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Online Backup Services


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Well, hello there. I have been researching on online backup services for the past two weeks because I am now considering using one. However, before I give a company all my personal information I would like to know feedback from people who might have used a specific company and whether it really is a good choice.

I've read all major, well known online backup services websites or at least as much as I could and I made a comparison chart on Excel to then narrow down which could be the best company for my own needs. But I'd like to get some input and maybe I could get more info about something I hadn't considered at all.

Feel free to download the .xlsx file and edit it, just please upload it and post here with changes you thought were necessary and helpful to share with all Neowin members.

Excel file

These are the services that fit my needs because they all support back up for mapped drives (i.e. external hard drive), support versioning and most of them even archival.

Backblaze

Jungledisk

Livedrive

Mozy

SpiderOak

I fell in love with CrashPlan and MiMedia, especially mimedia, but they're either too pricey or they don't support external HDD. :cry:

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sorry I got no time right now for answering longer, but I had the same problem some weeks ago - have a look at Crashplan, I think it's the best, or Mozy.

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Here is my take on offsite backup services such as what you have mentioned. About a year ago, I tried Mozy due to recommendations and based on my research.

From the standpoint of backing up data, they do totally rock and can make your life easier in the event of having an offsite backup solution in the event of catastrophic loss (Fire, theft, flood etc). The initial backup will take quite some time unless you have a huge upload pipe bandwidth level. Otherwise, plan on it taking up to a couple of days depending on your data you backup and the amount of system resources you allow it to have during the backup.

One major downfall I saw at least to both Mozy and Carbonite (I asked them about it), is let's assume that you are working on a mission critical job for a client or for yourself (doesn't matter really), and your data is lost at your workstation and no other backup medium is available or used. So, you are now looking at restoring your data back from your offsite backup service. Cool! Let's do it! You proceed to do this, but they tell you that instead of getting your normal download rate (in my case 20meg), you will not get your data for up to a week or two depending on the amount to restore. The reason?

Mozy and Carbonite will split your files into randomly named chunks over several different servers (in my case 12 chunks), spread over several data centers. Now, the software knows where each chunk is, but each data center only has one chunk for it's security and yours. Combine that with their own redundant backup source, and you should be good. But, even with pressing hard into them to get your files back, they can probably get your data burned and shipped overnight to you in a few days after they wrangle up all the techs to come in and motivate them somehow to grab your file chunks and send them to the master controller center for reassembly and processing. NO, it isn't made up! Somewhere here, I actually have some chat transcripts (Mozy has no phone support usually), that show what they told me about that. Crazy stuff!

As long as you don't have a critical need for files you are backing up and don't need a restore to happen the same day or maybe a week, then you are probably good to go with any service that you choose. I would actually rate Mozy very good over the others at least for me on the Mac by the way it integrated into my system (what I wanted), but I can't recommend any if they don't have a rapid response restore situation in the case of mission critical data.

For the average home user, it should be good and for most businesses just fine as long as nothing is needed to be recovered immediately.

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Get DropBox, you will love it.

Since it is not allowed to post referrals links in the forum; you might want to use the link I've sent to you mail here.

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Thank you very much for your feedback, first and foremost; I was feeling kinda lonely :rofl: . I have gone through many online backup services (see the excel file) and I have actually narrowed down which services would best fit my needs but the purpose of this thread was actually to get to know in a more in-depth level about each service based on people's experience, just like Medfordite (thanks a lot for your input!!!)

Unfortunately, I cannot consider using Dropbox because it only limits you up to 100GB, I need to backup around 500GB! (@TrOjAn thanks for the offer though!)

I look forward to read more feedback :)

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Unfortunately, I cannot consider using Dropbox because it only limits you up to 100GB, I need to backup around 500GB

support@dropbox.com will solve your problem; you can easily request your own 'package' and they will tell you the price you have to pay. :)

Once you tried DropBox, you will always use it! :yes:

EDIT: and they are planning to make higher packages in the near future. Here are the past requests from the members that were completed: https://www.dropbox.com/votebox#votebox:completed:0 I should at least give DB a try to see how it looks like, you'll love it and the prices are reasonable in my opinion

Edited by TrOjAn.
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I Think Dropbox is great for sending files but as far as Official Backup I dont think they should be considered. Drop-box is simply a way to transfer files between computers.

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