Anybody use crashplan?

Caporegime
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
32,618
I got to my dad's every week, I am tempted just start a routine and using a couple of 2TB Western Digital drive and update it weekly and then leave it with him, swap it round every week.

That is what I do.
With something like timemachine (although i just coded my own bash script to tar and copy) I backup the data locally. I used to take disks into work and cycle them around. Now I work at home I have been lazy and dont have offsite backup so I should really send some disks to a friend.

If you are really concerned you should probably have 2 external backup locations and you just cycle through the disks. E.g. you taker your recent backup form Home to place A, take the disk at A to place B and take the disk at B back home. It is not unheard of for a backup disk to fail so having some redundancy helps. The 2 locations is not that important but is commonly done. I heard a story of someone who gave a backup disk to a neighbor down the street. One year there was a big flood and the whole street got flooded and the original and backup disk were destroyed.


Your workplace is typically a good place because they have more surveillance and smoke detectors plus sprinkler systems. You can put your backup disk in a watertight container used for kayaking/sailing.
 
Last edited:
Soldato
Joined
27 Dec 2005
Posts
17,285
Location
Bristol
With two off site backups, why do you need an online backup as well? And why not just upload processed JPGs rather than RAWs? It's a very worst case scenario and to have full-res processed JPGs is still a more than adequate backup if the project is complete.
 
Associate
Joined
7 Nov 2012
Posts
1,611
Location
UK
I was fortunate enough to grab a Prime membership days before they increased the price to £79. At first, with DPD delivery, it was great, but when they stopped using them I soon came to the conclusion I wasn't going to renew. I have Netflix and I use that much more than Lovefilm. However, that Amazon Prime Photos is interesting.

I have a couple of TBs of photos and they're all backed up to Crashplan and two external USB HDDs. But another cloud backup solution can only be a good thing.

Assuming, that is, we get it here in the UK?

Prime Photos provides unlimited storage for photos in Amazon Cloud Drive for active Prime members in the U.S.
 
Last edited:
Soldato
Joined
11 May 2004
Posts
4,790
Location
Gloucester
I use Amazon Glacier.

It's aimed at techies and their pricing structure is complex, but it's incredibly cheap for backup storage. Last month's bill for all my photos was $1.70 and that includes a few thousand transactions.

I've never hit an upload cap, my last upload went through at 14.2MB/s
 
Soldato
Joined
24 Apr 2006
Posts
6,361
Location
SE England
I use Amazon Glacier.

It's aimed at techies and their pricing structure is complex, but it's incredibly cheap for backup storage. Last month's bill for all my photos was $1.70 and that includes a few thousand transactions.

I've never hit an upload cap, my last upload went through at 14.2MB/s

Many thanks for pointing this out.

So... if I am understanding correctly. If I uploaded 500GB of data, and wanted to retrieve that 500GB that data back after a disaster, it would cost me $50USD from the Ireland data centre.

Hmm.. this is an interesting idea for long term storage. I guess this really is for the times when your primary backup is stuffed and you're in big trouble!

This idea interests me a lot, as I've found that Crashplan, Backblaze etc all throttle upload bandwidth at some point in time.
 
Last edited:
Soldato
Joined
11 May 2004
Posts
4,790
Location
Gloucester
Well if you did staggered recovery you can recover up to 5% of your total stored amount per day for free, then 1GB-10TB of transfer out is priced at $0.12 / GBMonth (prorated per day)

As i said, it's complex.
 
Associate
Joined
25 Oct 2002
Posts
2,298
Location
Sarf Lahndahn
Currently using Google Drive and Google Sync. 1TB for about £6 a month. It just....works. I drop photos on any of my PCs (home, work and laptop) and it ends up synced everywhere. I've not noticed any upload speed issues either- my initial 200Gb of photos took an evening. I also keep all my music there, basically anything I need accessible.

Not everyone will like this, but Google+ also does some interesting things with photos, it chooses similar ones to combine into little animations, and organises albums by time and location, and does some half decent automatic post processing too. I don't publish any of it, but it'd be neat if you wanted to.

Having said all that, as an Amazon Prime member, it'd be interesting if they offer the unlimited photos to the UK, in which case I'll bung all my mobile and non-RAW photos there instead.
 
Associate
Joined
20 Aug 2003
Posts
2,446
Location
London
The Amazon S3 / Glacier pricing model is not really complex at all.

$0.12 x 1TB (1000GB) = $120 for recovering 1TB of data. The ongoing cost of the service is no more then $10-15 for 1TB of data. We have over 4TB data and I have never seen the bill go beyond the $30-40 a month.

The upload/download speed is truly fantastic!
 
Last edited:
Soldato
Joined
24 Apr 2006
Posts
6,361
Location
SE England
Which software do you use for Glacier? I've tried FastGlacier and it doesn't seem as feature rich as I was expecting. No folder sync options, such as local folder sync and time/frequency of sync etc.

Edit: I think I've answered my own question, Cloudberry Backup Desktop.
 
Last edited:
Associate
Joined
7 Nov 2012
Posts
1,611
Location
UK
Wait, scrap that, that was just filling up my 5G free limit....i just hit it.

It's showing on Amazon UK's front page now. So maybe we now have it?

I'm just logging in now to see what I can see...

Coincidentally, today I received an email from Crashplan offering me 50% off a 1 or 2 year family plan. It's the first time I've ever heard of an offer for current subscribers. My plan ends in a couple of months and I couldn't resist - I opted for the 2yr plan.
 
Associate
Joined
7 Nov 2012
Posts
1,611
Location
UK
Update:

I've installed the Amazon Prime Photo app on my windows 7 PC and it's currently uploading all my photos from a mapped network drive on my Synology NAS - so I'm impressed.

There're 695GB of data - so let's see how long it takes.

It does put a spanner in the works though, as I wasn't going to renew my Prime membership in the New Year. I already have Crashplan and a couple of external USB HDD as backup, but it does increase the value of a Prime membership in an area that's important to me (backing up memories).
 
Last edited:
Soldato
Joined
24 Apr 2006
Posts
6,361
Location
SE England
Somebody on Talk Photography said they were able to upload raws.

The good: Can confirm that RAW files are supported and it is able to preview them.

The WTF: The desktop app is completely lacking, there is no folder Sync options bizarrely?! You can't set a folder on your PC to watch and sync, so instead have to manually start a sync by dragging a folder in to the app. :confused:
 
Associate
Joined
7 Nov 2012
Posts
1,611
Location
UK
2 days in and I've uploaded 33.5GB/695.1GB. So it's going to take 41-odd days at this rate.

Do BT traffic manage, or impose limits for uploads? :D
 
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom