safe online storage?

[Hazel Grant]

I have backups here at the house but am wondering about a safe online backup. We just had 2 towns destroyed by a tornado near here and I am thinking that had that happened here, I'd have lost even my house backups. Any suggestions?

[Doug West]

What type of file sizes are we talking about?

I tried Carbonite. It came with a 30 day free trial. The funny part is, my files
were still being backed up after 30 days :)

Doug

[arash_hazeghi]

dropbox is the best

[David Stephens]

Hazel, you're right to be concerned. I had two friends lose their life's work in the last year, one due to fire and one due to flood.

[Diane Miller]

File size is a major concern for the initial upload for online storage, and reliability is certainly a concern.

One simple answer is to backup to a rotating duplicate set of hard drives (one large one if your files will fit, or several if necessary) -- keep one set offsite and rotate every day or at some convenient interval -- for instance have a spouse swap them at a workplace every day -- or bury one in the yard. (OK -- tongue in cheek on that one, but it is fire- and tornado-proof. At least use a waterproof Tupperware container.) Hard drives are cheap -- you can get 4T for under $200. You don't need a fast one.

A more sophisticated solution came up on another thread somewhere here recently. Make an initial backup set and swap it with a friend's similar backup and set up a software backup system so each of you can update your files to the drive at the other's house, online, on some agreed-upon schedule. (Some people can do this on drives at a work location, without the friend.)

But the back yard is sounding easier....

[Dan Brown]

First, you need FAST INTERNET FOR ONLINE STORAGE!

Here's some ideas.

Off site copies (with a friends or family member) updated periodically, if something happens you won't loose everything, just the most recent data.
Iosafe, waterproof and fireproof hard drives http://iosafe.com/products-soloG3-overview a little pricey, BUT!
Dropbox is really nice and can be used for sharing files with clients, cost - https://www.dropbox.com/pricing
Carbonite is good but I don't think you can use it as an off site hard drive and share files, the cost is about $60 per year
FOR BOTH DROPBOX AND CARBONITE, YOU NEED REALLY HIGH SPEED INTERNET! With my slow dsl, it took me two months to backup 150gb which included NO IMAGES!
I also use Smugmug, creating 1.6mb derivative jpegs and uploading them to galleries, which although isn't backing up originals, at least if a disaster strikes, I do have the images that reside there!

[Hazel Grant]

thanks. will consider your suggestions...and I do have a backyard:)

[Hazel Grant]

thanks everyone ...some good suggestions.

[Chris Ober]

I use Crashplan, my company uses Crashplan and we in turn use Crashplan for dozens of our customers.
For personal use, I can have a dozen machines backed up with no storage limits all for less than $15/month. They have client apps for OSX, Windows, Android, iOS. I can restore from any computer, backup local workstations to external drives or to their service or to other network sources.

I've tried a number of other services and so far, this has been the best.

[Bill Jobes]

Here's another longtime Crashplan client.

[Tom Graham]

I have a "safety deposit box" at my local bank, BoA. About once a year I copy off onto hard drives all data/apps I feel I would not want to lose. Those hard drives are in my bank box.
Tom

[Hazel Grant]

Thanks. I'll check out Crashplan. I did check out Carbonite and the web site says it is a backup plan but not a storage plan. Not sure what the difference is, but apparently not what I need. The goal is to have a place where my photos are stored should the backup here at the house be destroyed.

[Diane Miller]

Good detail-checking, Hazel. I have checking Crashplan on my Todo list -- didn't know about it. But it would presumably only work for my Documents folder, I think. For image files I'm actually thinking about the daily swap of two racks of hard drives. (Utilizing my husband's daily trips to the airport, where he plays, or a good Tupperware container buried in the yard...?) I need about 4.5 TB, so a pair of 3T drives is about the minimum. And I continue to delete -- made so easy by Lightroom keywording and search functions!!

[Linwood Ferguson]

Is use Glacier (Amazon) storage, which is about a penny per gigabyte per month. I back it up with Cloudberry backup. That way I own the backup program separate from the storage provider.

Amazon, unlike many of the "all you can eat" benefits from the more you use it, so they don't throttle your connection. Many others do; some admit it, some do not. A fundamental question you should ask is "if I use it more, do they make more money, or make less money from it". If they make less money, count on the service having a mechanism to keep you from capitalizing on what is otherwise too good to be true. It's a lot like an "unlimited" or "no overage" cell phone plan, where it's "unlimited" but over a certain limit they slow you down so much you can't actually get much more.

I use it for last-ditch storage. I keep a copy on raid disks online, a copy on external disks, and a copy updated nightly in the cloud. I've got a couple terabytes of files, compressed to a bit over a terabyte, on Glacier, and pay about $10/mo for it.

[Elizabet Smith]

Everyone wants safe online storage that's why i always used drop box to store my all data.