Recommendation for a good cloud service

[sleepybrown]

Hello,

I'e been playing around with cloud services for quite some time, and prior to the cloud computing explosion, I used to backup my work to a webserver. I havent done that stuff in about a year now, but what I'm looking for seems hard to find. I had a wd 2tb that had died on me (No more WD green series, heck sata drives for me have been a lot less reliable ) and I lost a good amount of data. I wanted to know if there were any cloud services I can backup a good few terabytes onto without having to get a second job. Is there another remote solution I can try? I was thinking the old web hosting trick but usually you get only 200-500gb of storage. Any input would be gladly appreciated.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

I'd encourage you to grit your teeth and backup locally, regardless of past experience with hard drive failure.

Cloud services not only cost money, they are also quite slow from what I have heard. If you are talking terabytes, it may take days or weeks to get it all uploaded.

Personally, I wouldn't want my backups to be dependent on a net connection.

In the long run, I think a local hard drive is likely the least expensive choice. And the fastest.

 

[Sir George]

I'd encourage you to grit your teeth and backup locally, regardless of past experience with hard drive failure.

Cloud services not only cost money, they are also quite slow from what I have heard. If you are talking terabytes, it may take days or weeks to get it all uploaded.

Personally, I wouldn't want my backups to be dependent on a net connection.

In the long run, I think a local hard drive is likely the least expensive choice. And the fastest.

+1 for using a local hard drive for the reasons stated.

 

[sleepybrown]

I was definitely thinking it would be a snail trail. Especially because of the amount of data, but didn't know how to rate it since I'm used to ftp speeds. Ill absolutely give it a shot. it's not worth the price per gb yet for cloud storage from the last round of research I have done. A lot of blogs and articles confuse tb and gb apparently. I know it's pushing the post in another direction, but what's the best solution I should use? I have a spare desktop, and I do want to buy a hitach 3tb, possibly 2-4 eventually to pull a 6tb mirror. My current setup as a 2tb, a 1tb, a 500gb, and I'm looking to pick up a 3tb.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

While cloud back ups have their place and can be valuable, you don't want to solely depend on them. You should, at a bare minumum, have two backups: local and offsite. That way, if one fails or is destroyed, the other one will still be available. By having one backup offsite, if a computer and the local backups are stolen or destroyed by disaster, such as fire, the offsite backup will survive. It should be considered a very last resort only.

As ignatzatsonic (curious name) pointed out, most cloud back up services are slow, both to upload and download. The ones that allow you to have quick recovery of data (business plans) are extremely expensive and usually charge by the GB. Less expensive unlimited plans are more reasonably priced but initial backuops can take days. Large backups are usually throttled, making them even slower. Their only real advantage is automatic, nearly instant offsite backups. Most offsite backup schemes, such as storing them in a bank deposit box, are severly out of date. Even local backups can be out of date unless the media they are stored on is connected to the computer all the time. The downside to that is a power surge, virus, etc. that can wipe out data on a computer could also do the same to the data on the back up media. That danger is reduced with a cloud backup service, especially one that supports versioning.

The only encrupted cloud back up service I am aware of that approaches being reliable at a reasonable cost is Carbonite (yes, I use it). Mozy no longer has unlimited backups. CrashPlan has had problems with their servers although they have an encrypted free plan that would allow backing up via the internet to another computer (such as friend's). The initial back up will take seemingly forever but, unless you deal with huge amounts of data on a daily basis, once the intial backup is completed, back ups occur fairly quickly in the background. Carbonite will back up only data so you can't use it to restore an OS. Additional, non-cloud back ups are essential due to the unreasonable amount of time it takes to recover large amounts of data. Cloud back ups only ensure that you are most likely to have your most recent data backed up at all times.