What I need for remote backup....

[kyrielle]

For anyone trying to suggest alternatives to Carbonite for me - I would love them. I'm not willing to pay TONS more for better service, though, because Carbonite works reliably for backup/restore (it just has this annoying quirk regarding video files, which they're theoretically escalating to fix). I'd be willing to pay maybe double what I pay now, at most.

I currently back up two computers, whose backups are 55 GB and 237 GB respectively. This will drop to one computer but the same size backup in the next few years - I'm gradually consolidating away from the laptop. All I'm interested in is the backup; other services offer syncing between computers/devices, but that's not what I'm looking for here. Just to have my files preserved if my computer turns into a doorstop, and in an off-site backup.

Carbonite charges per computer, so this costs me $110 a year currently. It looks like Mozy would be about the same, but I don't know anything about them; thoughts and impressions? (Sugarsync, which someone suggested, does a LOT more...and would cost me $350 a year at my current backup volumes. Since the one with 237 GB will eventually grow with more photos and videos plus the 55 GB from the other one, and their top plan is 250 GB of storage, I'd simply outgrow them shortly.)

Comments

[susandennis]

When my Carbonite expires, I am going to Mozy for sure. I tried them once - way back when - and went with Carbonite because it finished backing up all my files sooner. At the time, they seemed exactly the same - that was before I found out about Carbonite's insulting customer service.

Plus, my brother is now an authorized Mozy seller. If you use this URL http://www.mozy.com/home/?ref=3f9a896b&kbid=45056&m=20&i=87 he'll get a few pennies and do whatever he can to help if you ever need it.

[davmoo.livejournal.com]

Its your brother's lucky day that you posted that. I've got enough photos that I don't want to lose now that I was already planning on getting Mozy this weekend.

[susandennis]

fun! i'm so glad you got to use it. i can't have him relying entirely on inheriting my money - he could figure out how to get it sooner.

[kyrielle]

Okay, that's very cool, timing-wise. Let me know how Mozy seems to work out? I'm going to take my time (my Carbonite subscription's not up until August) to investigate (unless they do soemthing else stupid and annoying).

[kyrielle]

Thank you! I may use that. I've got a while before Carbonite expires, and the current issue is not enough to make me jump ship too fast. Looks like Mozy and CrashPlan are the two contenders in my case. And price-wise they're at about the same point. Luckily I know people starting up with them, so I can ask for how it goes...hee.

[mdlbear]

Mozy looks very nice; I can't use it because I run Linux almost exclusively here. There are almost certainly apps that use Amazon S3 as a backend; that would probably be marginally cheaper though not as convenient.

[mdlbear]

aha!

apt-get install s3cmd
s3cmd sync / s3://backup-bucket

At a couple of cents per gig per month, it's said to be significantly cheaper than local hard drive when you take power into account.

[davmoo.livejournal.com]

Once you reach 33GB stored, Mozy becomes cheaper than S3.

[kyrielle]

FYI - someone recommended CrashPlan to me as well - and they list Linux support. The person mentioning them had only just signed up, but if you're interested in offsite backup with something other than S3 (given the price points for large data volumes), it's out there.

[davmoo.livejournal.com]

I've been recently comparing Mozy to Carbonite. The one big difference I see is that, according to what I read on the web, Carbonite begins to throttle your bandwidth when your backup size reaches 250GB. At Mozy, "unlimited" really does mean unlimited.

[kyrielle]

Interesting. I hadn't seen that, and either am or will be in that category (depending on whether it's per-computer or per-person, since I have two computers covered).

Carbonite has done an excellent job (and I did have to restore once and it worked as nicely as I'd hoped - total failure on my main drive in that case), on the technical side. On the people side...this is the third time I've had to deal with their support and the second time I have been, not merely unimpressed, but seriously aggravated. (The first time I had a basic question about restoring the hard drive which had an easy answer, and the support was very helpful. Of course, I fit their "expected questions" pattern that time. The second time was a billing issue and now this.)