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Online backup options
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philm
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Jun 1, 2010, 01:12 PM
 
After a recent hard drive disaster, I'm looking at the various online options for backup: Mozy, Carbonite, Backblaze et al. Lots of web searching seems to suggest that none of these is an outright winner. Does anyone have experiences which they could share with the lovely MacNN community?
     
turtle777
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Jun 1, 2010, 01:24 PM
 
Could you share the reasons why those weren't winners ?

E.g., Mozy is perfect (IMO) if you don't mind spending the money.

Of course, none of these are "perfect" if you are looking for unlimited backup space for free.

-t
     
philm  (op)
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Jun 1, 2010, 05:15 PM
 
I'm happy to spend the $5 a month or whatever that these sites seem to charge. I have no issue with that. It's good to learn that you have found Mozy to be good. Various reviews seem to have people with a range of problems but, of course, it's widely used and I would expect a number of
negative reports given this.

Do you find Mozy eats up system resource or does it wait until you are not working? One plus point for Backblaze is that the software also supports local back up to a hard disk. I'm thinking of using BB at work where I have fast upload speeds and for a local hard disk backup, and Time Machine at home on the evenings.
     
turtle777
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Jun 1, 2010, 06:18 PM
 
Well, I'm not sure (from the OP's post) if we are strictly talking online backup, or a combination of online + local.

Personally, I use TM, Mozy and backups to my own web storage (using Twin: Twin)

Re: Mozy - resource hog

Yes, sometime for a few minutes, the backup daemon seems to spin out of control. But that usually goes away within a few minutes. I never had any major issues with Mozy.

-t
     
jmiddel
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Jun 1, 2010, 09:45 PM
 
I use Dropbox, for $99/year I get 50 Gigs. It is almost never a resource hog, just twice in a year it seemed to go crazy and slow everything to crawl, I just force quit it and that was all.
     
besson3c
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Jun 1, 2010, 10:41 PM
 
Keep in mind that these backup services cannot work well if you have a lot of crap to backup, particularly a bunch of large files, as most ISPs really restrict your upload bandwidth. For instance, I wouldn't count on backing up 20+ gig VM images or something this way, it would just be too painstakingly slow.
     
philm  (op)
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Jun 2, 2010, 03:23 PM
 
I'm giving Backblaze a go. I love Dropbox and use it regularly, but I don't think it's really a Backup tool, although I can see how it would be used for that.
     
all2ofme
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Jun 2, 2010, 05:54 PM
 
I'm loving CrashPlan. A mate and I have been using it to backup to each other's machines for a couple of months now, and it works flawlessly.

I've got around 1TB on his machine, and after I'd seeded the initial backup (read: done locally, then taken the disk to his place) it's been quick and painless. Great to have an offsite back-up on top of my local Time Machine and mirror.

Love it. No affiliations, either
     
philm  (op)
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Jun 3, 2010, 09:12 AM
 
I found this review which is pretty good.
     
jmiddel
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Jun 3, 2010, 08:54 PM
 
Thank you philm for the clarification regarding Dropbox. I also found your link useful, and Backblaze looks really good. I will try it.
     
bdmesq
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Jul 27, 2010, 04:05 AM
 
Originally Posted by philm View Post
After a recent hard drive disaster, I'm looking at the various online options for backup: Mozy, Carbonite, Backblaze et al. Lots of web searching seems to suggest that none of these is an outright winner. Does anyone have experiences which they could share with the lovely MacNN community?

I HAVE TREID NOW FOR HALF A YEAR CARBONITE.
don't waste your money, does not work and the service "works" like a robot,they seem not to care.[every time you have to exclude some links and nobody can guess what is backed up]
anyhow nothing is backed up [or just a part and you can't even include what you want...........don't start it!!
I am also very much looking for a trustable .online backup......did not find one yet.
     
   
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