CrashPlan+ cloud back up

[Fulton17]

Hi

I am a home user, 10 meg (actually 8 meg at present as Helkom can't seem to solve the problem) line. I have a bolt on uncapped after hours account and a WA MyBB account. I am not too tech knowledgeable

I can see the benefit of having a cloud based back up and CrashPlan (http://www.crashplan.com/consumer/crashplan-plus.html) seems to be a highly recommended.

The issue for me is that in SA our upload speeds aren't great and I have over a TB on my hard drive at present. About 250 gigs of photos; 50 odd gigs of documents; a few hundreds gigs of TV series etc and the rest programmes etc. Now whilst I would not need to back this all up, just to back up my documents and photos would takes ages.

I guess what I am trying to figure out is how do we do cloud based back up in SA or basically is this something that can only be done in countries that have proper internet?

I do appreciate your help in figuring this one out

 

[Dean]

CrashPlan has a scheduler so you can set it to only back up during early hours of the morning, for example. Doing this over a few nights would probably be enough to get everything backed up.

Obviously backing up your media (other than Photos) is pretty inefficient so ja after a while it would eventually get it all done.

After the first time, it only does incremental backups for files that have changed, so those would be pretty quick.

 

[Oceanhost]

Hi Fulton

OwnCloud also works great. It has the same functionality as Dropbox but you can set multiple folders to sync with the server. You can load this onto any local server. The nice thing is that once the initial backup is done, any changes you make within those folders will automatically sync with the server.

Martin

 

[Web Telecom Services]

Hi Fulton

I am using a South African cloud based backup service by Web Telecoms which is great - I backed up 100GB over a 4mbps adsl line in under a week (ok it sounds long but I think my upload speed is quite bad at the moment). Have a look at http://www.web-telecoms.co.za/backups.html

Apparently they are also launching a dropbox-like service in June where you have a phone app, desktop app and web access to your files - this will also be hosted on SA servers. Give them a shout I think - you should be able to get a free trial for a few days to play with the service.

 

[Fulton17]

Thanks guys for your feedback.

I need something that does not require much tech skills, and is reasonable cost wise. Crash plan does seem to be the best option and as Dean said, once up and running, the back ups will be a lot quicker.

My other option is to do a weekly back up on a hard drive and keep that at work. Primitive but could work

 

[Dean]

Thanks guys for your feedback.

I need something that does not require much tech skills, and is reasonable cost wise. Crash plan does seem to be the best option and as Dean said, once up and running, the back ups will be a lot quicker.

My other option is to do a weekly back up on a hard drive and keep that at work. Primitive but could work

Honestly, your best option is both. When backing up, the amount of precaution you take should be directly proportional to the importance of your data.

Wild example: As good as CrashPlan is, if they go belly-up tomorrow and shut down their servers, you have no backup. Therefore having it on a hard drive at work is great. Similarly, with just the hard drive - if it's caught in a fire or stolen, it's useless - which is why the cloud is a great alternative.

Something else that many don't consider when picking a backup solution is how they'll need to restore the data. If there is an immediate need to access stuff, having large volumes in the cloud is useless (waiting for it to all re-download, etc). That's when the hard drive would be so much quicker to access.

I've rambled far too much but in short, you can never have too many (varied) backups - all have their pros and cons (but CrashPlan cloud requires no on-going effort so it wins for me )