My apple laptop is pushing 5+ years and i'll admit I abuse it a bit leaving it on for weeks at a time, letting the battery drain, not updating OS systems. But i have 15 years of photos, music, videos stored on it and my iphone has most of my LO's photos. I'm looking for a solution for backing up my stuff in case something happens to my phone or laptop. What do you use/recommend? Cloud? (i think i would need to update OS at least once to use apple's) External hard drive? finger drive? Other?
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We use Dropbox.
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I recommend OneDrive.
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I'm not a fan of the cloud personally, I just buy lots of external hard drives
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We use dropbox
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I do external drives and flash drives (extra backup) for my very favorite stuff.
I might be lame but I don't trust clouds or storage services. But that being said I also e-mail myself my absolute favorite photos of LO just in case my house burns down.
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@Mae: @Raindrop: Truly curious -- what is wrong with cloud based solutions?
When I was deciding, I wanted to protect myself against theft & fire, both of which wouldn't help me if my external drives were at home. That being said, I avoided cloud based solutions for awhile because I was concerned about security of my data on servers that I don't control. Encrypted files makes that point moot though.
Quite honestly, the biggest problem I currently see is if my provider goes out of business, I'll have the task of finding a new service and re-uploading everything which could take several weeks.
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@sunny: Do you use crash plan? I like that it's automatic. I believe when I was looking, Dropbox doesn't allow automatic uploads. Like you, I am concerned what happens if this digital backup company goes under. I think that's one of the reasons I haven't done it yet.
This is one of the links that reviewed those auto backup sites.
http://online-backup-services-review.toptenreviews.com/ -
@sunny: Please take what I say next with a grain of salt. I did my master's degree over 3 years ago and tech might have greatly improved since then but it still bothers me.
Not to scare people into not using clouds and those types of services but I'm a software person and when I was going for my master's degree my thesis professor's expertise was in cloud/server management for big data for personal and commercial use. At the time he was working on something for amazon's data storage plan / management.
One part of his paper is what do you do when a company looses data? - Honestly there is nothing you can do if this happens, the data is lost and you might not find out about this till you have lost your own data personally and try to access your data from the cloud or service. At best the company might give you a monetize value of your data but what amount of money is worth all the pictures of your LO or family?
Another part was how to evaluate what data might be okay to override? - So let's say a company needs room for more data. What if they physically can't keep up with demand but still want to sell it like they have room? It's just business. There is a algorithm that they will use that will determined basis on how old the data is and how much it's accessed to determined weather they want to override it and of course tell that costumer if they try to access it... oops we lost it.
Again I was studying this years ago and storage and data and computer and technology in general is going the speed of light. Everything is faster and cheaper and maybe these issues are not an issue anymore.
Anyways I just want to say that no one will be more concern about your data more than you. If you do store your items in a cloud/service, I highly suggest you check on in at least every few months to show you are accessing it and you are indeed interested in that data.
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@bluestriped bee: Yes. We've been using it for awhile now. I've renewed it at least once so it has been over a year. I would say the likelihood of my drive dying is probably higher than the likelihood of the company going under. If my drive dies and I didn't have an account, I've lost my data. If the company dies, I still have my drive and I can scramble to find a new solution. You select which folders you want to sync and it will automatically monitor any changes and push those to the CP servers.
@Raindrop: Cool, I didn't know you were in software. So am I
Here's my thoughts. I see 2 ways to lose data. First, the company loses control of the physical data (say the datacenter is broken into, thieves steal a rack of drives) or the more likely scenario, the company has a data breach (hackers break into their security & copy data). In both cases, since the data is strongly encrypted (even before you send it over the wire, so you shouldn't have any MITM attacks), you should be well-enough protected. I'm not storing state secrets on my home computer, so if a foreign government agency breaks open my files, I guess, so be it. However some generic hacker that isn't well funded/resourced shouldn't be able to open up my files.
The other is what you spoke of, which is the data is irretrievable due to negligence or code bugs, etc. Depending on the service, you'll have some redundancy. I honestly don't know if CrashPlan provides this or not -- good reminder for me to look into it. I know with most business plans, you ARE paying for geo-redundancy -- if 1 datacenter goes down (temporarily or permanently), you'll still be able to access your data at another datacenter. That should all be seamless to me the customer. Generally, you'll be paying a lot more this (see Dropbox's business plans vs. personal). Perhaps I am naive but I don't honestly think Amazon (or any other reputable company) would overwrite customer data on purpose. They generally keep some buffer of free space. I know in my previous job, we kept a close eye on our capacity and utilization. Unless their policies say that they will delete data that hasn't been accessed within a specific timeframe, I wouldn't assume that they would delete my stuff. Accidental deletion is a real possibility though. Not sure how to guard against that.
