Advice please: remote/private/cloud storage

[Buzz]

To paraphrase Aaron, I'd rather ask all you, who I've been chatting with for years, than a random stranger on a forum. I've read a heap of stuff but would still value sage advice from real folk.

A few events over the last year, including the failure of an external backup drive and some issues with online storage, have me considering my options regarding backing up what's on the various machines in the house. 

The stuff we want to keep safe is your average common or garden stuff - pictures, music, letters, household admin, accounts and so on - stuff we'd want to ensure we would need to access to get back on track after a house fire, for example. Other than wanting to exercise reasonable caution around data access/theft, we have no weapons-grade secrets to encrypt or squirrel away.

Our current set up is:

• OS involved are Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows RT 8.1 (and Android and iOS phones).
• Everyone uses webmail of one flavour or another.
• Our business website and email is with my friend's hosting business in the US and backed up elsewhere.
• The kids' laptops all currently use Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive for the school/uni work and personal stuff as per their/their school's preference.
• Home PC and my MBP are both backed up to external hard drives which can go in a bugout bag in the event of evacuation.

I'd be interested to hear views and opinions on the various options - e.g. DropBox et al vs. a so-called commercial 'private' cloud service; leasing a chunk of server space and sync-FTPing stuff. Options that rely on a machine at the property acting as a server are non-starters - not only for the fire scenario reason but, being rural, we have regular power outages.

Cheers

Buzz
www.hillsidebandb.co.nz
A rural retreat just 40 minutes from the city

[Bert Latamore]

Buzz

Several services out there including but not limited to Dropbox, MSFT's OneDrive, and Apple, offer large amounts of space for free. I would pick one that is convenient for you and seems to have ling term stability and that lets you organize your files the way you like them and back up everything there. I personally use the Microsoft OneDrive for everything, including my music and photos. MSFT gives me much more space than I can ever fill. I chose it in large part because my MSFT tablet comes set up to use the OneDrive for its back end storage, and I was already using Office 365, which keeps all its files on the OneDrive. So it made sense for me to put everything else there. 

I have Quicken, Pimlical, and other applications set up for daily backups to the OneDrive. I also have the Windows Media Player set to rip CDs to the My Music file on my OneDrive account. I move photos ther by drag and drop, organizing them as I go. 

This way I do not lose anything in a local disk failure, I can access everything from any computer with Internet access, and I can keep everything organized the way I want it. You can do the same sort of thing with Dropbox and other services. The most important thing to my mind is to keep everything in one place so you know where it is. I also of course keep a local copy of everything for convenience and because I want at least two copies of everything important. But I rely in the OneDrive as my backup.

Bert

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Bert Latamore

(703) 340-8396
Freelance Writer covering the intersection between IT and business

I dream of a better world where chickens can cross the road without having their motives questioned.

[Buzz]

Bert

Thanks for this. 

I currently have a 30GB OneDrive account and a 50GB Dropbox account and, until today, have had an assortment of files spread across the two. 

Over recent weeks, I have completed a long-overdue tidy up of documents, files and folders on my MBP, resolving all documents to a simple two-level folder structure in 'Documents' and various media to their respective folders.

As an initial interim solution (but still keen to hear other's thoughts), rather than move all this to the sync folder of one particular service, I will try using the apps mentioned below to sync my 'Documents' folder (~10GB) to the above accounts to provide two independent backups and see how that works for me. My image and music libraries are 80 and 50GB respectively so I'll continue to back those up to external drives, not forgetting most of the music is on my X1 anyway.

Cheers

Buzz

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For those here with Macs, I came across these freeware apps, which were developed by a young Kiwi guy here in NZ. They are simple GUIs for Unix command line stuff that sync any folder and recently used files to any of the popular cloud services.

http://www.zibity.com/macdropany.html

http://www.zibity.com/quicksand.html

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Buzz
www.hillsidebandb.co.nz
A rural retreat just 40 minutes from the city

[Bert Latamore]

MSFT is only giving you 30 GB? I have a huge amount more, maybe because I subscribe to Office 365. That costs very little and gives me Office on all three or our machines although I only use it on my Surface.