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Ask HN: What's your favorite online-backup tool?

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Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite online-backup tool?

#41

Post by thaumaturgy »

We used to recommend Backblaze to our clients (and set a few up with it), but when they announced a while back that they had entertained a purchase offer, I pulled the plug on that. I can't in good conscience recommend an online backup service that's not in it for the long haul.

We now try to get people set up with Carbonite, mostly because of its pricing, ease-of-use, and compatibility with most platforms.

I'd love to find something with a good white-label reseller program, but no luck so far.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite online-backup tool?

#42

Post by rdoherty »

jobenjo wrote: post #24

I've been happy with Backblaze. Good cpu usage, and I restored files easily with a nice web interface. I switched from Mozy because the client was much more efficient. If you're looking at Mozy and Carbonite, definitely check out Backblaze. (Also, I met the CEO a few years back--seemed like a smart guy).

I love Backblaze too. They also have a great blog and have posted about their custom hardware a while back http://blog.backblaze.com/

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite online-backup tool?

#43

Post by hippich »

Backup-manager - http://www.backup-manager.org.

I posted a blog post about using it on server - http://www.yepcorp.com/blogs/pavel-karoukin/simple-backup-so...

I am using it to backup both my dedicated server and laptop.

Basically, this is bash script with config file and some dependencies to Perl libraries to upload files to S3. Since it's bash script - it's very customizable.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite online-backup tool?

#44

Post by bound008 »

Has no-one on here hit problems with backblaze's number of file limitations and xml data structures?

see: http://harijan.wordpress.com/2009/04/27/the-real-backblaze-b...

what the author does not make clear is the statement: "the bzfileids.dat is causing my computer to stop."

this is how i found the article originally, the bzfileids.dat on my computer was too large and at that point the only solution is to reinstall the software. which invalidates your old backups and they are purged after 30 days.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite online-backup tool?

#45

Post by sbierwagen »

sabj wrote: post #3
sbierwagen wrote: post #2

rsync.net Not cheap, ($.80gb/month) but bulletproof, and about as hacker-friendly as it gets. As you may be entirely unsurprised to hear, you can use rsync with it, as well as sftp, webdav, etc, etc, etc.

I had heard about this before, and I think it is really great - for small amounts. For backing up my laptop hard drive (~250 GB) and everything I normally would keep backed up (another... 1 TB?) or even some fraction thereof, this would get SUPER expensive. :( What I really need backed up: - Documents (~5GB) - Photos (~20GB) What I would _like_ backed up includes everything to do a full drive recovery, but beyond tha…

I use rsync to back up compressed text, .rc files, etc. The critically important stuff, that in meatspace would go in a safe. Photos, music, and movies (the kind of stuff that would be on bookshelves) get backed up to terabyte hard drives in USB external boxes.

The difference here is that the important stuff is also on those drives. "Importance" here means how many times it's replicated, and how far apart the backups are.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite online-backup tool?

#48

Post by mdda »

jpeterson wrote: post #31
bmelton wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dropbox partition is completely enveloped in a TrueCrypt partition. I don't particularly have many concerns with the security of Dropbox, but I do keep some personally sensitive information on there, and TrueCrypt is how I sleep at night.

Doesn't this make your syncs terribly slow? It will basically have to send up your entire partition every time you make a change in any file there.

AFAIR : Truecrypt is designed so that changed plain blocks map to changed secure blocks : i.e. the whole secure image doesn't change if one plain file does. (Makes sense from a speed perspective too).

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite online-backup tool?

#49

Post by wickedchicken »

kurtsiegfried wrote: post #46

I'd place another vote for SpiderOak. The fact that you can pool storage between computers on a consumer plan is great, and their DIY API looks promising.

I've been pretty happy with SpiderOak but I haven't needed to use it to recover files yet -- I feel that the interface may be a little too cumbersome than it should be.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite online-backup tool?

#50

Post by quadhome »

martey wrote: post #30
quesera wrote: post #11

Tarsnap. Simple, cheap, efficient, honestly secure. I can't imagine storing personal files and photos somewhere "out there", managed by someone else, in readable form. Seriously, how do you Dropbox (etc) fans sleep at night?

Dropbox's website suggests that they store files using some sort of AES-256 encryption and they cannot read them: https://www.dropbox.com/help/27 I wouldn't make the claim that they are more (or as) secure as Tarsnap (especially since there is no page as detailed as http://www.tarsnap.com/crypto.html on Dropbox's website), but this suggests that files on Dropbox are not readable by the company.

"Suggests." However, the fact that there is a web GUI tells us they can read the data.
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