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@sunny: It seems like there are a lot of people in software here.
You make some good points. Again this was a long time ago for me. I don't think any company will viciously over-ride any data but it was just part of the paper he wrote up for them if that makes sense.
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I thought about this a lot and could not find something I was completely comfortable with. I finally thought I would be satisfied with everything on the cloud. But when I did it, I wasn't.
So then I moved my stuff to 2 different external hard drives (in addition to current stuff on my computer.) I feel a bit better.
One for pics/vids and everything else and another for just pics/vids. One is waterproof, bump proof etc. Eventually I will change again and use the cloud (probably Google) for pics/videos and one external. I hope I never lose my vids and pics.They are precious! -
We've used Crashplan after @sunny: recommended it and couldn't be more happy.
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@sunny: did you check out Carbonite? Why did you end up with Crash Plan?
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@sunny: cloud storage is expensive IMO (at least for the volume of material I have-- multiple TB of photos) and it's super slow to upload if you take a lot of photos.
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I just got an external hard drive. I've got thousands of pics on it so far and only use about 1/100 of the storage. It's 1 tb and was $85. Probably much cheaper if you live in th states. Canada is pricey sometimes, lol.
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@808love: Did you delete the pictures from your computer hard drive after you transferred them to the external drive? I'm having a hard time bringing myself to do it, but I can no longer upload pictures to my computer. I have trust issues!
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Crash plan is interesting I'm definitely looking in to that
Can I back up my music on there as well
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@Mrs. Champagne: any brands you would recommend
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@Espion: omg I was almost crying deleting pics off my iPhone after I put them on the drive. My storage was full though and I couldn't take any more pictures. I left about 100 on my phone though so I can flip back through the newborn days
@Chillybear: I got a toshiba. Easy to use but I've only had it for a day!
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@bluestriped bee: Someone recommended CrashPlan, I checked it out and since it met all my needs I went ahead and went with it. They were also running a promo at the time so it was a no brainer for me. (BTW - they are currently running a promo for 20% off your first year. Typically the promos are 1st year only)
I am looking at the Carbonite website right now and here's a few criticisms:
1. In Carbonite Basic ($60/yr), you must manually select a 4GB+ file to be backed up vs. having it automatically done in CP. Video files, Outlook PSTs, etc. could be 4GB+.2. Carbonite uses 128 bit encryption, CP uses 448 bit. Quite honestly, I don't know the difference except that higher is better
3. Carbonite keeps your backups for 30 days only. This means, if you lose your file (accidental deletion), you must re-download it within 30 days. CP does not have this requirement. If you accidentally delete a file, you can download it from CP anytime later as long as you're still a member.
Other than that, they look like pretty similar offerings.
@Mae: Yes, it takes awhile to seed the backup. It took us probably 2-3 weeks of on & off backups while we were sleeping to push 1.5 TB. However, I disagree with you on cost. Yes, Dropbox gets expensive FAST but CP & Carbonite are both unlimited space and only $60/yr for a single computer.
@Chillybear: You can backup whatever you want on your hard drive. There are no restrictions on file size or type.
I realize I sound like a shill for CrashPlan, but I swear I'm not and I don't get any referral credits/$. I am just a satisfied user
I have seen so many drives fail (at work and at home) I am not satisfied to have just a single copy of my precious photos and videos residing on my computer. We run a Windows Home Server that provides disk redundancy (e.g. 2 drives that hold the same data - the software takes care of making sure that they stay in sync) and we run CrashPlan on the WHS to push data to the cloud so that we have geo redundancy. Our 7 year old WHS is actually dying right now -- 2 of the drives are making funny whirring noises and have randomly shut down over the past few weeks and the power supply died on us earlier this year. I just ordered a Synology NAS as a replacement. If anyone is interested, I can let you know how it is after using it for a few weeks.
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@sunny: Cool! Thank you!
Also, you mention earlier about encrypting your files. How do you do that? Is that a program or something?
