Need Cloud Storage?I have a few thousand pictures on my computer (few 100 thousand that is). My back up grew from a raid array, plus my web host, to my raid, my web host and Carbonite. Carbonite was pretty good at first. Affordable, easy to use and easy to access remotely when I needed files in a pinch and I was somewhere else. My only complaint was unfriendly, unhelpful customer service. Thankfully, I didn't need service often. As my storage grew, I noticed that Carbonite was always running and running slowly. I was told it's because they throttle the speed back after 200gigs. The cost to speed it up didn't seem worth it to me. I was paying $50 per year for slow and could pay $1055 for fast so I let it run slowly (for over a year). I was averaging about 1 to 1.2 gigs per day. That's sloooooow!! I mentioned this to one of my friends who said he was using a service called Crashplan for his cloud back up so I checked it. Free trial that's cool. I ran the trial and chose a couple of gig to back up (it may have been 3 or 4). In what seemed like a couple of minutes, all backed up. Hmmm interesting!! Now my set up is a Drobo external hard drive, my web host and Crashplan. While i was still on the trial I began backing up the Drobo, all 950gigs. At the moment Crashplan doesn't directly support external drives, but with a simple work around, recommended by Crashplan customer service, the drive was mounted and visible. Crashplan was backing up between 50-80 gigs a day depending on internet speed, I couldn't be happier. One down side was I had to remap the Drobo. Now with a new drive letter the backup started over. Now the trial was coming to an end but I knew i was signing up. Plus because I was coming from Carbonite, they were offering the first year for free!!. Free, fast and oh did I mention I spoke to a human who was friendly and helpful. So, the new backup started and right around the 1/2 point, Hurricane Sandy knocked the power out for 10 days. I was starting to think this backup wasn't going to happen. Once the power came on the back up started again. I did have a couple of questions and whether through email or phone (yes phone, talking to Erik in Minnesota) my questions were answered. Well happily, on Monday my now 965 gigs were all backed up! That would have taken 3 years with Carbonite. I can access my files remotely, I can get them back g-d forbid I need to and files are backed up quickly and seamlessly in the the background. So far seems like a win win!! Thanks for the recommendation Chopper no I too can recommend Crashplan Comments |
Subscribe
RSS
Archive
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
|