Basically Mozy have discontinued their unlimited online backup, have introduced a cap and doubled their price if you want to use more than 50Gb. I use them to back up all the pictures I send to clients and other important documents, on top of my local backup solutions.

So I am looking for a new online solution, any suggestions ??? Has to have an automated OSX client, has to be invisible and cost around $5 a month. At the moment I use around 80Gb and that is growing at a rate of about 5Gb a month at the moment.

I am tempted by DropBox, but it's expensive and has limited storage of 100Gb. Anyone got experience ???

Cheers

Cris

Amazon S3 back end through one of their front end resellers ? Have a look at jungle disk for sample pricing.

Thanks, looks like it could be an option, a little more expensive than Mozy but seems to be much more flexible and I really like the idea of a mapped network drive.

The iOS access seems really handy too !!!

I signed up to DropBox but it doesn't seem like a solution for me, the 100Gb limit would soon be a pain too.

Cheers

Cris

On dslreports some people talked about Crashplan. One interesting thing about them is that you can backup to a friends computer.

I was really pissed off about this last night when I got the email. I was always a little surprised that they offered unlimited storage, but their new plans are way too much of a price hike.

Looking at Twitter, pretty much everyone is just as pissed about it. Personally, I currently have around 325GB of data up there, and the bulk of that is in my photos and my wedding video and home movies. Currently I'm on a plan of two years of service for $100, and under the new plans I'd be paying $140 per year. That's a 180% increase in price, and I'm taking up more and more space with every set of pictures I take. I still have quite some time left on my two-year subscription, though, so I have plenty of time to think over the alternatives.

But for you right now, Cris, there are definitely alternatives.

Mozy has actually always been the lesser twin of Carbonite, which offers basically the exact same product for nearly the exact same price. I'm pretty sure it's used by more people, too, as they do far more advertising than Mozy does (if you listen to anything on TWiT they've advertised with Leo for years). Now, there's nothing to say that Carbonite won't change their plans too, but I'd say that half of the people angry at Mozy on Twitter are jumping ship to Carbonite.

One product I'm a little interested in trying is the Pogoplug. I could put one of these in my mother's house (along with a large external drive) and back up all my stuff to that. Because we both have Fios, one benefit is that backups will go much faster.

Could be worse. Photographer reports another account for stealing his pictures. Flickr promptly deletes his account instead of the other account. Their initial email response basically is "Sorry!"

As for Mozy, its stupid that they offered an unlimited service in the first place. Were they really so naïve to offer this without considering that people will upload large amounts of data and are perfectly within the terms of their contract to do so?

At least 7500 people aren't happy with Carbonite however.

My remote backup is to a server hosted at a family members house and to a colo server.

I know we've discussed this before Cris, but you're more than welcome to stick a NAS over at mine. As long as the backups happen overnight then there shouldn't be any issues with my allowance being eaten up.

Andy is on FTTC so has a decent upstream rate.


Its poorly documented by A&A but there is another tier of usage charging. 2am to 6am is tracked as "21CN Night Special" which is 1TB per unit instead of the regular night rate of 100GB per unit.

21CN daytime (09-18 M-F) 2GB
21CN evening (18-24 M-F) 100GB
21CN night (00-02) 100GB
21CN night special (02-06) 1TB
21CN night (06-09) 100GB
21CN weekend 100GB
21CN weekend night special (02-06) 1TB

Cris is on FTTC too, so it's relatively speedy in both directions.

Uh yeah. Not sure what my logic was in pointing out that you've got good upstream! Duh. It'd be Cris' upstream rate that would be important!

I've got 10Mbps up so I don't think that would be a problem

I think the only workable solutions for me at this point are either Jungle Disk or take up Andy's offer.

How would that work Andy ??? I wouldn't want to run my Mac Pro 24/7 as it really sucks the electric, but I have a readyNAS running here already, would it be quite simple to buy another and sync them over night ???

Maybe we could whack some large drives in there and you have a bit of the space at this end, and me some at your end ??? Mine would be client data so I would have to make sure it's secure etc... No personal information, just pictures and album layouts etc...

I've downloaded Jungle Disk for now, just using the free space at the moment to give it a try out. Seems to do everything I want in a pretty simple package.

Cheers

Cris

Some kind of small low power machine or NAS box that you can run rsync on would work well. Just dump the files onto your local box and it'll sync over to the remote end overnight.

What ReadyNAS do you have? I've got the NV+ and scheduling backup jobs looks fairly simple.

You can stick the NAS on one of my public addresses and either lock access down to your address range over there, or I can set you up with VPN access and keep the NAS on my private LAN. Assuming you've still got the Vigor then setting a simple LAN to LAN VPN is pretty easy.

A contra deal would be nice!

If you have two Intel based ReadyNAS units, the ReadyNAS Replicate service can be used. Pretty sure Chris had an NV+ though, so thats out.

I was also going to suggest Egnyte, but it looks like their options are a bit pricy for what you want. Still aimed mostly at document cloud activity, not photos. I beta tested this alongside my ReadyNAS Ultra, and it was pretty clever. Any files in a share could then be accessed in the cloud, or at another remote location over the LAN to a local NAS.

