Cloud Backup Recommendation

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#237604 9-Jun-2018 15:01

I am currently with Backblaze and its time to renew my subscription.

Backup: Your next renewal for your Bi-Annual Plan of 1 license will be on 06/07/2018 for $109.25, which includes applicable taxes.

While I am happy with the Backblaze service, I was wondering if anyone thinks there's a better provider/service offering out there?

Cheers

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#2055013 12-Jul-2018 13:55

Just came here to ask a similar question, so will jump in on this thread instead. I've finally got an NBN connection here in Australia. It's only via HFC but I am getting a pretty solid 100/40 connection, which is a huge improvement on the 4/1 ADSL I was getting until earlier this year and then 12/1 LTE rate limited connection I had after moving before NBN connected me (Took nearly 3 months). For the first time ever I have had greater than a 1mbit upload, and I am keep to get some cloud backups properly in place.

In the past I have really just used Dropbox for the really important stuff, which works OK and has other benefits so I'll continue to do that, but also want a proper backup of general stuff on the machine (not OS) now that I actually have the bandwidth to make it work.

What is everyone using these days? Preferable would be an option where you can back up more than one machine (just two is fine), and works for both Mac and PC.

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#2055019 12-Jul-2018 14:11

I'm still using crashplan, simply because it just works...

All the alternatives out there i've looked at has simply not had a equal system worth moving all my data..

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Any comments made are personal opinion and do not reflect directly on the position my current or past employers may have.

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#2055029 12-Jul-2018 14:22

There's a huge thread I started to discuss cloud backups.

BackBlaze is good, other than not keeping versions for very long. CrashPlan was better but they got out of the consumer space. I doubt you'll find anything better / better value / easier than BackBlaze.

For example, I use a combination of Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, CloudBerry Backup (which I'm not a fan of), and Restic. It's high maintenance because I keep changing things, but low cost as I just pay for storage.

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#2055138 12-Jul-2018 15:12

timmmay:

There's a huge thread I started to discuss cloud backups.

BackBlaze is good, other than not keeping versions for very long. CrashPlan was better but they got out of the consumer space. I doubt you'll find anything better / better value / easier than BackBlaze.

For example, I use a combination of Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, CloudBerry Backup (which I'm not a fan of), and Restic. It's high maintenance because I keep changing things, but low cost as I just pay for storage.

Yeah I was using CloudBerry and S3 for a while. It was cheap, but really unreliable and hard to use. I'll have another look at BackBlaze. Thanks!

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#2055140 12-Jul-2018 15:17

I use Cloudberry with Backblaze B2 (Geekzone aff link)

This means I only pay for Backblaze storage, not their software and select the Cloudberry that I need - for home usage I just have the freeware version running on laptops, for Geekzone server I have the SQL Server version (paid), and for the Geekzone bare metal server I have the Hyper-V version (paid).

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#2055143 12-Jul-2018 15:22

Just a note, with around 4TB Backblaze B2 (Geekzone aff link) storage used I'm paying US$25/month.

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#2055150 12-Jul-2018 15:31

ajobbins:

timmmay:

There's a huge thread I started to discuss cloud backups.

BackBlaze is good, other than not keeping versions for very long. CrashPlan was better but they got out of the consumer space. I doubt you'll find anything better / better value / easier than BackBlaze.

For example, I use a combination of Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, CloudBerry Backup (which I'm not a fan of), and Restic. It's high maintenance because I keep changing things, but low cost as I just pay for storage.

Yeah I was using CloudBerry and S3 for a while. It was cheap, but really unreliable and hard to use. I'll have another look at BackBlaze. Thanks!

S3 is extremely reliable. It has encryption and versioning that I trust.

The CloudBerry software is fine for mirroring stuff up to S3, but I just don't have a good feeling about it. The deduplication is average at best. A minor upgrade recently stuffed it badly, couldn't even open the software. I had to delete the database which is a cache of your file status, so my next full backup took 48 hours to run instead of the normal hour or so.

The aws command line tools to upload to S3 are reliable, I just put them into task scheduler. Restic, a command line backup tool, can backup direct to S3. It de-duplicates but oddly it doesn't do compression yet. They plan to add that at some point though. It's v0.91.

I'd really like to find a decent piece of software that can at least be trusted to do incremental backups to local disks, and ideally to cloud storage like S3 / B2. Something rock solid and supported. The open source stuff seems to have good technology but most is still in alpha / beta. The commercial seems relatively inflexible and not so advanced.

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#2055181 12-Jul-2018 16:11

One more for Backblaze B2. If you're not storing truckloads, it's way cheaper than anything else. For the family photos and home movies and some assorted miscellania, I'm paying a couple of bucks a month.

I get it there via rclone, which I find excellent.

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#2055192 12-Jul-2018 16:23

B2 stores two copies of the data in a single data centre, whereas S3 stores the data in three data centres with regular consistency checks. S3 is enterprise grade, B2 is good but it's not quite as good. In practice their chance of data loss is probably very low.

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#2055194 12-Jul-2018 16:24

timmmay:

S3 is extremely reliable. It has encryption and versioning that I trust.

I don't trust any third party with my files. I use Backblaze with duplicity, so my file contents are PGP encrypted before they leave my system. They seem to have the best pricing (definitely cheaper than S3), and the few times I've needed to restore a file from a point-in-time recovery, it has worked well. I have a copy of my GPG keys on two USB sticks. One is at my house, and one with a trusted friend (and it's an encrypted partition anyway).

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#2055201 12-Jul-2018 16:31

mdf:

One more for Backblaze B2. If you're not storing truckloads, it's way cheaper than anything else. For the family photos and home movies and some assorted miscellania, I'm paying a couple of bucks a month.

I get it there via rclone, which I find excellent.

+1 as this is my set up too.

I was using their "all you can eat" solution on Windows. But moved everything to Linux (cause the media PC died and I wanted a change). Not having a Linux client I had to move to Backblaze B2. Its rediculously cheap (and I keep up to 30days of versions).

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#2055660 13-Jul-2018 10:59

For what I require I find the combination of Duplicati and Microsoft OneDrive is excellent. I have a TB of space on OneDrive as part of my Office365 subscription.

My machines already 'back up' to OneDrive through the Microsoft OneDrive application but in addition I store encrypted, versioned back ups there through Duplicati. I also run identical back ups to a non-production remote dev server in case Microsoft decides to spit several dummies one day as well as to a dedicated external HDD locally.

I find this best for me as I only have around 200GB of files requiring back up across all my machines. If I had several TB then I would likely look at Backblaze or Amazon.

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#2055764 13-Jul-2018 14:07

I'm also using Duplicati - I have just under 1TB backed up to Backblaze B2 with it. Took a couple weeks to complete the initial upload but now that everything is up there, the backups run every night without issues. Test restores seem to work just fine too, though the interface is a little slow to navigate. I also store my documents, photos, music etc in my OneDrive folder which also gives some protection against deleted files.

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#2055768 13-Jul-2018 14:09

I had tried Duplicati in the past two, but found that the app was crashing in the background and I wasn't noticing my backups weren't running. Looks like they have a new version, so might look at that.

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#2055771 13-Jul-2018 14:16

Two other options I'm currently testing out are Arq and GoodSync.

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