RAID 5 array. It holds the past 10 or so years worth of photos along with my entire music library, and every digitized home video of my childhood. This NAS backs up to the Backblaze cloud for additional safety.

I want to say it cost me about $800, which is a small price to pay for the priceless memories it retains.

quoting you hear, as it is a pertinent thread for nerdy stuff. see me above post. is there a fee for the NAS cloud backup?

 

[binary visions]

I have a Synology Diskstation as well.

@jonKranked yes, there is a cost for cloud backup. I currently backup using Backblaze B2. It's $0.005 per month, per gigabyte. $5/month per terabyte, which is very reasonable. There is a cost to restore data, but you hope that this is a disaster occurrence so paying something to restore shouldn't be a big deal.

Another nice thing about Backblaze is you can order a drive shipped to your house with your data on it. So you don't have to wait for your multi-terabyte download if you don't want.

Cloud Storage Pricing Comparison: Calculate Your Costs

Quickly calculate and compare cloud storage costs from AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and Backblaze B2.

www.backblaze.com

The way my backups work at the moment is everything goes to my Synology, then my Synology sends everything up to Backblaze.

 

[jonKranked]

@binary visions good info. can you share what your synology setup is as well?

 

[Adventurous]

I have a Synology Diskstation as well.

@jonKranked yes, there is a cost for cloud backup. I currently backup using Backblaze B2. It's $0.005 per month, per gigabyte. $5/month per terabyte, which is very reasonable. There is a cost to restore data, but you hope that this is a disaster occurrence so paying something to restore shouldn't be a big deal.

Another nice thing about Backblaze is you can order a drive shipped to your house with your data on it. So you don't have to wait for your multi-terabyte download if you don't want.

Cloud Storage Pricing Comparison: Calculate Your Costs

Quickly calculate and compare cloud storage costs from AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and Backblaze B2.

www.backblaze.com

The way my backups work at the moment is everything goes to my Synology, then my Synology sends everything up to Backblaze.

Exactly how I have mine setup. Took a little to figure out how to set it up, as I'm not super tech savvy, but probably only took a few hours.

I've never needed to fetch data from Backblaze, but it always feels like a matter of when, not if, I'll lose a drive. That and it's nice not having to plug 8 different external drives into my computer once a month so Backblaze can recognize their validity.

 

[binary visions]

@binary visions good info. can you share what your synology setup is as well?

It's a DS1019+ with 5x 8tb drives in it.

The + models have Intel processors in them so you can do stuff like hardware-based video transcoding - I have a large Plex library with movies and TV shows in it, so I can stream to my computers/mobile devices. This lets my NAS transcode videos on the fly, so the video might be very high quality 1080p, but gets sent to my phone as a downscaled 720p to save on bandwidth.

Note that hardware video transcoding in Plex requires Plex Pass which is a non-free service. It's not required if the device you're playing can just directly stream the video you want, and this may not be relevant for you anyway. It's nice for me because I'm traveling so I can stream stuff over sketchy internet connections.

 

[jonKranked]

It's a DS1019+ with 5x 8tb drives in it.

The + models have Intel processors in them so you can do stuff like hardware-based video transcoding - I have a large Plex library with movies and TV shows in it, so I can stream to my computers/mobile devices. This lets my NAS transcode videos on the fly, so the video might be very high quality 1080p, but gets sent to my phone as a downscaled 720p to save on bandwidth.

Note that hardware video transcoding in Plex requires Plex Pass which is a non-free service. It's not required if the device you're playing can just directly stream the video you want, and this may not be relevant for you anyway. It's nice for me because I'm traveling so I can stream stuff over sketchy internet connections.

good info. the NAS aspects are nice, but not core features i'm after. any video streaming would be done on my home LAN. it sounds like you and @Adventurous both recommend the synology? it sounds like what i'm after, buy the system and add harddrives.

 

[binary visions]

I like the Synology because they have the most comprehensive OS/utilities. There are cheaper ways to do it, and I've heard good things about QNAP, but at the end of the day the Synology supported the most things that I wanted to do and appeared to have the most flexibility.

 

[Adventurous]

good info. the NAS aspects are nice, but not core features i'm after. any video streaming would be done on my home LAN. it sounds like you and @Adventurous both recommend the synology? it sounds like what i'm after, buy the system and add harddrives.

Synology seemed like the most straightforward option, and came highly recommended from my bro who is an IT manager. Ratings were good at both Amazon and B&H, so who am I to question those who obviously know oodles more than I about the subject?

Just keep in mind that should you choose do to a RAID 5 array, you'll need at least 3 disks. Also also, Synology has their own backup protocol called "SHR" that is approximately equivalent to RAID 5, albeit with some pros/cons. In my case, the pros outweigh the cons, so that is what I am running.

 

[jonKranked]

Synology seemed like the most straightforward option, and came highly recommended from my bro who is an IT manager. Ratings were good at both Amazon and B&H, so who am I to question those who obviously know oodles more than I about the subject?

Just keep in mind that should you choose do to a RAID 5 array, you'll need at least 3 disks. Also also, Synology has their own backup protocol called "SHR" that is approximately equivalent to RAID 5, albeit with some pros/cons. In my case, the pros outweigh the cons, so that is what I am running.

yea i figured i'd need 3-4 drives.