Online backup service?

[Boomyal]

Who's using what? I have had Idrive for over a year. When you sign up a computer it pre-populates just about everything to back up. Yesterday I set about to restore the contents of one computer to a new one. It was going at it for over 24 hours and still only restored 50%. The laptop kept shutting down (going to sleep) even though I had selected to keep it from hibernating during backup/restore. I was on instant chat this morning for two hours with a simple question that should have been answered in 5 minutes. It was almost like they were playing rope-a-dope.
This service is supposed to be intuitive with quick restore. Something is amiss. There has to be a better service.

 

[bruceb58]

Even using an online backup, I would do a local backup as well just so you don't have to go over the internet to download everything you need. Online full backup is for catastrophic issues like your house burns down.

I have a network drive that I do my local backups on. You can also do it to an extra hard drive in your PC. I use Cobian backup. It's free and works great. I have mine scheduled to backup early in the morning.

 

[fishrdan]

I won't do online backups, and what you're experiencing is one of the reasons. Someone I know lost all of their PC's data by relying on one of those services, years of family pictures, music, etc., all gone in a flash. They couldn't restore his data due to system upgrades over the years, they had the data, but couldn't decrypt it... Had a similar situation at work where cloud backup software was running on our computers, saw it kick off every so often backing up files. One of the guys had his computer crash and when he asked IT to restore from their backups they told him, oh - that hasn't been working for a long time. Sorry Charlie. :faint2:

We have 5 computers in the house and each of them has a backup HDD, then a couple of 1TB external drives that I swap back-forth to backup each PC every month or so. External TB drives get stored in a media safe along with the Acronis software, in the event we need to do a disaster recovery as Bruce mentioned. I've also used AOMEI Backupper which seems to work well, and it's free. It may be archaic and clunky, but I trust myself more than the online services.

 

[alldodge]

I to won't use online services because everyone is getting hacked. I also use external backup drives

 

[southkogs]

... another thing in the mix, and my concern with "cloud" storage is where the physical box that I'm storing stuff is located. Because I have so much intellectual property that gets stored, laws that apply to my data here in the US won't necessarily apply to a box thats sitting in Calcutta.

I haven't gotten comfortable with it yet.

 

[boatman37]

i don't do cloud backups. i have a file server that my workstations are backup up to then that is backed up to external drives. i also use Cobian for my backups. free and reliable

 

[alldodge]

Oh, also use a Raid 1 on my main computer

 

[southkogs]

Oh, also use a Raid 1 on my main computer

At the office I use a Pegasus Raid for our small network. Just had our first drive failure in 4 years. We didn't notice it was failed until we did a check on the physical box ... $150 bucks later we were back to full capacity. It's a pretty cool storage gig.

 

[garbageguy]

+1 on using external hard drives for backups - they're getting very inexpensive for huge amounts of storage

 

[thumpar]

I use Carbonite for my customers. It is encrypted on the local side before being sent to the server. The problem with only doing backups to an external drive or another computer in that if there is a disaster at the location then both the backup and the original are gone. I do work for companies that have disaster recover plans. We are audited by the state because of the types of businesses. The backup is tested routinely and works.

 

[boatman37]

^^^very true on having everything at one location but i don't have much that important. mainly movies, music, but i'm sure if i lost it all i would remember something that i really needed. you would think i would know better being a security guy...lol. i will likely buy a few more external drives and keep a copy in my safe or the safe deposit box. i still don't trust offsite storage

 

[ehenry]

I've been doing IT systems and disaster recovery work for about 30 years now an have never used or trusted web based backup solutions. I like to be able to touch and feel my backups whether tape or disk based.

We just recently implemented a Unitrends disk based backup appliance. We have two appliances one located in our data center that grabs all windows based servers and UNIX based systems in the datacenter. We have another identical appliance at our sheriff's office data center that does the same for their servers. These two appliance run their backups each night then replicate to one another on Tuesday and Wednesday night. If we lose a critical server a new temporary server can be spun up on the unitrends appliance itself and accessed until the server that is down can be brought back up and put online.

Our A/S 400s are still tape based. We do not backup endusers machines that is their responsibility.

If the enduser does not store their files on our network it is on them to back the files up.

 

[thumpar]

As long as it is stored in 2 locations I am all for it. We used to use tape, DLT mostly and swap the tapes out to a storage facility weekly. That gets old quick. At some locations I run roaming profiles so the clients get backed up too. I haven't dealt with an A/S 400 in years.

 

[ehenry]

Unitrends is some pretty slick stuff. I was skeptical of it at first but after having been on it for a while now and having restored a number of things from it I trust it. its fast and redundant. We used DLT on the servers prior to Unitrends and sent the tapes daily to conditioned storage. We run two 400s and back them both up to tape. One 400 at the Sheriff's department apps and another at our location for all the courts, DA, collector, assessor, chancery clerk and circuit clerk apps.

The unitrends box at the sheriff's office is basically in a bunker five miles from our datacenter. The datacenter at the SO is a room off central dispatch. Central dispatch is basically a bunker with foot thick concrete walls, ceilings and generator backup.