Crashplan exiting consumer market - the hunt for a new provider.

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#1851370 23-Aug-2017 16:13

jjnz1:

I am looking at CloudBerry Windows Server licences now along with Amazon Glacier 1TB storage. What has your experience been like? Are you doing full system backups or just certain files or both?

I am looking at doing both - a monthly full system (image) backup (160GB Windows drive), and instant (if changes occur) document backups (100GB drive) with versioning.

In your experience, would you recommend CloudBerry?

I back up files, not system images. CloudBerry works fine for that.

Glacier is an archiving solution, it's not particularly suitable for files that you expect to retrieve on a regular basis. Think of it as an automated tape library, which is what it might be. It takes 3-5 hours to restore a file from Glacier to online storage, then download time.

S3 IA (infrequent access) class is best for backups IMHO. It's cheaper than S3 standard but more expensive than Glacier, but you have real time access to files. You can actually store objects in S3 in the glacier storage class, which basically takes older files and stores them in glacier. Restore time is still 3-5 hours.

CloudBerry has worked well for me, though I've never had to do a big restore I've done test restores.

I think I'm actually going to change my daily S3 backup from their de-duplication, encrypted, compressed, incremental backups to a basic sync up to S3. I'll use S3 to provide encryption and version history. I don't care much about compression as most of my volume is uncompressed images and video. I'm considering doing this as I trust AWS more than I trust CloudBerry, if something goes wrong my files are all stored on S3 and can easily be downloaded.

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#1851379 23-Aug-2017 16:39

Hi folks... If you are planning on switching to Backblaze, please consider using our Geekzone affiliate link when signing up to Backblaze.

Thanks!

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#1851418 23-Aug-2017 18:00

How have you got backblaze going on windows server?

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#1851424 23-Aug-2017 18:12

davidcole: How have you got backblaze going on windows server?

You have to use something like Cloudberry or other integration plus B2. The Backblaze client is for desktop only.

Also, installed here to see how it goes:

I have other seven machines (two are servers but only want file backup, as the VMs are already managed by Altaro Backup).

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#1851435 23-Aug-2017 18:40

Looking through my Crashplan account only one machine would need Cloudberry Pro and the two servers would need Cloudberry Server. I am testing it with B2 storage as well now. sounds promising.

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#1851439 23-Aug-2017 18:57

Another one that I have used for about a year is zoolz.com (they have both on demand and cold storage plans)

Do a search for zoolz lifetime and you can get some nice deals. The program polls for changes of files and uploads the changes.

Also has version control via the website.

My setup is that I use a mix of services (that I have life time licenses too). I use pcloud for a network like drive which is encrypted before leaving my machine, I then point zoolz to backup the pcloud mapped drive.
Works well for me.

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#1851440 23-Aug-2017 18:58

Stu: I've opted to go with the Small Business offering for the time being. Full price won't kick in until April 2018 so there's plenty of time to see how the current alternatives progress. Migration was easy. Software upgraded itself as part of the process.

Did your upgrade go smoothly?

My subscription was 'expired' after the upgrade. I had to go through the checkout process to activate my trial just to get backups running again (outside of support hours). My account now says they will be billing me $A33 next month. Hopefully support can get that sorted out, but I expect problems. CrashPlan support hasn't exactly been stellar over the years.

Unfortunately, I'm well above the 5TB mark on one PC. That's another $60 wasted increasing my Internet speed for the next two months to complete 20TB of backups. Thanks CrashPlan!

Hoping LTO-7 drives will get a bit cheaper with the arrival of LTO-8. It's a huge investment to go to tape, but there seems to be a trend in online storage - imposition of caps on previously 'unlimited' services, if not outright closure. I think I'd be better off just doing a manual backup every few months, as most of my data is static.

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#1851468 23-Aug-2017 19:49

tripp:

Another one that I have used for about a year is zoolz.com (they have both on demand and cold storage plans)

Do a search for zoolz lifetime and you can get some nice deals. The program polls for changes of files and uploads the changes.

I'm not sure I trust places that have deals or do "lifetime" cheap. Storage, servers, networking, costs money. If they're doing lots of deals they may be relying on a constant stream of new subscribers to pay the bills.

Their free plan is 75GB, which is $0.52 per month on AWS. Multiply that by a million users and you're paying half a million dollars a month with no additional revenue.

Their starter plan, 500GB hot 100GB cold, costs $6.65 a month on AWS and they charge $20 a month. That's a steep mark up to add a nice interface, but may be sustainable.

I lost data to a very early "free online storage" vendor about 20 years ago. Z Drive or something, I think.

Stu

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#1851473 23-Aug-2017 19:56

SirHumphreyAppleby:

Stu: I've opted to go with the Small Business offering for the time being. Full price won't kick in until April 2018 so there's plenty of time to see how the current alternatives progress. Migration was easy. Software upgraded itself as part of the process.

Did your upgrade go smoothly?

Yes, no problems at all (knock on wood). Only one computer to migrate and less than 1TB of data. Thankfully I didn't get around to setting up their family account (I think it's up to five computers?), which was the plan this year.

People often mistake me for an adult because of my age.

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#1851490 23-Aug-2017 20:19

First looks into Backblaze, is certainly a different take on things.

I'm not quite a fan of the Must backup whole drives situation, Obviously i could go via a 3rd party client and B2 however.

Glad it is smart enough not to backup network drives by default, i came back from dinner with it wanting to upload a mare 9TB... my poor connections...

