How many of you do cloud backup, what kind, how much, etc.?

Mozy has decided to drop their "unlimited" which isn't very surprising. It was just a matter of when.

bohdank wrote in post #11793175
Mozy has decided to drop their "unlimited" which isn't very surprising. It was just a matter of when.

Not only did they drop unlimited they also rasied their price significantly. Mozy definately do not want photographers as their customers because if you have more than 125 GB (on upto 3 pc's, the limit is 50 GB for one pc) then you are going to pay a hefty price.

Currently I have 810 GB data from 2 pc's. The next renewal would have cost $1680 instead of $210 for 2 years. That is an increase of 800% ! Obviously I am not going to renew.

I think it's totally fair that Mozy charge more for more storage. There are costs in disks (RAID arrays and tape backups), bandwidth, networking gear, etc, etc. I think their only mistake was advertising unlimited storage to start with.

Their new prices do seem to discourage data hogs, but switching to another unlimited cloud storage system is a fools errand. They'll all go that way eventually, you can't run that service at $5/month unlimited. The service is mostly used by techies, who usually have lots of data. If you want cloud backup, be prepared to pay for it.

Instead of backing up all your raws online how about backing up to two offsite disks, $100 each, and putting 1800px jpeg files onto amazon s3? That way you have a good enough last ditch cloud backup, as well as full raw files available on disk.

I have 500GB of RAW and PSD files, I keep them on three different hard disks in three different locations.

tim wrote in post #11799446
Their new prices do seem to discourage data hogs,

The new prices are DESIGNED to push users with more than 50 GB pr pc or 125 GB for up to 3 pc's out. They do NOT want them as customers. If they did they would have chosen a more gradual price increase and they would have started that a long time ago. It cannot come as a surprice after 5 years that they would require huge amounts of storage when they offer unlimite storage.

I am pretty sure most users were skepticin the beginning. I was and basically the main reason I upgraded from the free service to the unlimited was because they were backed by EMC. But anyway Mozy has always just been a convenient offsite backup for me so its not a big loss to me. My current plan run until november and I'll keep my data there until then. If they don't want my money then I can certainly find something else to use them for. Camera gear for example

I dont think those online backup places work very well for photographers.. I think the FASTEST and cheapest way is use a very old computer that you are about to throw out. Put FreeNAS on it and get a few terrabyte drives and raid them.
You'll have a local dedicated storage that will cost you little to nothing.. And the best part is Freenas supports ISCSI so you could use it for active storage for lightroom or all your other systems.

This is what i do.. With almost 10 terabytes (raid 5) of storage that is connected to every computer in the house. I even host 2-3 virtual machines on the storage array which dont even look at the local hard disk on the Host machine. Ok.. im a little bit of a geek. But, its almost the fastest, most cost effective, and safest way on backing up your data.

rcfury wrote in post #11818178
I dont think those online backup places work very well for photographers.. I think the FASTEST and cheapest way is use a very old computer that you are about to throw out. Put FreeNAS on it and get a few terrabyte drives and raid them.
You'll have a local dedicated storage that will cost you little to nothing.. And the best part is Freenas supports ISCSI so you could use it for active storage for lightroom or all your other systems.

This is what i do.. With almost 10 terabytes (raid 5) of storage that is connected to every computer in the house. I even host 2-3 virtual machines on the storage array which dont even look at the local hard disk on the Host machine. Ok.. im a little bit of a geek. But, its almost the fastest, most cost effective, and safest way on backing up your data.

Fire or user error could kill that "backup" instantly. How do you do offsite backups? That's more what this thread is about.

CrashPlan.

Yeah, I'm pissed off about Mozy's change and will have to consider my options when the account is up for renewal (I signed up with a 2 year plan). I expect my backup set to grow at about 100 GB/year and their tier-pricing right now would cost me $23/month. This is about how much Amazon S3 charges.

Maybe a bank vault with high capacity drives is the way to go. Just terribly inconvenient.

Two external hard drives in rotation, kept at work or a friends house, will cost you $200-$300 and last years. It's a bit more hassle, but it's fine for me. I have about 2TB to back up so online was never an option.

talz13 wrote in post #11821922
CrashPlan.

same here I cancelled my mozy plan after their ridicolous new plans, crashplan is better and cheaper !

CrashPlan is the way to go. Their software allows you to backup to both an external drive and their cloud service. Backups are encrypted, and they allow infinite versioning, which means every time a file is edited , changed, or deleted, they keep a copy of the file forever. The storage is unlimited.

So, currently I have a local copy on my editing machine's drive, a copy on an external USB drive, and a copy in the cloud. If the PC dies, a quick restore can be done from the external drive, and if the house burns down I can restore from the cloud.

Everyone bellyaching about upload times can send them a seed copy of your pictures on an external drive to get things started. Most areas of the country offer cable internet service with upload speeds 3Mbps or over. You may have to ask for their "business class" service for a small premium that offers faster speeds that are also guaranteed (meaning your contractually guaranteed the speed your paying for).

There really is no excuse for not having an off-site (cloud) backup solution today