Hello guys, I have 1 5tb of pictures and I 'm looking for a good backup solution

[G+_George Gomez]

Hello guys, I have 1.5tb of pictures and I'm looking for a good backup solution. I had 1 bad experience with an external hd. I'm not sure if I should look into online backup or cloud storage. Please advice.. Thank you guys!

[G+_Michael Buitendorp]

With that amount of data, the only way I see cloud backup being feasible is to send in a hard drive for the initial backup. Most cloud services offer this. You can then maintain incremental backups over the Internet.

[G+_Ben Reese]

I use CrashPlan and have over 2 TB backed up. They have unlimited space and don't throttle you as I've heard Carbonite and others do.

 

The first half of my data was uploaded at 1Mbps before I caught TWC cheating me and had them bump it up to the 2Mbps it should have been at. It took probably 6 months total. I'd recommend telling it to backup the more important things first then include the rest.

It also has the TNO encryption that the TWiT crew recommends, but that means you can't access the data from mobile or the Web.

Something to keep in mind is that their backup utility runs in Java (I think) and requires about 1GB of RAM per TB backed up.

 

I know TWiT can't recommend them because Carbonite is a sponsor, but the Happy customers will ?

[G+_George Gomez]

Thank you for the input guys, this is very good information!

[G+_Bill H. Sr. McMullen]

I tell my friends and family; if you do not have at least three copies, one of which must be offsite, you ain't really backed up.  In terms of backup reliability, redundancy is your best friend; then, location, location, location. 

CrashPlan, love it.  I also use Carbonite.  Plus I use Acronis TI, and Macrium; backups held on a separate physical HDD.  The HDD holding your backups does not have to be 7200 RPM spindle speed.

 

Your first backup HDD does not HAVE to be external.  Consider mirrored RAID.  I use a four disk RAID 1+0.  You do NOT need to buy a dedicated external HDD.  Use a hard drive Dock (mine is a Vantec NexStar; any good one will do) and basic raw HDD's; plural. 

 

Optical disc burner drives and consumer grade blank optical disc media are going the way of the cassette tape, but if anyone feels they absolutely must have their family treasures burned to a disc which they can hold in their hand, Please raise in this forum the question of optical disc media longevity , and I will chime in there also.

[G+_Bill H. Sr. McMullen]

Clarification:

My C: system drive is an SSD.

My RAID config is designated as drive D: and holds all my Docs, Photos, etc.  The mirrored aspect is my backup step #1.  

 

Duplicate, duplicate, duplicate; and keep at  a friend's home at least one of your HDDs containing your backup files. Plus you may do the same for your friends. 

In fact, the concept of sharing of backups among friends is a salient aspect of CrashPlan. 

 

Additionally, do not discard your malfunctioning external HDD.  On more than one occasion I have pried open the external case , rescued the bare HDD , connected it as a normal HDD in my desktop computer , and Voila' it functions perfectly.  After three such experiences I started using a hard drive Dock device.  

[G+_William Burlingame]

I have a USB drives, a Pogoplug and a Transporter.  I guess a person could have a problem with any one of these, but if you use more than one, you should be able to have at least one good backup. The idea of uploading that much data to the cloud is not only time consuming, but if you have a data cap, it could be costly.  As +Michael Buitendorp says, you should send them a drive for the initial backup the they offer that option. The nice thing about the Pogoplug and Transporter is that they can easily be accessed from a remote location.  

[G+_Philip Florio]

I was thinking of switching to Crashplan after years with Carbonite but the Crashplan Seeded Backup $125 fee is only for a 1TB. 

[G+_George Gomez]

I have the same dilemma, I left carbonite and now I can't decide which company or product is best for me

[G+_Ben Reese]

I'm cheap so I went with the family plan and split it with my dad and brother. It has been about a year now, I've got 2.7 TB, dad has 100 GB, and my brother has 800 GB backed up. Since I'm cheap, I chose not to send them a drive. If you've got a good up speed, it's probably not necessary.

 

If you don't trust their cloud, CrashPlan will let you use their software for free to backup to a friend's computer. You could backup to an external drive then use the sneakernet to get it to his CrashPlan system where it would stay synced over the Internet.

[G+_Bill H. Sr. McMullen]

Well said, Ben Reese.

[G+_Ben Tyger]

I've been using crash plan for about 2 years now. I recently started using them at work too.

 

Here are pros and cons of it.

 

The client runs Java. This is both a blessing and a curse. The good part about it is that it will run on lots of platforms. Windows, Mac, and Linux are officially supported. CrashPlan can even run on a Raspberry Pi. The bad part is that it is a bit more resource intensive since it runs in Java.

 

As stated before, since it supports TNO encryption, there is no web interface to download the files ad hoc. If you have the android client (probably the iOS client too) and you provide the encryption key, you can only download backed up files to that plat form. There is currently no feature to backup your phones data to CrashPlan.

 

CrashPlans pricing plans are one of the most competitive I've seen. You're not going to get much better and not have to support everything yourself.

 

I've never had any issues with network performance. I never noticed any throttling and I haven't read about it anywhere either.

 

If you have 'friends' using crashplan and if they allow it, you can store your backups on their hard drives. If you have encryption enabled, they will not be able to read you backups either.