[Scurry]

So I am realizing most of my data, some of which is very important (portfolio, student work, photos) all resides in my apartment. I really dont want to come home to find out a drunk guy on the second floor passed out with a cigarette and torched all of my hard work. I have copies of some stuff at my parents house, but I dont update very often.

I have over 200gb of data I would like to back up, mostly photos. I work in aperture for my photography, and dont really delete, but sort. It would be a big hassle to go back and delete now. I have some stuff on the free part of google drive, but what would people recommend for online storage?

I was looking at paying more for google drive, $20 a month, Id rather spend less. I looked at Amazon's Glacier at $2 a month for 200 gb, but aperture librarys are really just 1 file, so each time uploaded I would be replacing a 50 gb+ file, and I imagine that would take a while on there. I was considering time machine to something, but im not really sure about that, most 100gb of photos is on externals.

Any thoughts?

 

[eaterofdog]

Have two backup drives. Keep one in your car at all times.

 

[Scurry]

Have two backup drives. Keep one in your car at all times.

Not a bad idea, I didnt think of that. But does cold heat kill drives? I have a Lacie Tough drive that might fit the bill.

 

[binary visions]

I have been using Backblaze (www.backblaze.com). It's inexpensive, and if you experience a failure, you can pay $100 to have a hard drive mailed to you with your stuff on it, which is nice if you don't want to wait for the download.

I am going to be switching to Crashplan (www.crashplan.com), because it supports file versioning and has a nice feature where another Crashplan user can accept your backups. I'm going to set it up so my dad and I are backing up each others' files, and a backup will go to Crashplan's servers as well. That way we each have a local backup of the other's data, making it easy to do the initial several-hundred-gig sync locally, then mail the drive... and if there's a failure, we can just mail the drive to the other.

Crashplan supports block-level backup from what I can tell, so it won't re-upload the entire file, just the portion that changed.

 

[bean]

Backblaze. It's $5 a month for unlimited storage for a single computer and dead simple to use. The initial back up will take a while (mine was something like three or four weeks for 500 GB of files) but after that most changes move up pretty quickly. If you need to restore, they'll send your files on external HDDs so you don't have to download everything.

I also keep local backups on external drives. Restoring from those is faster than downloading or having drives shipped. I treat Backblaze as the backup for my backups.

 

[binary visions]

Also, never trust a couple hard drives as your primary backup.

They are not being monitored regularly, so you have no idea when they will fail. You could easily end up in the situation where, say, there was an electrical problem or a flood or a theft at your house and your PC/backup drives are gone. Then, when you plug in the drive you kept in your car or at work, you hear "click...click...click..."

Drives are great for convenience. But getting the data onto an active server where drive failures are seen and corrected is important.

 

[eaterofdog]

He's pushing a 50 GB+ file? So he'll get a backup maybe every couple weeks and it NEVER stops backing up. Lovely setup.

Not a bad idea, I didnt think of that. But does cold heat kill drives? I have a Lacie Tough drive that might fit the bill.

Cold is no problem. Just let it get up to room temp before using. Heat is fine unless you mean a Phoenix parking lot in the summer.

 

[binary visions]

He's pushing a 50 GB+ file? So he'll get a backup maybe every couple weeks and it NEVER stops backing up. Lovely setup.

Crashplan supports block-level backup from what I can tell, so it won't re-upload the entire file, just the portion that changed.

 

[Scurry]

He's pushing a 50 GB+ file? So he'll get a backup maybe every couple weeks and it NEVER stops backing up. Lovely setup.



Cold is no problem. Just let it get up to room temp before using. Heat is fine unless you mean a Phoenix parking lot in the summer.

Well, Aperture makes a odd file structure. It is one file, but you can get into the structure. If you use time machine to back up its pretty quick, it only changes the files that change. But otherwise it would be too much of a hassle to find the files you changed. Black Blaze supports time machine, I think it might be the way to go for me. In theory, I can have my externals plugged in and they will get synced with the rest of my time machine. I have to check about that though.

 

[bean]

The Aperture library isn't truly one file. It's really a directory that contains multiple files. Apple likes to do this. .app and .pkg files are also unix directories that are shown to the user as files. Anyhow, Backblaze can update this without uploading the entire thing.

 

[$tinkle]

I am going to be switching to Crashplan (www.crashplan.com), because it supports file versioning

DEC VMS?

b/c that would rule

 

[binary visions]

When I was doing contracting work several years ago I found a customer that was still using VMS for some piece of proprietary software where the vendor went out of business and they didn't want to switch to anything else.

I told the owner if they waited too long, there might not be a migration path. He informed me that he planned on retiring that year, so he didn't give a sh*t. Not much arguing with that logic