Best online backup?

[Thready]

I'm thinking about getting an online backup solution for 800GB worth of data. Any thoughts on IDrive? It is only $50 a year which is in my price range. 

[manikyath]

3 minutes ago, Thready said:

It is only $50 a year

for the first year only

 

on that note, office365 personal comes with 1TB of cloud storage for $60 per year.

[PianoPlayer88Key]

Another thing to consider would be how long it would take to upload, and your ISP's bandwidth caps.

 

For example, I get about 10 Mbps upload or so, and my ISP imposes a 1TB per month cap.

I have probably around 25 to 30 TB (not GB) of data, if not more, so doing online backup would be impractical for me.

And if I wanted to actually completely image all my storage (when I hear the word / phrase "back up", I think of a bit-by-bit / sector-by-sector clone of everything, as if you did something like "sudo dd if=/ of=(backup_destination)"), that would be a bit north of 90 TB, probably not quite (but coming close to) flirting with 100 TB.

[Thready]

5 minutes ago, PianoPlayer88Key said:

Another thing to consider would be how long it would take to upload, and your ISP's bandwidth caps.

 

For example, I get about 10 Mbps upload or so, and my ISP imposes a 1TB per month cap.

I have probably around 25 to 30 TB (not GB) of data, if not more, so doing online backup would be impractical for me.

And if I wanted to actually completely image all my storage (when I hear the word / phrase "back up", I think of a bit-by-bit / sector-by-sector clone of everything, as if you did something like "sudo dd if=/ of=(backup_destination)"), that would be a bit north of 90 TB, probably not quite (but coming close to) flirting with 100 TB.

I would only be uploading this 800 GB one time and I would usually only upload about 1 GB per month. It's portrait photography and I don't have clients in the winter so the next upload I would be doing would be in April.

[20_below]

19 hours ago, Thready said:

I'm thinking about getting an online backup solution for 800GB worth of data. Any thoughts on IDrive? It is only $50 a year which is in my price range. 

Might be a little unorthodox, but have you considered Google One? I pay $9.99 a month for 2TB of online storage. Whenever I need to back anything up or just archive photos I dump them into my Google One account. 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

There is a huge difference between cloud storage and clound backups. Inexpensive and, especially, free cloud storage is usually unsafe and often can go out of business or be discontinued with inadequate to no warning. Google is especially notorious for discontinuing services and for snooping through user data.

 

A cloud backup service, on the other hand, will automatically upload new and changed data after encryoting it before it leaves the computer. Most have versioning which will keep deleted data for a certain amount of time, usually 30 days, in case you need to recover accidentally deleted or corrupted files.

 

The only consumer cloud backup service I currently recommend is Backblaze. I used to also recommend Crash Plan and Carbonite but no more. Crashplan dropped their home plan and replaced with a poorly planned Small Business Version with a poor user interface and erratic upload speeds. Their tech "help" is pretty much useless. Carbonite has moved their tech "help" offshore again and their reliability has dropped considerably.

 

Keep in mind that any consumer cloud backup is subject to failure at anytime, same as HDDs or SSDs so important to also have physical external backup drives.

[vanished]

Last I checked Amazon had the cheapest storage, but they also had terrible software that was awkward and impractical, making it a poor choice for most people.  As a result I generally recommend OneDrive as last I checked, it's the next cheapest, but given what you said about how you'll use it, Amazon might actually work well for you.

[Thready]

On 11/26/2019 at 8:51 PM, Lady Fitzgerald said:

There is a huge difference between cloud storage and clound backups. Inexpensive and, especially, free cloud storage is usually unsafe and often can go out of business or be discontinued with inadequate to no warning. Google is especially notorious for discontinuing services and for snooping through user data.

 

A cloud backup service, on the other hand, will automatically upload new and changed data after encryoting it before it leaves the computer. Most have versioning which will keep deleted data for a certain amount of time, usually 30 days, in case you need to recover accidentally deleted or corrupted files.

 

The only consumer cloud backup service I currently recommend is Backblaze. I used to also recommend Crash Plan and Carbonite but no more. Crashplan dropped their home plan and replaced with a poorly planned Small Business Version with a poor user interface and erratic upload speeds. Their tech "help" is pretty much useless. Carbonite has moved their tech "help" offshore again and their reliability has dropped considerably.

 

Keep in mind that any consumer cloud backup is subject to failure at anytime, same as HDDs or SSDs so important to also have physical external backup drives.

Thanks lady. I have 2 backup HDDs and an external that I back up to every night and I never remove my photography from the memory card until I've sent my client their final photos. I'm confident in my local system, but it's the online thing I'm struggling with. I'll look up Backblaze.