Ask HN: What's your favorite online-backup tool?
It's almost 2011, and my backup solution still calls for semi-regular huddles between my laptop and a few external drives, which I randomly scatter between home and school for redundancy. This is pretty low-tech, all things considered, and I'd like to enter the future. Right now at best I have a hodgepodge of things that I will try to upload to Google Docs or suchlike. Not so pretty!
Where to start? I could set up from cron scripts and buy Amazon S3 space, but that really doesn't seem to be the most elegant solution (perhaps for some software projects, but not for a personal basis).
Options I'm familiar with are, most prominently, Mozy (mozy.com) and Carbonite (carbonite.com). I guess using something like Dropbox could fulfill this need to some extent as well.
Would love to hear feedback about these services for automated backups and any other alternatives I should consider.
Thanks!
88 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadNot cheap, ($.80gb/month) but bulletproof, and about as hacker-friendly as it gets. As you may be entirely unsurprised to hear, you can use rsync with it, as well as sftp, webdav, etc, etc, etc.
What I really need backed up: - Documents (~5GB) - Photos (~20GB)
What I would _like_ backed up includes everything to do a full drive recovery, but beyond that, music [40 GB] and other harder-to-replace things.
If I can't backup all my backups, that's fine, but I think under even the bare-bones situation, rsync would be outside my budget :)
The difference here is that the important stuff is also on those drives. "Importance" here means how many times it's replicated, and how far apart the backups are.
It uses Amazon S3 for storage, has versioned backups, very lightweight and fast, and leaves all Mac metadata/permissions intact. I've had 0 crashes or problems in a year of constant use.
They also supply an opensource tool you can use to restore your backups, in the event that you don't have access to your licensed copy of Arq (like if your laptop gets stolen)
But to be really honest with you, I'm considering leaving ADrive for my own external HD only. That's the safest, not always easiest, solution.
Transfers are encrypted, de-duplicated and compressed, supports file versioning and it all works very well.
The only downside I've had is that their Java client uses a lot of memory both on my OS X and Linux boxes (haven't tried Windows) - It's using nearly 600Mb of resident memory right now.
I also love the fact that you get email alerts about the backup status for every destination (in one email) local or to remote.
I've been extremely happy with the service. It keeps multiple versions of files and backs them up continuously if you have CrashPlan+. This has already saved my bacon more than once.
The icing on the cake is that you can designate some storage as a backup well of sorts and have your family (or other computers) back up to this destination. This is very easy to setup and has worked flawlessly for me, no networking or "what is my ip" voodoo.
I admit their product offering is a bit confusing. It does make sense though:
You can install CrashPlan (the regular, free version) on any number of computers and set them up to back to each other/external drives/ftp/etc. This works wonders for family computers, for example. At this point its all free.
If thats not enough for you you can buy the "Plus" version of the software that offers continuous backup, stronger encryption, etc. This is where it stops being free; you're down something like $60 for the software.
Regardless of which version of the software you use, however, you can pay for CrashPlan Central, which is effectively another backup destination that happens to be on their servers, this is the "online" portion of their offering. The cost is more or less on part with the Mozys out there.
So technically if you are OK with backing up just between your existing machines and you don't need up to the minute backups, their free offering will work just fine for you and it works well.
I have a Mac Pro with 5+TB of storage. Lots of HD home videos and photos.
I can't imagine storing personal files and photos somewhere "out there", managed by someone else, in readable form.
Seriously, how do you Dropbox (etc) fans sleep at night?
I don't particularly have many concerns with the security of Dropbox, but I do keep some personally sensitive information on there, and TrueCrypt is how I sleep at night.
It does get to be too painful sometimes.
This would destroy the secure model of tarsnap. If you truly want this then don't use tarsnap use dropbox.
In my (very) limited knowledge - I am able to do retrieve backups on my machine using my key, which I supply to the command line. I was thinking of how it would work in a web based environment. Perhaps I could copy paste my key into a textbox, and I could retrieve my backups from a webpage. This would only last for the session (tarsnap would not store the key).
I know that you can think of a million ways that this can be exploited, but that is MY cross to bear. If I am prepared to do this, because I need immediate access to my backups from another machine - then please let me do this (basically, give me a way to access and create my backups in less than two steps).
I personally do believe that this would be a killer feature.
(Honest questions -- I don't use Dropbox, so don't know.)
Besides, there is much more to cryptography and building a secured system than just using that crypto suit or another (e.g. AES256-HMAC-SHA256 etc.)
I love my users.
can some people chime in with a multimachine option that also allowsaccess by smartphone?
Other than that I can warmly recommend JungleDisk ( https://www.jungledisk.com/ ), been using it do backup my source code and documents for about a year now without any major problems. I don't even notice it runs anymore. I'm using it with the S3 backend.
It was only after a total failure that they realized the gpg keys to decrypt the backup were only contained _in_ the backup. Their test restores before were happily using keys from the user's home directory.
This is one of the many reasons it makes sense to have a company that specializes in backups help you with backups. :)
(I cofounded SpiderOak)
http://code.google.com/p/duplicati/
Their 1.0 release is out and works excellently with S3. It can't be set up as a Windows service yet, but that functionality is on its way.
For Linux, my favorite is another free utility called Amanda Network Backup:
http://amanda.org/
Supports S3 and MySQL backups. Really easy to set up and has commercial support if you need it.
It's also quite cheap.
I previously used Mozy, which was excellent, but only does backup. Mozy was much more efficient over the wire, better at notifications and better about resuming very large backup sets. But unfortunately doesn't do synced folders and the rest.
I wanted to like Mozy but the mac client crashed on me and the uploads were slow.
iDrive gives you 150gb for $5/month. Plus the mac client is reliable, the uploads are quick, and they let multiple computers share space if you want.
I switched from Mozy because the client was much more efficient. If you're looking at Mozy and Carbonite, definitely check out Backblaze.
(Also, I met the CEO a few years back--seemed like a smart guy).
Nowadays, I keep most of my stuff backed up locally on external hard-drives, but also started using dropbox recently for smallish set of files (sharing, mostly, but serves as a backup of sorts as well).
We now try to get people set up with Carbonite, mostly because of its pricing, ease-of-use, and compatibility with most platforms.
I'd love to find something with a good white-label reseller program, but no luck so far.
(I cofounded SpiderOak in 2006.)
We were looking for an offer where we would handle support and invoicing of our clients, with compatibility for Windows and Mac, while being able to keep costs under $10/month/client. We're happy to tell our clients about the service we're using.
Pretty much everything seemed to break on one of those points; either the service wanted to do the invoicing, or it was prohibitively expensive.
I posted a blog post about using it on server - http://www.yepcorp.com/blogs/pavel-karoukin/simple-backup-so...
I am using it to backup both my dedicated server and laptop.
Basically, this is bash script with config file and some dependencies to Perl libraries to upload files to S3. Since it's bash script - it's very customizable.
see: http://harijan.wordpress.com/2009/04/27/the-real-backblaze-b...
what the author does not make clear is the statement: "the bzfileids.dat is causing my computer to stop."
this is how i found the article originally, the bzfileids.dat on my computer was too large and at that point the only solution is to reinstall the software. which invalidates your old backups and they are purged after 30 days.
I've never compared; I just use the first one someone invited me to use. 5GB free.
AltDrive has a free two month trial for either home or business users. You can control your own encryption key too. It is highly secure and uses AES-256 EAX mode encryption. It works in Windows, OSX, Linux. Plus other OSs for business users. It is easy to use and is full featured. There is also a white label offering for the business service.
Check it out. http://altdrive.com I'm always looking for feedback of any kind that would help improve it.