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@bluestriped bee: the Crashplan/Carbonite client that you install on your desktop does the encryption before the file gets sent to the server. They also make the connection over SSL (eg. How you connect to your bank for online banking) before they send the files over.
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@Raindrop: interesting! This is always my fear with the cloud but I never say it bc I thought ppl would think I was nuts.
@sunny: you can't back up external hard drives with a Mac on the carbonate personal plans. I've never found anywhere that allows unlimited storage from 1 computer + multiple hard drives for Mac. So anywhere I'd go if br paying per gb.
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I recommend Google Drive for online storage. You get 15 gigs free with it and can get 100 gigs for $1.99/month and 1tb for $9.99/month. Way better pricing than DropBox. I love having my pictures and files backed up on Drive because 1) I can access them anywhere and 2) I love the piece of mind knowing that even if my house burned down, my precious files and memories are safe. I'm not too afraid of Google losing data. An external harddrive breaking, corrupting or even just getting misplaced is much more likely than that happening.
Unfortunately though with any online storage solution it will take a while to upload all your stuff to it since it needs to transfer over the internet. Still worth it though, and once it's backed up you can set it up to keep you backed up forever more.
I also keep really precious photos (like wedding photos) backed up to our work storage, which is a hardcore setup... Not sure what company it is (I'm pretty sure it's Canadian) but it's for businesses, so they guarantee a high level of security.
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@Espion: yes. Only after I transferred them to two hard drives and made the really good stuff into projects like books, long home movies, or printed. I still keep about a year's worth on my computer for current projects. The plan is make projects before the end of the year so I can delete those to make room for next year. It is a huge issue with LOs growing media file and the sooner I store and organize, the better.
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@chopsuey: do you pay for it? It seems like a kinda expensive cloud storage and all my photos won't fit in the free space?
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@Chillybear: I am using time machine (probably only on newer iOS) and it automatically backs my Mac to the external drive. You can select folders you don't want backed up but it keeps all my photos music and movies.
I'm also putting all my photos on shutterfly. I don't mind the site or the app, they run frequent deals and it's unlimited storage. Not bad for free cloud storage of photos. I just put the good important stuff there.
I am still also looking into a good cloud storage for the rest of the stuff though. I just don't 100% trust an external hard drive and/or the risk of it getting ruined with our house.
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@T.H.O.U.: yep, we pay extra. We've both had hard drives die on us, plus we love that we can share folders through Dropbox. Dh uses it for work stuff too.
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@T.H.O.U.: Are you just using shutterfly or their new storage product "thislife"? I have used shutterfly for a long time, the limitation is that you can't re-download your items. You can only use their services to print them.
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@MamaG: I think there is a shutterfly service were you can buy the images to a CD or DVD. I figured if our house burned down its a small price to get then back.
I think the new service has storage limitations.
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@chopsuey: I love the ease of it for sure!
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@T.H.O.U.: What kind/brand of external do you have? I think i'm able to set up time machine with my OS... I talked with my IT guy and he's going to help me set it up
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@Chillybear: I don't know the brand but I think you should make sure it's Mac compatible. Setting up time machine was really easy though. Basically just turn it on!
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@Chillybear: i use google drive and dropbox. i've had several external hard drives completely die on me so i do not trust them. and auto-backup services often only back up what's on your computer (if you delete it, it's deleted in the cloud), so that did not work for me.
google drive is getting cheaper and cheaper. i've been using it for years and haven't had any problems!
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@Mrs. Bee: @T.H.O.U.: Thanks Ladies! I think i'm going to use a 2 prong approach for now I still have plenty of space on my laptop so i wont be deleting anything off that, I'm going to get external that bot me and hubs can back up on to and i'll be uploading most of my precious pictures (wedding/baby/etc to Google drive)
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google drive & dropbox!
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Dropbox. When I lost my phone on the way to a counseling session, my photos were already backed up on there. I didn't lose some of my early LO and bump pics. DH and I created a family email address and back up to Picasa with our cell phone pics in twice yearly drops when we run out of phone space. We have a home server too for picture backup.
I've had two hard drives die on me in 10 years. The first time, DH put one of them in the freezer to recover information. The second time, we backed up to our home server and spent a little extra money for a solid state hard drive. Also, my DH bought a server from a coworker, has it among other servers in an offsite facility.
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