Online Backup

[Catherine Hunt]

Dear Smuggers,

I have had Backblaze online backup for a number of years. However, I feel that their support has been dreadful over the last couple of months and I now want to find another provider.

Any recommendations?

Best wishes
Catherine

www.catherinehunt.co.uk

Sent from my iPad

[Jason P. Davies]

How much stuff do you want to back up?

cheers,

-Jason
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[Diana]

I have used Code42 / Crashplan+ for many years without problem and I am no expert.  Hope this helps.

[Paul Booth]

Can you elaborate on the problems you've had with Backblaze? I've been using them for years too but have never needed to contact them. I'd like to know if I can't rely on them if I ever need to.

Cheers,

Paul.

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[Graham Street]

I've also used them for years. Only ever contacted them once or twice and found the response to be excellent.
Graham

Paul Booth

26 January 2016 07:59

Can you elaborate on the problems you've had with Backblaze? I've been using them for years too but have never needed to contact them. I'd like to know if I can't rely on them if I ever need to.

Cheers,

Paul.

[Phil Ward]

I’ve always found Backblaze to be pretty good too. What went wrong Catherine?

P

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[Tonyp]

me too! Customer Service OK as well….perhaps caught them on a bad day…we all have them!

Tony Phillips

ton...@gmail.com

[Catherine Hunt]

Dear All,

My problems with Backblaze are that they did a safety freeze of my online backup. They sent instructions for what to do to restore my backup and it didn't work. This has been going on for over a month and it just seems to go round in circles. I email support and they reply a couple of days later. I carry out what they say and it doesn't work. And so it goes on. I have now got the attached message. 

I've been with them since 2009 and I had no problems up to now. However, I feel I'm losing the will to live with this and I just want a different solution.

I also have dropbox pro which backs up up to 1 TB. Backblaze was unlimited backup and I wasn't having to think about how much I had. Perhaps it would be possible just to use dropbox? I've got 1TB MacBook drive, 750 GB used. 

Best wishes 
Catherine 

Sent from my iPad

[Catherine Hunt]

I also found a number of reviews on Amazon.com, if anyone's interested. 

http://amzn.to/1QyV00O

Best wishes 

Catherine 

Sent from my iPad

On 26 Jan 2016, at 14:47, Catherine Hunt <ca...@mac.com> wrote:

Dear All,

My problems with Backblaze are that they did a safety freeze of my online backup. They sent instructions for what to do to restore my backup and it didn't work. This has been going on for over a month and it just seems to go round in circles. I email support and they reply a couple of days later. I carry out what they say and it doesn't work. And so it goes on. I have now got the attached message. 

[Paul Russell]

All the online backup services seem to get bad reviews (BackBlaze, CrashPlan, Carbonite, etc) - does anyone know of a reliable service, or is it better to create your own, e.g. using generic cloud storage such as DropBox ?

Paul

[Jason Kitcat]

Personally I use a combination of things - not trusting any one approach!

So Dropbox for all personal files including Music but not Photo library as it’s too big. I use iCloud Photo library for online Photo backup.

Then I use external drives for time machine backups and also for occasional SuperDuper copies of whole machine. I always have at least one drive off-site at someone else’s house in case of total disaster!

All the best,

Jason

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Jason Kitcat

@jasonkitcat

07956 886 508

http://www.jasonkitcat.com

[Paul Russell]

Thanks - same here, in that I have multiple Time Machine drives plus occasional SuperDuper backups - the part that’s missing from my backup strategy is the off-site backups. I was hoping to go with CrashPlan, which seemed to be the best of the bunch, but the negative reviews have put me off. I might have to look into a DIY solution.

Paul

[Diana Hart]

I have been with CrashPlan for several years and cannot remember any problems.

Diana

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[Paul Russell]

Hi Diana - Have you ever had to restore from your CrashPlan backups, e.g. after a hard disk failure ? That seems to be when people run into problems, at least according to the negative reviews.

Paul

[Diana Hart]

No I have not.