Ultimately the easiest solution will probably be root access to the NAS and scripting a little rsync solution up. The only downside I can see to this idea is rsync is really slow on the NV+ due to the sparc CPU, and worse when SSH overhead is added. Possibly slower then the 10mbit upstream speed. You will probably want to do the initial sync with both units on the same LAN, and NFS mount the second NAS from the first. Then use normal copy tools.

*edit* Looks like Andy is saying you might be able to do a LAN VPN to VPN easily. If so, the built in backup via the web interface should work, I'd recommend using remote NFS server if you choose this route, and have the remote NV+ have NFS enabled.

Also, 10mbit upstream service would be nice. Currently on the highest plan from Cox, and it's still only 5mbit upload.

You two should set it up such that the backups are encrypted, to eliminate any possibilities of data-leaks.

Good fences make good neighbours.

Cheers

Cris, work out how to get IPv6 on the Vigor or buy a cheap RouterBoard 750G to replace it then you can connect direct over IPv6

I only have a ReadyNAS Duo RND2000 at the moment, but that is not to say an upgrade is out of the question if it's the right solution. I've been thinking of finding something faster as I use it to run my SlimServer (or whatever it's called now) and it's dog slow.

This is all going to get beyond my understanding very quickly I think. I use a DrayTek Vigor 2930 at the moment (2nd ADSL is going off line in April) so a change of router isn't out of the question either.

It there an easy and secure way of both Andy and I benefiting from this solution? So we could both securely backup off site to the same box in each others houses but keep all the files in effect hidden from each other ???

I am with BT for my FTTC so options are really limited, I can't change anything, not even supposed to use the Draytek! But the HomeHub supplied really does suck big time. Underneath it's good but the firmware is terrible if you want to change even the simplest thing.

Cheers

Cris

+1 for jungledisk. Works really well for me, especially the sync folders.

It depends on whether you're going to put a NAS at my place. If you are then password protect the shares on it and don't tell me the password. Then I can just do the same at yours when I get round to it. Otherwise maybe we could look at using duplicity on our existing NAS'? It's available on Macports so you could run it on your Pro and also a few people have made it run directly on the ReadyNAS NV+.

The Duo is also Sparc based like the NV+ (basically the two systems are the same, just one has 4 drive bays instead of two).

If you want something more powerful for home, you could look into the ReadyNAS Ultra lineup. They have 2, 4 and 6 drive variants, and then the Duo could go to Andy's house for the remote backups.

If you want to run encryption, it looks like it's possible to use Duplicity on the ReadyNAS. This works like rsync where it only sends over the differences and can mirror, with the added benefit the remote copy is encrypted. The Ultra CPU should have more then enough power to handle this decently.

If you do go the ReadyNAS route, let me know. I have both an NV+ and an Ultra 4 at home, and can do some experiments to help find the ideal setup. Assuming Andy can take care of the networking part on your side, this should be pretty workable. A bit of setup effort, and the process should run smoothly for as long as you need it. All you need to decide is if you want a large up front cost (new NAS and drives) and no monthly fees, or if you want to go a service route with no up front cost but monthly fees.

One other possibility to toss into the mix for monthly service is the ReadyNAS Vault.

*edit* Seems Andy and I are thinking alike, both posted the Duplicity solution at the same time

Ah. If you've got BT Infinity then you are supposed to use their VDSL modem and their HomeHub. If its another ISP then you're just made to use the VDSL modem and you supply the router.

I've no idea how well BT Infinity supports IPv6 and you're unlikely to have a 1500 MTU/MRU which may need some careful tweaking of VPN and connection parameters.

I guess you're on the Option 2 package if you've got 10Mbps upstream?

That's probably true. I think the problem is that the vast majority of their users are going to suffer enormous price increases based on their new pricing schemes.


They probably were, though I don't think this is a result of them being mad that people are uploading so my data. They surely expected that. I suppose it's just not possible for them to expand at the rate that people are taking advantage of the unlimited space.

And I don't consider myself to be using an incredible amount of data. Like I said before, the bulk of the data I've backed up to Mozy consists of my photos and my wedding video. It's not like I'm backing up terabytes of copyrighted media, which I suspect is what they're battling here. If so, I still think they increased the prices too much.

I'd be interested in knowing the average amount of data that their users are backing up...

Yep. And to be honest for the cost I am totally happy with the service so far. I use the Openreach supplied modem, but the BT HomeHub has just stayed in it's box, it was quite simple to figure out how to configure the Draytek. The 10Mbps was the whole reason I went for FTTC, I upload lots of client pictures and it actually does save me time.

So far they don't seem bothered that I am not using their hub, never really noticed any downtime, but I do have automatic fall over to the other ADSL line, so I guess I wouldn't notice anyway. In April I will loose the backup ADSL and use a 3G USB stick in the router for emergencies only.

I have found the initial backup to JungleDisk painfully slow though, it has taken all day to backup 5Gb and was no where near using the 10Mbps available. I think I'm going to give this a go for a while until such time I can share a beer with Andy and discuss in more details the ReadyNAS solution

Cheers

Cris

Another possible option is BackBlaze, who made something of a splash two years ago with their custom disk servers. Dunno if their pricing is best for you or not.

Flickr gives the photographer 25 years of free membership + recovers photos

25 years? Odd to have a specific number whilst also having it be so long of a time period. Is Flickr even going to exist in 10 years time?