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Online backup to S3 for the Mac

haystacksoftware.com

11–20 of 53 posts

Re: Online backup to S3 for the Mac

#13
post #8

Sounds nice. Just too bad the contents of my NAS would cost $700 a month to keep on s3.

+1 on this. Any decent NAS software (FreeNAS, OpenSolaris, etc) with an iscsi target will work great with the (free) GlobalSAN initiator and Time Machine.

True, but one big "gotcha" to this is that there is no way to do a complete restore from a time machine volume. There is no iscsi initiator on the OS X system DVD (and therefore no way to select your TM backup for a complete system restore).

Re: Online backup to S3 for the Mac

#14
post #10

I can't judge how much it'll cost to back my iMac up. I have about 750Gb of data.

Lots. Roughly US$112.50 per month. CrashPlan and SpiderOak are better price value, although I might look at using this to have a secondary backup of critical items. Even that, for me, though, is about 200GB (photos & music) or about $30/mo.

Re: Online backup to S3 for the Mac

#15
post #9

The price scaling issue worried me at first, and then I noticed the monthly budgeting — great feature. In the long run, you’ll always sacrifice price (vs. an external hard drive) for off-site data persistence anyway. In any case, this looks really awesome for documents/projects backup to supplement my TimeMachine drive.

Right, I use it as a supplement to my Time Machine drive as well, for my most important stuff (documents + photos).

Maybe I should call out that use case on the landing page.

Re: Online backup to S3 for the Mac

#16

Sounds nice. Just too bad the contents of my NAS would cost $700 a month to keep on s3.

I was thinking of adding Pogoplug support. That way storage would be much cheaper, although backing up to a Pogoplug at a friend's house may be much less reliable than backing up to S3.

Would anyone be interested in this?

Re: Online backup to S3 for the Mac

#18

Has anyone tried both Backblaze and this?

I have. I chose my own encryption password, but in order to restore files, I had to enter the password into the Backblaze web site. Backblaze used it to decrypt my files on their server and assemble them into a zip file on their server. They then sent me email saying I could download the zip file.

Also the Mac metadata weren't restored properly: http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/backblaze-backup-bouncer...

Re: Online backup to S3 for the Mac

#19
post #10

I can't judge how much it'll cost to back my iMac up. I have about 750Gb of data.

You can't figure out what 750 * 0.15 comes to?

Perhaps he is saying that the per-gig cost is not clear. It says buy now for $29, but the extra $0.15/GB/month to use S3 is hidden under "Why use S3?" (you might not expect costs to be there)

We both know what S3 is, and know that they charge per gig. But the market of people who want online backups for their macs don't necessarily know this.

Re: Online backup to S3 for the Mac

#20
I had Mozy and I used their built-in encryption to backup ~250GB. I went to restore some wedding photos while at my parents' house, so I downloaded their decryption utility, and started the decryption of a 10gb subset of my backup.

Only about 1/3rd of the files decrypted correctly. The rest of the files were totally corrupted -- not cool. I contacted support and we investigated the problem for ~3 months. Luckily I didn't have dataloss, but what exactly was I paying for here?

We never got the problem resolved and I ended up getting a full refund for 1.5 years of service. Make sure to test your backups no matter where you store them.

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