Diana

[Derek Wright]

I have about 2.5TB of data spread over 4 partitions on 3 drives, these are backed up each night to an internal 3TB drive, then a further back up is done nightly to a 3TB external drive. Every two weeks or so or after a major addition of data to the system an additional 3 TB drive is connected to the system to create a further full back up. This final drive is kept in the garden shed about 100 feet from the house.

I also run Time Machine to a 4TB drive in a Time Capsule.

Superduper is used for all the backing up - all drives are connected as SATA or eSata drives in a Mac Pro tower.

Why the paranoia - my cousins house was burnt down and he lost all his family records, pictures history the lot. Only his two dogs survived, he was out at the time and arrived home to the smoke and fire engines.

[itsa...@icloud.com]

This, I think is the issue.

It sounds very familiar to an ISP - when everything works and you have a connection and your broadband works, the cheap bargain deal seems great. It’s not until your broadband goes really slow or starts behaving erratically that you dial their support, speak to someone with an almost incomprehensible accent in India reading a script who continually asks you to keep restarting your modem/computer and then can’t answer anything because they just read a script and you start realising where those cost savings were made!

That was my old experience of NTHell and my partner’s experience of TalkTalk.

The problem is that unless you simulate a disk crash / corruption and go through the motions you’ll never find out how well it all works until you’re in a real mess, which is just the time that you don’t want to discover that it doesn’t work, or work well.

I use Time Machine to back up to an external disk and then every month my partner and I back up everything to separate disks which are kept at a friend’s house. I really feel it needs emphasising that whatever kind of backup you do, you must have an off-site backup because otherwise a burglary / flood / fire could mean everything is lost.

Cheers,

Stephen

"David Bowie had everything. He was intelligent, imaginative, brave, charismatic, cool, sexy and truly inspirational both visually and musically. He created such staggeringly brilliant work, yes, but so much of it and it was so good. There are great people who make great work but who else has left a mark like his? No one like him.” ~ Kate Bush

On 2 Feb 2016, at 10:27, Paul Russell <prus...@sonic.net> wrote:

[itsa...@icloud.com]

Another thing I’d add is about trying to go paperless if you can. I did this primarily in order to get rid of my filing cabinet (which I did - yay!) but it also meant that I could find everything more easily on the Mac too. I realised later that a bonus I’d not considered was that it means that all my important documents, of which I have only one copy, are now duplicated off-site on my backups. When I had only the physical copies then they could have all been destroyed were something horrible to happen to the house.

Stephen

"David Bowie had everything. He was intelligent, imaginative, brave, charismatic, cool, sexy and truly inspirational both visually and musically. He created such staggeringly brilliant work, yes, but so much of it and it was so good. There are great people who make great work but who else has left a mark like his? No one like him.” ~ Kate Bush

[mac98aop]

This is a really helpful thread about a really important topic.

One thing I'd love to ask is how to check that TimeMachine is doing its job?

I did try to boot and restore from my TimeMachine but the only option it offered on startup was for a very old backup. I didn't have time to investigate so simply copied a cloned drive across.

Any tips on one checking that all is doing as it should from time to time?

Thanks

Adam

[Derek Wright]

My possibly over the top back up strategy is because i believe disk drives exist in one of two states
About to die
or
Dead

With my method I can boot up from a back up bypassing any failed drive, get onto the internet and order a new drive and in a few days copy the data over to the new drive. Maximum down time less that 30 minutes.

I use Time Machine for recovering data that has been "lost" due to my mishandling.

[Toby Leighton]

I haven't used crashplan in ages but I remember liking it a lot.  - maybe a good strategy is for you and a friend/relative to each buy a hard disk for backing up and back up each others computers?  not rely on their datacentres.   The worst backup provider I have ever seen, used and attempted to deal with was mozy pro but I don't know if they do macs.

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[Jason P. Davies]

I knew a guy once who had two backups die at the same time (same day - bought them the same time, see?) and went to his tapes (it's a while ago) and both those were corrupted....

cheers,

-Jason
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