srt101fan

I have followed previous UHH topics on backup software with interest. I have been manually backing up my data to external drives. Postings on UHH convinced me that I should add cloud backup to what I have been doing. I looked into Backblaze and Carbonite.

I keep data on several external drives as well as my laptop hard drive. The Carbonite basic plan does not include external drive backups, but includes an option to add one external drive at additional cost. You have to go to their business plans to be able to do backups of multiple external drives. I believe that Carbonite is a good company and sells a good product. But it is much more expensive than Backblaze when you add in external drives.

I am currently signed up to a Backblaze 15-day trial. Backblaze can back up multiple external drives as part of their basic plan. I wasn't really sure how the cloud backup would work. Well it works great! And it is very simple to set up and use. With the Help articles and questions answered by the support staff it was easy for me to learn how it works. The support responses via email have been outstanding - fast turnaround and comprehensive. I haven't tested the restore function but will do so as part of the trial.

Bottom line is that I will buy the Backblaze basic plan.

(No, I have no affiliation with the company; just a satisfied customer!)

LWW Loc: Banana Republic of America

Showing my naïveté here, but how does this differ from Apple’s time machine?

DaveJ Loc: NE Missouri

I have been using Backblaze basic since last October. Started with the free trial, then paid for it month by month for two months, it seemed to work fine, so I went ahead to save some money and paid for 2 years to get the rate down to $4.58 per month. I have not tried the recover function and hope not to. I have a laptop and two hard drives. It works in the background for me.

srt101fan

I'm not familiar with Apple computers and software. Somebody should be able to answer you.

LWW Loc: Banana Republic of America

It requires two drives, but daily backs up one drive to the other.

Photomac Loc: The Dalles, Or

Apple time machine is an in house software program that backs up your entire computer system directed to where you want it. I suspect most of us are backing up to multiple external hard drives on site with a safety one for off site storage, ie., bank vault etc.

jeep_daddy Loc: Prescott AZ

Time Machine is Apple's built in software used to create a backup of the internal computers hard drive to an external hard drive. This backup is typically used so that if your computers hard drive fails, you can install a new drive and simply restore it back to the way it was. It's not really intended to restore files individually.

The backup systems that the OP is talking about are cloud based and backup your computers "drives" over the internet to servers (i.e. big computers) owned by Carbonite and/or Backblaze. So instead of having an external drive sitting next to your computer that is subject to failure, theft, fire etc., you rely on a company's owned computers to keep your data safe.

The drawback to using cloud based backups is that 1. it costs money 2. it's very slow and depends on your internet connections speed, your modem speed, and the speed or bandwidth of the company's computers system that you are backing up to. 3. The cloud could be hacked or they could go out of business or they could corrupt your data. 4. restoring your files is VERY slow and sometimes very complicated.

Most of the time you can't simply use their cloud services to just search for a particular file and restore it. I'm not saying this about all of them, but some of them it's either difficult to do or impossible to do.

Restoring files via "Timemachine" is also cumbersome. You will have a hard time or impossible time finding one file and restoring it. This is because they don't write the backup "file for file". They use some other way of doing the backup that compresses the data.

Backing up to an external drive using simple file to file backups is fast and easy. If you accidentally delete a file from your computer, simply go to the external drive and the same exact file will be backed up in the same exact folder using the same structure as it was on your computer. Very simple and easy to access. But again, doing it this way could be troublesome if you have a fire or a theft of your equipment. So I suggest you purchase 2 external hard drives and make a copy of the first backup to the second one and then store the second one in a safe place. I store mine in a safe that is fire rated. Some choose to put them in a bank vault, their car, a relatives home etc.

Another way to keep data safe and not rely on the cloud is to use a RAID storage backup system like this one from Western Digital https://shop.westerndigital.com/solutions/raid
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1244352-REG/wd_wdbnfa0320kbk_nesn_my_cloud_pr4100_32tb.html?sts=pi&pim=Y

It can be setup to keep a backup of your data and inside the cabinet is has room for several hard drives that automatically backup each other. If one hard drive fails it lets you know, then start automatically backing up to another. Hot swap the failed drive and it will automatically restore it via the other drive that hasn't failed. All done while you sleep and it's automatic. Kind of expensive though.

This reply is meant to be an overview and not be super accurate on how things work. I'm not an expert and have done some reading about his in the past. Some of my knowledge is from past experience working on friends Macs and my own PC's. I have not done any recent research on this subject so things may have changed a little since then. So please, those of you who read my reply, don't get all over my case if there are some discrepancies. I apologize if there are, and there probably will be.

johngault007 Loc: Florida Panhandle

I have the Backblaze B2 service and couldn't agree more. I chose the B2 service because there is no limit on devices that can be backed up under that plan, and since I have multiple computers it was the cheaper option.

My backup plan is all in cronjobs (automated):
Daily backups - Locally with 14 snapshots saved (14 days of backups)
Weekly to Backblaze B2 - Offsite cloud storage with 14 snapshots saved (14 weeks of backups)

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

Permit me, with all due respect, to correct a few things.