I may stick with Crashplan until i've improved my upstream to a stage that i'd be happy to start from scratch and upload EVERYTHING (excluding steam etc)

Alternatively, i could go B2, and likely drop my backup sizes a fair amount as there is actually more of a selected subset of data i keep stored.

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#1851507 23-Aug-2017 20:46

Yeah, pretty annoyed at this as I signed up for the family option so that I could install it for others and know that there was at least some sort of regular back-up being done. I know you can't rely on just one form, but one is better than none. So have signed for Backblaze, using the Geekzone referral code, so we shall see if that is a good option. So far, not so good. The indicative upload speed is 2 GB day and I am on 200/200 fibre! With 2 TB to back up, well, the maths don't look great at all. The whole reason I got the 200/200 fibre option was to enable fast upstream backups to the cloud. Maybe over-night when I am not using my iMac, things will improve. But if not, I will need to re-think my backup strategy. I know it took ages to do the original Crashplan backup - 5 weeks maybe - but once it was done, it has been pretty painless since. 2 GB a day upload is a simply not acceptable; even more so if download/restore speeds are similar. Sigh.

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#1851511 23-Aug-2017 20:52

It sounds like a lot of people are using a cloud backup program as their main or sole backup. That's not a great plan. In my opinion everyone should have a backup program doing incremental backups, with everything going to an external disk you store offsite, and a subset of that going to a cloud backup.

For example, I have at least 1TB of RAW and video files, personal and professional, spanning ten years. I have them on my PC, on a disk in my shed, and a disk at work. Why would they need to be backed up in the cloud? They don't, they're on three disks in two locations. On those disks I also have RAW versions, and on Glacier I have medium sized jpeg versions to fight format obsolescence. Pretty sure I have DNG somewhere as well.

I also have a backups folder, things like system images, most of that doesn't need to go to the cloud either. Neither does things like my music collection, which are largely static.

What I backup to the cloud is recent images (past few months that aren't offsite yet), documents, and financials.

That won't suit everyone, but I think the strategy of everything on disk, key stuff in cloud would make cloud backups viable for more people.

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#1851514 23-Aug-2017 20:57

I'm switching to the small business account for now and removing devices that I don't really need backed up. It will be free for the next two months and then US$10 per month until October 2018. After that it will be US$40 per month but I'll find a replacement before then.

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#1851526 23-Aug-2017 21:13

timmmay:

It sounds like a lot of people are using a cloud backup program as their main or sole backup. That's not a great plan. In my opinion everyone should have a backup program doing incremental backups, with everything going to an external disk you store offsite, and a subset of that going to a cloud backup.

For example, I have at least 1TB of RAW and video files, personal and professional, spanning ten years. I have them on my PC, on a disk in my shed, and a disk at work. Why would they need to be backed up in the cloud? They don't, they're on three disks in two locations. On those disks I also have RAW versions, and on Glacier I have medium sized jpeg versions to fight format obsolescence. Pretty sure I have DNG somewhere as well.

I also have a backups folder, things like system images, most of that doesn't need to go to the cloud either. Neither does things like my music collection, which are largely static.

What I backup to the cloud is recent images (past few months that aren't offsite yet), documents, and financials.

That won't suit everyone, but I think the strategy of everything on disk, key stuff in cloud would make cloud backups viable for more people.

I get this, and I certainly follow a similar regime for myself of having multiple layers of backup. Maybe I am backing up too much to the cloud in addition to other places/devices, i.e. Time Machine and disk cloning via Carbon Copy Cloner. And this without mentioning any of the "sync" options I use such as iCloud or Dropbox. But for the issues faced by the average non-geek user are very different. In my experience they don't even want to think about this and their eyes glaze over so quickly when you start to discuss backup strategies. They want simple, no fuss, no bother. Maybe their expectations can't be met, by the advantage of something like Crashplan, and maybe Backblaze, is that it takes away all of that complexity and provides at least some form of backup, and peace of mind. Not sure what the answer is, but expecting the average user to implement and manage a multi-layered backup strategy is simply not gonna happen. I mean, who hasn't had this experience: User: "Where is my file?", Me: "What folder did you save it in?" User, "How would I know? Where is my file?"

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#1851531 23-Aug-2017 21:18

Tinshed:

I get this, and I certainly follow a similar regime for myself of having multiple layers of backup. Maybe I am backing up too much to the cloud in addition to other places/devices, i.e. Time Machine and disk cloning via Carbon Copy Cloner. And this without mentioning any of the "sync" options I use such as iCloud or Dropbox. But for the issues faced by the average non-geek user are very different. In my experience they don't even want to think about this and their eyes glaze over so quickly when you start to discuss backup strategies. They want simple, no fuss, no bother. Maybe their expectations can't be met, by the advantage of something like Crashplan, and maybe Backblaze, is that it takes away all of that complexity and provides at least some form of backup, and peace of mind. Not sure what the answer is, but expecting the average user to implement and manage a multi-layered backup strategy is simply not gonna happen. I mean, who hasn't had this experience: User: "Where is my file?", Me: "What folder did you save it in?" User, "How would I know? Where is my file?"

Yeah agreed about the average user. That's why CrashPlan was good, and why BackBlaze is an acceptable substitute at best. Maybe someone should look at other online backup providers that do better versioning - I have a review of a few on one of my websites, but I don't much need them as I roll my own.

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