B2 cloud backup for my home server (Windows Server 2012)

[GW2]

This is all sort of a long boring story, so I will try to cut to the chase, but I want to back up my home erver off-site. Fast access wasn't really a priority for me so I was going to go with an amazon glacier bucket, but for a penny more backblaze acts more like s3 than glacier for my needs, so that's what i've been playing with, but I'm still searching for a good backup client. They all seem to have problems for my use case from what i can tell. The main reason i chose B2 is because im running a server OS, so solutions like carbonite, or backblaze's workstation style backups are off the table. I would consider switching to glacier if i had to to get a better backup client.

 

I have about 2TB of data currently. I've put a list of what I've tried below, I may end up forking over the insane amount for cloudberry if I have to, as it's a one time fee and i like the software, but it's very expensve for personal use so I was hoping someone may know of something that would suit my needs better. I was also thinking RSYNC, but that wouldnt give me versioning etc.

 

Any and all feedback appreciated, thanks.

 

Clients I've tried so far:

Cloudberry Backup Server Edition

Price: 299.99 USD

Pros: Excellent backup manager, backs up files in original form to B2, handles versioning, retention, etc

Cons: Price! they offer solutions at lower price points, but they impose a 1tb restriction making it useless for me in all but it's most expensive version

 

qBackup

Price: 29.99 USD

Pros: Fast, easy to use, can be used for free if you do not need more than 30 day retention

Cons: Backs up to proprietary format on cloud, not full featured

 

Duplicacy

Price: 20 USD /yr

Pros: easy to use

Cons: subscription based, propritary format on cloud, not full featured

[jkirkcaldy]

Crashplan lets you use their normal "desktop" application on server OS. I currently back up my windows server 2012r2 to crashplan's cloud service. 

 

About 60ish USD for a year of unlimited storage. 

 

And bonus you can also backup to local drives as well as local computers for free using the same software.

[gsr51]

I'm in the same boat as you GW2.  I've been testing the few clients out there that support Backblaze B2.  

 

A few you didn't mention:

 

SmartFTP ($199)

Pros:  Works very well and ready for large transfer queues. Has the ability to resume downloads and uploads. Supports RSA encryption. Can use PGP with an add-on.  

Cons: Price.

 

Cyberduck (Free)

Pros: I really like the built-in encryption with Cryptomator. Can encrypt file and folder names as well. They also have a nice companion app called Mountain Duck that allows you to mount the B2 as a local drive. 

Cons: Transfer queue lumps everything into one progress bar.  I prefer a queue that shows me the files as a list as they copy over. Like an FTP client would show.

 

CloudXplorer ($59)

Pros: Nice modern Windows interface. Price. 

Cons: As far as Backblaze B2 goes, this one looks very new.  Doesn't seem to support any type of encryption. 

 

Cloudberry Explorer ($39.99)

Pros: Great interface. Has the ability to pause and resume transfers. Supports AES 256 bit encryption. 

Cons: Inability to sync folders from local to B2. Doesn't preserver file time stamps. Companion app (Cloudberry Drive) doesn't support B2.

 

-----

 

I really love the simple clean GUI for qBackup and the price is great.  The thing I didn't like about it was no way to resume a transfer if it was aborted or had problems.  If it could do that, it would win for me. 

 

I'm still evaluating these clients and am interested if anyone has any good experience with these or others with Backblaze B2. 

 

Thanks!

 

[Marco2G]

On 18.8.2017 at 6:52 PM, jkirkcaldy said:

Crashplan lets you use their normal "desktop" application on server OS. I currently back up my windows server 2012r2 to crashplan's cloud service. 

 

About 60ish USD for a year of unlimited storage. 

 

And bonus you can also backup to local drives as well as local computers for free using the same software.

That would be 120$ a year as their offer for home users is dead. You need to go small business.

[jkirkcaldy]

11 hours ago, Marco2G said:

That would be 120$ a year as their offer for home users is dead. You need to go small business.

yeah, it's really thrown a spanner into my backup solution. I'm thinking about creating a VM running windows 7 or maybe ubuntu if it's supported and running backblaze on that for file backups. 

 

I just took delivery of an R710 as well to replace another one of my old diy server builds. Nothing fancy, a pentium CPU with 8GB RAM and 12TB Raw Storage. I'm now planning to turn this from RAID 1 with 6TB storage into JBOD or maybe RAID 5 (or RAID 5 equivalent with 2 data drives and one parity drive) stick this in my parents house 100 miles away and use that to backup all my important files (no plex media etc.) Which should be fine as I only have about 2-3TB of data if you exclude Plex Stuff.