I've been putting this off forever, but it's definitely time to come up with a suitable alternative. The Crashplan free "P2P" that I've been running is now over. We've discussed CrashPlan issues before (thread 1, thread 2, thread 3).

- This guy has settled into some kind of combination of Duplicati and Minio that uses Amazon cloud storage. He also had negative things to say about BackupBuddy (or is it BuddyBackup?), which is ostensibly a drop-in replacement for the P2P Crashplan mode.

- Here's a summary of commercial options. Nothing here seems great. Here's the summary:



So... based on all of this, it seems that UrBackup is the recommended solution for my needs (i.e., running a "server" on my work machine and backing up to it from my "home" machine and laptop).

Thoughts?

Probably what I do for backups won't resonate with the sophisticated users we have here, but it works for me.

I use a program called "Karen's Replicator" which, as far as I know, is no longer being sold following Karen's demise, but with a little searching you might find a copy of it. It is a brute force backup that basically creates a file-for-file copy of your source drive. If a source file changes, that file is deleted from the backup and replaced with a new copy of the changed file.

Yes, it is not economical on hard drive space, but who cares, with hard prices down to a little over half a cent per megabyte on my most recent purchase. It is reasonably configurable with a very non-intuitive user interface. I just set it to copy everything, even the recycle bins, and let it go at that.

My backup procedure is... crude. The things I really want safe (my eBooks, my music) I copy into a backup directory on the same hard drive. Then I back up that complete hard drive to another hard drive in the same computer. Then I back up that backed-up drive to an external hard drive. Then every few months I visit my neighbor and retrieve my off-premises external hard drives and back up the backed-up backup drives to those.

I am a grumpy curmudgeonly Luddite, and don't feel at all comfortable having my data not under my complete control at my fingertips -- so no cloud backup for me, even if my absolutely blazing 1.2 Mbps upload speed made it possible. [Update: I just checked, today I am getting the best speed I have had in years, 14.9 Mbps download, 2.0 Mbps upload. Wow!] By my figuring, it would take 150 days, 24 hours a day, to upload my data, by which time a lot of it would be obsolete.

Anyway, I am happy with my backup system, crude though it may be.

tanstaafl.

The rest of your system seems pretty complicated but if it works for you then I won't argue. But this worries me a little, and leaves you completely susceptible to ransomware. I've had several clients get infected with ransomware, which changed the files by encrypting them, which then triggered a backup of each file. By they time they catch on to this, usually most of their files are already infected AND backed up. But it's no matter because most backup services offer versioning so you can merely restore all the files from right before the infection occurred (after cleaning it off, of course).

Not so much as you might think at first. I wasn't clear about ssomething: the deletion/replacement of changed files occurs only when the backup program runs, and it is not configured to run automatically. It runs when I have decided that it has been long enough that I ought to another backup, and hopefully I would notice that my files were encrypted and inaccessible before I ran the backup. There's a pretty good chance that I couldn't even run the backup program if I tried under those circumstances.

Not so much. I have two configurations defined in the backup program, one for the "regular" backups and one for the "off premises" backups. Choose one or the other and click on "Run".

I probably back up about every ten days to two weeks, and the off-premises backups maybe every couple of months. That one is a little more complicated in that I have to exchange the drives in the external docks with the off-premises drives.

My data doesn't change that often, and the data that gets added the most often comes from email which is on Google's server, and eBooks which can be reloaded from Amazon.

I feel reasonably safe.

tanstaafl.

I guess by complicated I meant that you have to do a lot. I don't do anything and it all backs up for me. I just test it every once and a while. But yeah, cloud would be tough for you if you even wanted to do it. But I think it would actually work on your new bandwidth.

I recently had to go through this. I have kept Crashplan Pro for my NAS. For one machine it's actually cheaper than the Family plan once the discount runs out.

I'm not super impressed though. First because my backup was >1TB all my backup history was deleted. I would have been better removing some of my backups bringing it under 1TB and then migrating. I'd read that the 1TB wasn't a thing and I was wrong. They also stuffed up the migration which required more effort than I wanted to spend. So I dragged my NAS into the office to backup 1TB over a few days.

For my "P2P" backups, I've tried Duplicati + a Minio docker on my NAS with the intention of then backing up the minio backup to Crashplan. Not super happy with it.

- Duplicati seems to have some wierd operation where it runs under multiple users resulting in different instances running under different ports. There are some options to fix this which I thought I had set up but haven't seemed to work.
- Setting up new machines is significantly more complicated than Crashplan where it was basically login and maybe change the files to backup (separate backup desitnations, passwords, new S3 destinations etc).
- Can't do real time backup (but the new Crashplan seems to have issue with that too).

I have a strict no touch backup "philosophy" i.e. once running it should require no effort. i.e. disk shuffling is not going to cut it for me.

Also I managed to get 1.6 odd TB into the cloud over a <1Mbps up ADSL connection. So perfectly feasible - if the data is obsolete, why back it up Doug? I have 5 Mbps now and that's enough for fairly significant cloud backups.