1) with all the major cloud services that I’ve used that include Amazon S3, Google and Microsoft, the file structure in the cloud looks exactly like your file structure that you upload, with the exception that the path is different. You can access/restore a single file, a folder or the entire file system exactly as you would on an external drive

2) the upload speed is basically a nonissue unless you’re using a dog slow connection, such as DSL. The initial “seeding” of the cloud and future updates of new or changed files can be scheduled to run at night when you’re asleep or as a background task, so no effect on you even if the initial seeding takes weeks. If you have a LOT of data and a VERY slow connection, many services will allow you to send them a drive with your data.

3) if the worst happens and you need to restore more than a few files, then you’ve had a disaster of some kind such that your backup is non functional - it’s a last resort scenario. Remember that if that happens, you have options. First, remember that you can restore to anywhere with an internet connection. Secondly, Gbit Ethernet is becoming ubiquitous in most major areas and 100-200 Mb/sec is often available unless you live in the country, and you can often upgrade your service for one month to do the download in an emergency. Finally, many services will send you a hard drive with your data (which you can return after downloading). Just for reference, assuming Gbit Ethernet actually transfers data at half the specified speed or 500 Mb/sec, that’s about 60MB/sec, 3600 MB (3.6 GB)/min and 216 GBytes/hour or 5 about hours to download 1 TB. In short, Gbit Ethernet’s spec is very close to the spec’d speed of a conventional HD.

4) finally, there has never been a case of a major cloud provider going belly up, and only one that I know of for a 2nd/3rd tier provider (Nirvanix), and in that case, users were given over a month’s notice to move their data. As far as data being hacked, consider that hackers aren’t interested in sorting through tens of thousands of your files for that one nugget of useful information. They want a nice clean database with SSNs or credit card information from a company such as Equifax. In every case that I’ve seen investigated when an individual got hacked, it was user failure - poor password management (including single authentication), sloppy computing practices, etc. - those are the real dangers to your data.

Keep in mind that 2/3 of all US companies keep some of their data in the cloud, and the rest are headed that direction. Your medical records, military records, credit card information, banking information and even highly secure information form the NSA and CIA are already in the cloud. Remember, it’s your disaster recovery copy, not your only backup, and there’s no way you can possibly devise and implement a system as safe on your own.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

Cloud backup can be slow, so you should depend as much as possible on local backup.
Cloud backup is safer than your local backup so you should depend on the cloud for your backup backup.

srt101fan

Thank you, TriX for sharing your expertise and knowledge of cloud backups. With regard to the concerns regarding restore speeds, let me add that Blackblaze allows restoration of individual files or groups of files. You can get them as downloads (zip files) or as mailed USB drives. There is a cost associated with the latter but you get a refund when you return the drive.

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

You are welcome of course and thanks for the additional information on Backblaze. As many times as I’ve defended the cloud on UHH, you’d think that I work for a cloud storage company (I don’t). it’s just that at the storage companies I worked for and the clients we sold to, data loss was considered a capital crime, and I know how a good DR strategy can save your a$$.

Cheers

chrissybabe Loc: New Zealand

Now what happens if the major disaster of some kind is the San Andreas Fault slipping big time ?
So we have no internet connectability of any kind and those that do are certainly not functioning very fast because everything is being used to get food back on the table.
And we have 200,000 people all trying to do the same thing as you where business's will be getting priority.
And probably rolling power cuts. And no way of checking even whether the online company has managed to keep backup copies since their main server room dropped into a hole. And PCs and parts almost non existant which may be important because yours got zapped by a power spike. I can see months, if not years, sorting all this out.

I know this sounds extreme but isn't this a disaster ? That you were protecting against.
I suspect if this happens that maybe restoring your photos is the least of your worries but after you have eaten your first meal, finally managed to get your computer working in spite of the power cuts, etc etc you can see just how hard this is all going to be.

On the other hand if you happened to have a copy of all your files on extra hard drives that are powered off during most of the time except during your usual backups (I am not counting the problems you will be having if the fault slips during a backup although I should) then you have one less problem to worry about.

It might be suggested that if the above happened then you might be quite prepared to just forget about the photos. And just sacrifice the years of payments and all the time spent keeping it all working. This would be understandable of course but I can only say why did you bother in the first case ?

Or am I just a total pessimist ? The product of a household where my father grew up through the depression and kept his WWII issued gasmask just in case ?

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

As has been mentioned many times, cloud backup is only a part of your strategy. Local storage is equally important.

In your scenario, I would not expect a quick recovery but it will still be possible assuming you survive all that.

srt101fan

It's comments from you, TriX and others that led me to look into cloud backup. I used to back up manually (drag & drop) to one external drive, with partial backup of important data to a flash drive kept at the bank.

And then my computer's hard drive (less than 3 years old!) crashed... got me thinking! I had my data (at least most of it!) backed up to my external drive. But what if something happened to that external drive while I was without my computer? The remotely stored flash drive has a partial backup, but, being remote doesn't get updated all that often.

After rereading past UHH topics on backing up I decided it was time for the cloud. No turning on/off - backups take place whenever the computer is running. Easy to see what's been backed up. Easy to exclude folders you don't want to back up to the cloud. Restoring data seems to be simple and straightforward....

I figure $60 a year is a bargain for the peace of mind I'm getting....

Edit: Of course I'm also going to continue using external drives for backup!!