Cloud Computing

[chelseafan]

I've had a second external hard drive failure in the last few months and to be frank with the amount of data I have, pics, avis etc I cant be arsed to back it all up onto DVD as it would take forever.

 

So I am looking to the clouds for my backups, the benefits are that I don't ever have to worry about losing valuable data....yeah yeah, theres some porn in there too....I can sync between all three laptops and I'll never have a worry crossing borders where they may check my laptop...though theres nothing illegal, I still worry

 

A couple of questions

 

1) Can anyone recommend a good cloud company

2) Assuming I have a fast line, how quick can I download from said company

3) What costs are assosiated per Tb

 

TIA

[Coss]

I have a separate USB2 2.5" hard drive of the same capacity as my laptop HDD, I back up to this every now and then, after the initial back up, the updates are incremental, and take only a minute or so.

 

It's portable.

 

The problem with cloud is 500 GB over the airwaves? that could take days. Not to mention the cloud can be unavailable when you need it. Even big names (gmail, skype) suffer outages quite often.

 

The idea of the cloud is good and makes great sense from a business point of view, from a personal point of view I'm not so sure...

 

 

 

[khunsanuk]

Hi,

 

What coss said.

 

If you are worried about losing data go for a RAID system (2 or more harddisk linked up, one fails the other(s) still have all the data).

 

With the clou, download speeds tend to not be so much of a problem, but you are uploading! And upload speeds then to be a LOT slower than download. E.g. I have 6Mbit download, but only 512Kbit upload. Uploading even 'only' 100Gb at that speed would take ~450 hours!

 

Sanuk!

[kamui]

I've had a second external hard drive failure in the last few months and to be frank with the amount of data I have, pics, avis etc I cant be arsed to back it all up onto DVD as it would take forever.

 

So I am looking to the clouds for my backups, the benefits are that I don't ever have to worry about losing valuable data....yeah yeah, theres some porn in there too....I can sync between all three laptops and I'll never have a worry crossing borders where they may check my laptop...though theres nothing illegal, I still worry

 

A couple of questions

 

1) Can anyone recommend a good cloud company

2) Assuming I have a fast line, how quick can I download from said company

3) What costs are assosiated per Tb

 

TIA

 

The hard drive of my iMac crashed two weeks ago in the midst of preparing several major events. It took over a week to get the Mac repaired. Nevertheless I could keep on working as nothing had happened:

 

Why?

 

I have triple back up system at our office.

 

1: - Time machine (Mac only). backs up the whole iMac every night (programs, user accounts, data)

 

2: Sugarsync.com, syncs all documents, images e.g. between my iMac and a notebook. Works on Win- and Apple PCs. I use it since 2-3 years and it works flawlessly. Two more important features: a ) file versioning. Recently I destroyed an Excel file, but could download a previous version of the file from my Sugarsync account. b.) Online access: I can access all synced files via the sugarsync website. Very helpful when I need a document, when at my home PC for example.

 

3: JungleDisc.com: The is my last line of defense against data loss. It backs up all data to an encrypted container to Amazon S3 servers. The data just stay there. It has file versioning as well. I keep the last three versions of every file. Data I delete on my PC will remain at Jungle disc. By now I never needed to use it.

 

Why do I have Sugarsync and Jungle Disc? Isn't this a little bit paranoid to have two cloud back up systems, plus hardware based backup?

It is not recommended to combine file syncing and back ups. It can always happen that the second user accidentally deletes files. If you are not aware of this and empty the garbage bin of the sync service those files are gone..

And if you read about professional back up techniques you will learn that a triple back up solution is the best. Of course it needs to be a mix of different back up solutions in case of stupid coworkers who switch off the backup software, fire, thieves, data center breakdown (happened recently to Amazon S3 as well as to Microsoft sync services).

 

For cloud back ups other than word docs (images, databases, e.g.) you'll need a DSL line with good upload speed (1 Mbit/s at least). Therefore I guess neither in LOS nor in large parts of the USA*** cloud services would work well.

 

Which service to choose? Best is to have a company with several data centers. And of course you need to know how many GB you want to back up. Choose the company/plan which suits you most. Most offer a free service for up to 2 GB, which is good for a test run.

 

By the way, at home I use Mozy.com. Until recently they offered an unlimited data plan. Now the ask me to pay almost double (Over 200 USD per year for 125 GB).

 

 

PS: After the iMac came back from repair with a new empty HD I just connected it to Time Machine and after a few hours I had all software, settings and data back on the PC. Then I just let run Sugarsync which downloaded all changed and new documents since the time of the last Time Machine did a back up before the iMac crashed. I only had problems to access the user accounts, but with OSX system DVD I was able to reset the passwords (I didn't know that it was that easy...).

