Musings on rolling your own remote "cloud" backups and general backups

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#1796595 8-Jun-2017 12:52

Looks like further proof that I'm not very good at making decisions - Cloudberry does this, ARQ does that, maybe I should try Backblaze or Crashplan, Backblaze seems to be opt-out, Crashplan opt-in.

Would you happen to know if Amazon Cloud has storage in Australia or at least fairly local ?

Thanks for the info, and for pointing out Cloudberry is $30, I managed to go to the server pricing and thought it was $120.

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#1796599 8-Jun-2017 12:58

rb99:

Looks like further proof that I'm not very good at making decisions - Cloudberry does this, ARQ does that, maybe I should try Backblaze or Crashplan, Backblaze seems to be opt-out, Crashplan opt-in.

Would you happen to know if Amazon Cloud has storage in Australia or at least fairly local ?

Thanks for the info, and for pointing out Cloudberry is $30, I managed to go to the server pricing and thought it was $120.

"Amazon Cloud" is a bit generic - do you mean "Amazon Drive"? AWS has storage in Sydney, but I don't know if Amazon Drive uses it. S3/Glacier definitely runs there, but they're raw storage not a consumer product. I use the USA regions as they're cheaper than Sydney, and I'm not in a hurry.

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#1796618 8-Jun-2017 13:23

Meant Amazon Drive, thinking sending stuff to AU may be a bit quicker.

Thinking (searching for) info on Google isn't worth the trouble. Was just looking at a thread and in that one thread someone says don't use Amazon Drive cos people are saying Amazon locks them out if they try to download lots (like terabytes) of stuff and someone else says don't use Crashplan cos updates often break it.

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” -John Kenneth Galbraith

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#1796629 8-Jun-2017 13:45

Amazon Drive does seem like more of a casual backup service. CrashPlan is good, people are always making stuff up about it, it's been 100% reliable for me for 2-3 years.

Are you trying to make your data available in another location, or back it up?

If you want an actual backup then you should consider CloudBerry Backup with BackBlaze B2. B2 is easy to set up and is about the cheapest online cloud storage around. S3 is a bit more expensive and is much more complex. I only tried B2 because 10GB is free, but it seems to work well. I back up the same data to S3 as B2.

Come to think of it, CloudBerry has a mode that basically mirrors data up to cloud storage as well, but that's not a backup, it's a copy.

rb99

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#1796739 8-Jun-2017 15:31

Mostly interested in just having some off site backup. There's nothing particularly critical, and its backup anyway, but its all in the same house (or room actually). Available in another location - not really.

I guess I'll just have to pick something and give it a trial, most likely Cloudberry or Crashplan.

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” -John Kenneth Galbraith

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#1796815 8-Jun-2017 16:58

What you have is copies, not backups. It has to be offsite and incremental to be a backup IMHO.

CrashPlan or BackBlaze = easy. CB Backup plus BackBlaze B2 can be made more secure and is cheaper for moderate data volumes.

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#1797068 9-Jun-2017 09:09

No surprise here ... http://www.aftvnews.com/amazon-kills-off-unlimited-storage-plan-for-their-cloud-drive/

I think they could see me coming...

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” -John Kenneth Galbraith

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#1797072 9-Jun-2017 09:16

I'm not a fan of unlimited, it relies on averages.

1TB in Amazon Drive is US$60 per year. In S3 IA class it's US$150, S3 standard is US$283. So either the Amazon Drive is pricing with the market and losing money, or S3 is making a huge profit.

BackBlaze B2 is 1/4 the price of S3 standard, 1/2 the price of S3 IA, and B2 is much less complex to administer / manage.

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#1797080 9-Jun-2017 09:35

I guess with either Backblaze or Crashplan their unlimited ones can disappear at any time (see Amazon) but they are still there for now. Does B2 have any advantage for the boringly average user like me, except I guess I save money (with B2) if I put less than a Terabyte online and 'loose' it with more than a Terabyte. B2 says its 'high performance', don't know if that means anything.

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” -John Kenneth Galbraith

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#1797090 9-Jun-2017 09:53

For most people the complexity of software + self provisioned storage makes CrashPlan or BackBlaze backup services a better option. If your data storage is less than 500GB then it's cheaper first year to use CloudBerry + B2. Once you own the software 1TB is the break even point.

For advanced users you get a couple of advantages:

Because you can prevent deletion of files on the server, or use versioning to allow deletion but retain old data, you're protected against a theoretical virus that specifically targets cloud backup providers like BB/CP. If you put a password on CrashPlan on your PC this gives some protection against the vulnerability, but a virus could still target the service rather than the UI. This is a highly theoretical advantage over a low probability event, verging on paranoia.
More flexibility - though CrashPlan is reasonably flexible.
Cheaper for smaller data volumes.
On-premise software like CloudBerry lets you backup to internal and external disks, giving you a tiered backup solution. CrashPlan does this free for your internal / external disks, but because it verifies the data on a disk every time it's connected it's much slower to run backups.

I'm running CrashPlan, but I've changed to monthly plans, and I plan to turn it off in a few months once I'm 100% happy with CloudBerry and my backup storage on S3. I have archives in Glacier as well, under a different access key.

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#1797991 11-Jun-2017 12:45

Crashplan and Backblaze work at their price points because they control the client. They can throttle data uploads and implement heavy client-side deduplication work to reduce their data storage costs, as well as even delete data unselected from backup sets (crashplan), delete files which haven't existed on the backup'd device for a few months (backblaze), or delete files from external drives not connected in a month (backblaze). Amazon and Google Drive have none of these strategies available. They can do dedup, but only on the server side. They also have stronger requirements for keeping files readily accessable than a pure backup product does, where files may only be accessed on a very rare basis.

I use Google Drive personally. I think it will have greater staying power than Amazon Drive, mainly because it's a pure business offering. Google is desperate to get G Suite into the business world, and deplace MS Office. If they have to subsidise Drive unlimited to do so, they will - they have been doing so since 2012.

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#1799156 13-Jun-2017 10:19

Though I'd have a 'quick' go at Backblaze before maybe Cloudberry and Amazon something/B2. Anyway for the last 3 days its uploaded 28/34/35GB per day. Does this seem reasonable/good/so and so does it twice as fast ? That would be about a month per TB. Am on 100/20 fibre and Backblaze says it can do 157GB/day at 15.5mbits/sec. I guess thats its theoretical fastest or it sends stuff in bursts.

“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” -John Kenneth Galbraith

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#1799216 13-Jun-2017 11:29

Deduplication can reduce transmission speed, but it also reduces space and bandwidth requirements.

20Mbps is around 200GB per day, or 1TB in 5 days. If it takes a month to do that backup then it's not using near your maximum capacity. That wouldn't be unusual though. I know with CloudBerry and S3/B2 it uploads multiple files in parallel so it can get close to line speed. Keep in mind though, in S3 it would cost US$13 per month for 1TB in S3 IA class, or US$4/month in S3 glacier storage class or directly in Glacier.

Around 30GB per day isn't too bad I guess.

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#2948466 30-Jul-2022 21:03

I know this is an old thread, but it is the most comprehensive one on here.

I have my backups, mostly personal photos/videos, computer and phone images stored on Amazon Drive. all up about 1TB of space, this service is being discontinued in the next year or so, so im looking for something new.

Id likely have more than the 1TB i currently have as i have a few more PC's i would like to backup images of, but most things are stored on one PC. On that one PC not everything needs backed up, ie digital copies of DVD's and CD's etc.

What are people recommending these days? ive had a quick look at backblaze and idrive and they both seem to do what i want, and both offer different functionality, ie number of devices/storage space etc.

any assistance would be much appreciated.

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#2948471 30-Jul-2022 21:41

If BackBlaze or similar suits your needs then do that. It's fairly cheap and it's reliable, it's all GUI, and it works.

I use Restic Backup (command line tool) which I backup to another internal disk, which then gets sync'd to AWS S3. The data is in Glacier Instant Retrieval class (US$4 / TB when stored in the USA), the indexes and such are standard class. I have used it for years and I do regular restore tests of random files and it's always worked well. B2 is cheaper and sufficiently durable, but I know AWS better.

I used to use CloudBerry but they did a major upgrade that completely changed the repo format. I gave up on it because of that and some other annoyances I don't remember. I do remember their deduplication was pretty poor.

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