# online backup



## haley1 (Aug 15, 2012)

Any opinions on online backup services and if they are good which do you like?
Thanks
Gary


----------



## arabian knight (Dec 19, 2005)

haley1 said:


> Any opinions on online backup services and if they are good which do you like?
> Thanks
> Gary


 Personally as cheap as it is now to get a external hard drive for back ups, once bought no more money going out,.
You can get a 1.5 TB drive for Under 90 bucks~! USB hook up, no problem.
I have a 500 Gig external hard drive for backing up my iMac.
My friend just got one like I have only for PC's and was under 60 bucks.
These work automatically in the background. Once the initial back up is done. You never even know when it does the backup, which is every hour in my case, unless you click on the icon to "watch" it LOL In fact mine hooks up via firewire.


----------



## bignugly (Jul 13, 2011)

I don't know how secure on line backup is by hackers or government.


----------



## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

For files up to 1 gb in size I would recommend a free account at fileserve.com. I use a free fileserve.com account to backup my hosting server, and also my voip server daily. It's really simple to set it up using automated FTP transfers.

Fileserve.com gives you 500 gb of storage for free.


----------



## NicoleC (Nov 7, 2008)

I use a free account from SugarSync for the main files, a home NAS (network attached storage) for the large and non-critical files like videos and media (in addition to the ones I sync online), and I rotate out USB keys in my purse and safe deposit box for the really critical stuff. The NAS, although it's top-rated and all that, is by far the least reliable. It gets the sniffles all the time. 

Bear in mind a backup device sitting next to your computer only backs up again one thing: computer failure. In the event of flood, fire, theft or just can't get home, a backup in the same place as your computer will fail, too. A friend recently had their home broken into and computer equipment stolen. Their backup drive, of course, was also stolen. They did not have any offsite backups, so they are in a bad way right now.

I recommend TrueCrypt (it's free) to encrypt any files with personal info, whether it's on your computer or a backup. Even if you lose your stuff, you especially don't want anyone else getting it.


----------



## WhyNot (Jun 21, 2011)

I would go with local external backup as ArabianKnight suggested.

To be brief, this is why:
I work for a company that does managed cloud services among many different things. The datacenters are by far crazy-whack-secure as we provide not just data storage but also managed backups for data that is required by many laws to be extremely secure due to our clientbase. We ARE extremely secure. That said.....

ANYTHING can be hacked.

That is all I'm saying as a person who does data security and backups and etc for a living...doesn't get much safer nor much less expensive than purchasing a very large capacity external drive and backing them up that way...put it in a safe or whatever...offsite storage is good if your house floods or burns down.

Shoot...most of the time it is worth the effort and time to back up to dvd instead of some of these cheap or free cloud services.


----------



## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

WhyNot said:


> I would go with local external backup as ArabianKnight suggested.


It depends on your needs, and the OP didn't really say what was being backed-up or why. Off-premise backups offer protection that an external drive backup can never provide.

I used to do network consulting for small companies. A large part of my work was in data security. For example, a law office might suddenly recognize that a secretary backing up document files to CD isn't going to help them if the office burns down some night, since the CD will get burned along with the computers. For a law office that can't afford to lose legal files, some kind of an off-premise backup is the only acceptable solution.

In my case, I remotely operate servers in a data center in Chicago, while I'm in Las Vegas. I do off-premise backups to a data center in a different city and owned by a different company. Really, how else could I do backups but off-premise?

But yes, there are cases where an external drive backup might be appropriate.


----------



## WhyNot (Jun 21, 2011)

Nevada said:


> It depends on your needs, and the OP didn't really say what was being backed-up or why. Off-premise backups offer protection that an external drive backup can never provide.


It is true that the OP didn't say their needs or why. However, again, in general...as Arabian Knight suggested...1.5 Terabytes is a rather significant amount for a home user or even a small business. External drives give you the option for an off premise back up. You can move them to wherever you would like.

Most company (and government) SOP's do not consider cloud data storage as off premise backups. Trust me. I manage storage for HUD contractors, FEMA contractors, Motorola, Dr.Pepper, Ford, large hospitals and others. Cloud servers do not actually meet the requirements for offsite in the fine print. There is onsite, cloud and off premise backups that we take. A cloud data storage is technically not considered offsite. If all your cloud data is compromised...then what? Again, not actually considered offsite no matter its physical location.

CD's and DVD's and Tapes can be taken offsite. Safe deposit boxes, your friend's house, etc.

Perhaps your company considers it offsite...but I do hope (and recommend) that all your backups are not relying on your cloud co-located servers. It's a mistake, no matter how small the percentage of dataloss may be. It's a mistake.


----------



## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

WhyNot said:


> Perhaps your company considers it offsite...but I do hope (and recommend) that all your backups are not relying on your cloud co-located servers. It's a mistake, no matter how small the percentage of dataloss may be. It's a mistake.


I absolutely rely on my off-premise backups. With the primary server in Chicago and a week of daily backups stored on a server in Dallas, my data can withstand a nuclear holocaust.

I lost it all one time by having the backup server in a different state, but the backup data center was owned by the same company as my primary server data center. While the data might have withstood a nuclear holocaust, it did not survive the bankruptcy of my co-location host. They just pulled the plug and flew the coop.

Live & learn...


----------