Before we switched to Mac, after a crash I needed a whole weekend to reinstall the software, setup Email, e.g..

 

 

 

*** The United States as a whole lags in speed, coming in 25th behind South Korea, which has the fastest speeds in the world. Even Romania clocks in ahead. Link

[kamui]

In regard to the upload size. If you have more than 100 GB expect that cloud storage will become expensive. Most companies are ok in the 10-100 GB range, this seems to be the storage space used by the SOHO and consumer crowd.

 

Also uploading 500 GB will almost probably take more than week (or weeks, depending on your connection). And you will need an unlimited data plan of course.

 

Anyway, once you have uploaded everything the rest will be fine. Unless you want to back up HD movies with more than 1 GB, which would take several hours for every movie.

 

Nevertheless the USD hd disk is IMHO outdated and if it is not connected all the time it is likely that you will lose some data in case the main hd crashes.

HD crashes happened to me on every second computer I owned or worked with for several years. - Even though I always either use(d) customized PCs with quality parts or IBM/Apple hardware. It seems to be just question of time when a HD fails.

 

Maybe a reasonable and secure why is to install a Windows (or more expensive a Mac Mini) home sever. You could even go for a RAID system with a second HD as backup for the data on the server. I have never used it, but seems to be easy to install and it's probably for the price of 1 years or less of 500 GB online storage.

[chelseafan]

Thanks for all the replies, I think a raid server sounds good, does it back up instantly or do you still have to go through the laborious palava of backing up ? I presume with a raid server, if I save a file, it will also save the file to an alternate Hard drive as well. Could I run this from a laptop and are the HD's revoveable from the raid unit ?

[kamui]

Thanks for all the replies, I think a raid server sounds good, does it back up instantly or do you still have to go through the laborious palava of backing up ? I presume with a raid server, if I save a file, it will also save the file to an alternate Hard drive as well. Could I run this from a laptop and are the HD's revoveable from the raid unit ?

 

Back up can be instantly.

But I can't help any further. You should contact Carlton who is PC specialist. Also do a search for "Windows Home Server" and "NAS" on Google.

[Wallenda]

Thanks for all the replies, I think a raid server sounds good, does it back up instantly or do you still have to go through the laborious palava of backing up ? I presume with a raid server, if I save a file, it will also save the file to an alternate Hard drive as well. Could I run this from a laptop and are the HD's revoveable from the raid unit ?

 

Normally you wouldn't want to back up your entire hard drive -- whats the point of having another copy of the operating system or all the programs, drivers, etc. that you have. It's really documents, pictures, videos, music etc. that you want backed up.

 

If you want to explore the cloud type service, Dropbox is one that's getting to be very popular. I've had it nearly a year now and have never been unable to access. It creates a directory on your computer that gets backed up online and then you can also go sign into the service from another computer, and sign in, have the option of just accessing your files from their server or else have it duplicate that same directory (or selected parts of it) on your laptop there, and yes it will take a bit of time to sync (or download) depending how much you have up there.

 

Not sure if I explained it well -- but basically you keep your files on both your computer AND synced on their server (it will automatically update/sync anytime it detects any change). If you have a 2nd laptop or whatever, you can just install Dropbox and hten it will automatically sync (just sign into your account) and put that whole directory on that laptop too. If you're using a computer thats not yours, and don't want all those files to get synced to that computer, then you'd use their web interface instead and just download exactly what you want -- navigating the directory and subdirectories via web interface rather than have the directory copied onto that laptop.

 

It's pretty nifty. It's become a program that I can't do without now.

[Wallenda]

Not sure if this was clear, but with Dropbox, you don't have to do anything-- it all happens automatically without any need for you to do anything other than save your files as you normally do, only you would be saving them inside the dropbox directory. Can add as many subdirectories as you want to it.

 

And if theres a problem and you accidentally save something and wipe out the previous version, no worries it also keeps hidden versions of previous versions for a month - so you could reaccess it and not lose that file. (that's even better than what Windows has)

[kamui]

Not sure if this was clear, but with Dropbox, you don't have to do anything-- it all happens automatically without any need for you to do anything other than save your files as you normally do, only you would be saving them inside the dropbox directory. Can add as many subdirectories as you want to it.

 

And if theres a problem and you accidentally save something and wipe out the previous version, no worries it also keeps hidden versions of previous versions for a month - so you could reaccess it and not lose that file. (that's even better than what Windows has)

 

I like Sugarsync better, because you can mark *any* folder to be synced and you can even exclude subfolders. Much better that just having to designate one folder to be synced. Anyway Dropbox is the best known cloud service.

 

Currently I use Sugarsync to keep in sync 120 GB of docs and image between two PCs. Also you can decide to store some data only without syncing. I use this for to distribute software which download when I need it on another PC.