Solutions for off-site backup strategies?

richnrockville,

Thank you for the thoughtful reply to my post. I understand what you are saying about Mozy and reliability, because I have had good experience with them.

However, I have been looking for just a little while now and found more competitive pricing. Just the data I have on my HDD now, which is not even half, is at 169 GB, which, under Mozy's pricing, would be over $30 monthly. I have found other providers that will give the same for $14.95 for one company, and the other company is $8.99 and under for unlimited storage space.

The problem with that is, as you said, reliability. I went back to reload their pricing page, and it failed to load, even after several tries. Yes, there may be a good reason for this, or they may be major flakes.

I would like some reasonable compromise between $5 and $35 monthly. At some point, it becomes un-worth it. Because, most of my data is sentimental, so I am not that concerned with encryption, although one company had a good policy whereby it was all encrypted before it was sent, so that their employees never saw the data...

Also, can you (or anyone else) please comment on this? One of the plans had a cap of either 1 GB or 4 GB per upload. Why would they have this? It just seems like a rather odd restriction, which, although probably not a big deal, would become a stickler just when you had that 4.1 GB file to upload by yesterday!

What about this, also? Could someone write a program that would make a RAID array out of all of the free storage services, such that my 169 GB of data could be spread in increments over all of the free services, thus costing me nothing. And, with a redundant system, could offer a full backup even if one of the services went offline or out of business. Hmmm.. Who would be able to write such a program?

One thing to remember about price, good, cheap and reliable do not necessarily go together.

I have a few external Laptop drives in external cases where I copy off all my critical data as well as store an image of my C drive on a weekly basis. I then can take these drives offsite which makes me feel good.

I use Acronis home backup to create the images as it only costs around $25 for the latest versions which works fine on my laptop and desktop machines. I buy mine from ugr.com as a user group member, they give a price break.

Rich

Hello richnrockville and everyone else who has posted helpfully,

Last night I stayed up until about 6 a.m. this morning looking at all of the online backup services that I could find, as listed in a Wikipedia chart, that offered unlimited backup.

I narrowed the selection down to the following choices, based mainly on competitive pricing and unlimited data, in no particular order:

• Backblaze
• Livedrive
• Carbonite; and
• Crashplan

Based on the fact that Crashplan offers a reduced rate, down to $6 monthly for 2-10 computers and for unlimited data, when paid 4 years in advance. I thought that I would try this, and then if I liked it, I would pay for the 4 years, and also add my family members to the plan, and it would be a great deal for less than $300 every 4 years...

However, when I explained this to my partner today, he said, "Absolutely NOT!" (He did not even know we were paying for Mozy.) He is surprisingly paranoid about having his data in an unknown data center, and says that he would rather spend the money on backkup hardware that we would own, or toys for himself.

So, I will probably just find a free provider for low data amount, and use that on my laptop for my working files, and for my 2 TB HDD, I will figure out some hardware based solution, perhaps buying another 2 -2 TB HDDs at less than $200 total, and then copying the data in A-B-C rotation, with one of them being left at my mom's house.

Thanks for all the helpful comments and input. I will go back and give rep where indicated, and where the system will allow me.

Take good care,

~Antonio