Online drive backup options?

[Uppsala9496]

The search function is down, so here comes a repost.

What is a good online backup that is relatively cheap? Carbonite any good? $60 a year is tolerable. I'm mostly concerned about my photos, but it would be nice to have all of my music, docs, etc. My wife would kill me if all of the baby pictures we have were lost due to a drive failure.

Picasa is $50 for 200GB, but only takes photos.

 

[janas19]

*subscribes to thread*

 

[Hoober]

I use Jungledisk. Works well, and you can select what you want to back up and how often.

 

[Twotore]

Might be worth taking a look at Wuala by LaCie... there's a good review of it here where it scores highly (4/5).

Sounds good but looking at the cost it might be a little pricier than Carbonite. However, the neat thing is you can try it out (1GB worth) for free just to see for yourself how good it is.

 

[Charlie98]

Right now I'm trying Acronis' free trial on backup (250GB) and I'm not having much luck with it. I haven't been able to get it to back up my data...

 

[Black-Wolf]

Why online? Why not a BU drive? I have an internal BU drive and an external. Data in 3 places. Granted HDD's are high right now, but cheaper in the long run and I am not relying on someone else to keep my data. Also, if you have a lot of pictures, etc. it takes quite a while to upload.
Didn't really answer your question, but it seems online BU is a gimmick to me.

 

[nitrous9200]

The theory is if you have a power surge that nukes your backup drives and computers or if your house burns down and destroys them that way...online backup would add another layer of redundancy.

We used to use Mozy until they killed the unlimited plan; now I just use CrashPlan. They have a reasonably priced online ("cloud") backup service but their software also allows you to make your own online backup solution; I have my dad's laptop and office computer (storing thousands of x-rays, patient information etc) backing up to my desktop at home, and the pictures stored at home are being backed up to the office computer.
So what you could theoretically do is find a friend who has a computer that is on most of the time, is on a decent internet connection and is willing to spare some hard drive space - you could back up to his computer and he could back up to yours (and you can set the software to back up to multiple remote locations as well as to a local external drive).

If that all sounds like too much work, Crashplan's hosted backups start at $5/month for unlimited data (price goes down if you sign up for a longer term, and they credit you for unused months if you buy a multi-year plan and cancel early). I don't use their hosted backups but based on my experiences with the software, I'm guessing it works well.

 

[Hoober]

I have my dad's laptop and office computer (storing thousands of x-rays, patient information etc) backing up to my desktop at home,

Doesn't that violate some laws? I wouldn't be comfortable knowing my health records are being backed up to somebody's desktop at home.

 

[mcveigh]

Doesn't that violate some laws? I wouldn't be comfortable knowing my health records are being backed up to somebody's desktop at home.

as long as it has protection of some type it's legal.
IIRC the HIPPA law says you have to protect pt info but not how you do it.

it could be anything from a lock and key, to a hand written sign saying don't read this. to 3DES 512bit encryption.

as long as it works you are OK. if there is a violation that's when a court can decide you didn't take enough precautions. and punish you.
IANAL

 

[nickbits]

amazon s3

i wrote my own backup/restore client though, but there are probably other ones out there

 

[paperwastage]

Jungledisk is pretty good. backend is Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloud

They don't charge too much of a premium... $3/month for the client(including first 5 GB free), $0.14 /GB/month after storage plus data transfer/request fees that Amazon S3 has

Don't really use ti to backup stuff, only use it to sync stuff b/w my 2 laptops and desktop, but security-wise its a lot better than dropbox (you can encrypt specific S3 drives with your own keys and no one can read it w/o the key)