I'm with Doug. I just don't see good value in trusting other people's computers with my own photographs and sensitive files. Local backups are downright trivial here, so for me this is what I choose.

Cheers

And when your house burns down, is flooded, hit by lightning or you're burgled or something like that?

And manually rotated off site backups in this day and age don't cut it for me.

You can encrypt locally for zero knowledge backups if you're that concerned too.

The house and interior walls are all brick and masonry, it won't burn down, valuables are in a fire safe in any case. The lake I live next to is now at the highest level since 1910. It's been rising at the rate of about one centimeter a day for the past three months. If it rises another six feet it'll ruin my garden but I'll have six months warning to put my computer on a higher shelf. My house is surrounded by 60-foot tall trees, and my roof-top solar panels are very well grounded, so lightning doesn't scare me. Burglary? That's why I keep a last-ditch emergency backup set off premises.

The time I have to spend maintaining this kludge of a backup system? On average about one minute per week, with maybe a four times a year exception when I retrieve and update the off-premises backups at a cost of 10 minutes of my time. Meanwhile, should I accidentally delete or damage a file, I can recover its backup with a few mouse clicks without loading any recovery software and drilling down through 20 different versions that were saved incrementally to find the one that I want.

Understand that this system would not be workable for someone whose data is valuable and time-critical so that daily or even more frequent backups are necessary. Before I click the backup button, I ask myself if I am happy with the state of my recent changes, and if yes, then off we go. I do not let my computer choose the time or frequency of backups, I choose that myself.

I am not losing any sleep whatsoever about the security of my data. If through some extraordinary circumstance I did lose it all irretrievably, I would be unhappy but it would not be life-changing. There's nothing there I can't live without.

What does worry me is the idea of having my data stored on some stranger's computer over which I have no control whatsoever.

tanstaafl.

Most of these cloud backup services allow you to encrypt using either a default or user-selected key. I don't understand the big deal about putting encrypted data on remote servers.

Oh, it's not that I'm worried about someone reading my data to find out which are my favorite porn sites or something, but being paranoid I worry that through some incredibly unlikely circumstance they might lose it. I mean with fly-by-night untested services like Amazon or Google, how safe could it be?

Just because you backup to the cloud/someone else's computer, that doesn't stop you from also backing up locally

I use the same tool, Arq, to backup locally and to a couple of different cloud providers automatically every couple of hours.

If I did any of those manually it would never happen, I don't have the same ability to stick to a timetable of backups like I'm sure Doug does have.

That's almost funny! My "timetable" consists of thinking "Gee, it's been a while since I backed up. Am I comfortable with the state of my data right now? Guess I better do a backup."

Unlike a sophisticated system, my backups are irreversible, that is I don't have the luxury of reverting back to a previous version of a file. When I back up, that original file is gone forever, so I am cautious about how and when I do the backups. Keep in mind that none of my data is mission critical in any way. As I said, I'd be sad to lose some of it, but none of it would be life-changing or even very inconvenient if I lost it.

tanstaafl.

I perfect description of what I would do twice and never remember/be bothered to do again. Some of us really need automation

Indeed. Doug, if it works for you then I won't rain on your parade. But I can't tell you how many times I've helped clients of mine, and they bring out their ancient external hard drive with dust all over it, and they say something to the effect of "I don't remember the last time I got this out."

I don't trust a single one of my clients to do manual backups. Heck, I don't trust myself to do them. So I don't recommend any solution that isn't automatic.

The next question is where to store the backup. Local or the cloud? I guarantee that none of my clients will be taking drives home and bringing them back (refer to the dusty hard drive). So while a local backup is good, and protects from things like drive failures and accidental deletions/changes, it doesn't protect from things like fire/flood/theft (I always feel like an insurance salesman at this point). I had one client get his systems flooded by a burst pipe from an office above him. But he had a cloud backup and got everything back. And he got everything up to the minute before the flooding.

So my personal order of importance for backup features is:

-automatic
-cloud-based
-local

Again, Doug, if your system works for you then great. But I deal with a ton of different computer users, and every last one of them needs a system that they don't think about and keeps them as protected as possible. That always means something like Carbonite or iDrive.

Great image! My external drives sit, each in its own dock, right on my desk top next to my monitor, so they are never out of sight, out of mind. Every time I sit down in front of my computer I have a reminder.

What I haven't done yet is work out a system for routinely cloning my C:> drive to make recovery easier in case of real disaster.

tanstaafl.

Given how obsessive you are about your file backup, I see no reason for a routine cloning. Maybe every 6-12 months?

That's pretty much what I had in mind. Except I haven't gotten off my lazy butt to do one at all yet.

tanstaafl.

I would go with Macrium Reflect. They have a free version that'll do system images, and I believe it can do scheduled ones.

I used it to migrate my laptop to a larger drive.