What is your cloud backup provider?

Restic works fine on Windows. The documentation mostly covers Linux so it may cause a little frustration, but once you get it set up and working it's fine.

bobbyz wrote in post #18976995
Currently all my pictures are < 4 TB. So for B2 it will be < $20/month. But now I am shooting 50MP/60MP bodies, thought at lower number of shots.

You also might want to consider crashplan. $10/mt and so far it worked well for me - I really do like the option of being able to retrieve easily single files from their server. However, this does not take away the slow upload. Not sure, if they offer an initial HDD-upload service.

tim wrote in post #18977175
Restic works fine on Windows. The documentation mostly covers Linux so it may cause a little frustration, but once you get it set up and working it's fine.

Thanks. I tried Arq, the interface on windows was clumsy. The option to make backup on a USB drive is not shown but it is there, I had to use keyboard keys to select the hidden radio button. I wish I could give names to the backups to help later when I need to restore. Right now I did full backup of my catalogs (just to see). I will try few incremental backups and see what happens and then try to restore it.

If I remember correctly a while back you had mentioned Macrium Reflect 7. Would that work if I were to make only local backups? And then I can take those backups and move to the cloud?

drmaxx wrote in post #18977483
You also might want to consider crashplan. $10/mt and so far it worked well for me - I really do like the option of being able to retrieve easily single files from their server. However, this does not take away the slow upload. Not sure, if they offer an initial HDD-upload service.

Does it allows me to update a single drive/folder? Then technically I bring it to work and use a faster upload speed. Backblaze doesn't seem to allow that as it is forcing me to include my C: drive in the backup. Why why.

One more thing. With these backups (Cloud or local), you make full backup, then incremental. Now say after a moth, 6 months, do you make another full backup? What you when need to restore, if only one full backup and then all are incremental, it will take a while to get all of them down on a new computer for restore, isn't it?

bobbyz wrote in post #18977585
One more thing. With these backups (Cloud or local), you make full backup, then incremental. Now say after a moth, 6 months, do you make another full backup? What you when need to restore, if only one full backup and then all are incremental, it will take a while to get all of them down on a new computer for restore, isn't it?

If you do incremental backups, reconstituting the data will require the first complete backup and each one of the incremental files, however many there may be.

I prefer to use "differential" backups. Then you need only the first complete backup and the final differential file. You may have two or three differential files, but you only need the last one.

Of course, each succeeding differential gets larger and larger until you do another full backup.

yes pro/cons with both options.

You can do full , then incremental, then at a later stage, do another full, then so on. I just don't know what these services provide as they don't tell much unless you really dig into them. Just hoping someone with more knowledge can chime in. Would be great if one can rotate old backups after some time (and after verifying them they are good).

bobbyz wrote in post #18977579
Thanks. I tried Arq, the interface on windows was clumsy. The option to make backup on a USB drive is not shown but it is there, I had to use keyboard keys to select the hidden radio button. I wish I could give names to the backups to help later when I need to restore. Right now I did full backup of my catalogs (just to see). I will try few incremental backups and see what happens and then try to restore it.

If I remember correctly a while back you had mentioned Macrium Reflect 7. Would that work if I were to make only local backups? And then I can take those backups and move to the cloud?

I found a few bugs with Arq on Windows, and didn't like it was just one guy. Macrium Reflect is great for backing up whole disks, but I don't like it for regular / daily backups.

I suggest either CloudBerry backup (nice GUI, technology decent but not awesome around deduplication and such) or Restic (advanced to use but great features, though missing compression)

bobbyz wrote in post #18977580
Does it allows me to update a single drive/folder?

Yes, you can specify what you want to backup and to where. I have two jobs defined. One that backups my local working files (excluding system files) from the laptop onto the master external HD and one that backups the files from the external master HD to the cloud.

Thanks everyone.

So my macbook died when I was in Florida a couple of weeks back...was driving home on Cyber Monday and picked up a Surface Book on the way home.

I've had close to a month of data drama with my external drives being locked in APFS (thanks Apple!) and not being able to read them on my windows machine. That's a story for another day, but until I could sort out migrating my files off my old hard drives into a brand new drive formatted in exfat, I had to lean on my backblaze cloud backup to restore files that I needed immediately....include​d a raws from wedding I was still processing and photos from my trip that I had been editing each night. Backblaze basically saved my ass.

So yes it's good to always have a cloud based backup, because you never know when the most unimaginable crap will happen to your physical drives.

It took me a while, but I think I finally got my system of backups in place on my Surface Book. I basically have an 8TB HDD that backs up all the smaller/faster drives that I process stuff out of. And then I back that 8TB drive up to backblaze. It's similar to what I had been doing on my Mac, but since Carbon Copy Cloner does not work on windows, I had to find an alternative that was equally simple, and could schedule automatic backups. Bvckup 2 Pro seems to fit the bill so far.

It's been a PITA process mostly because of Apple makes it so difficult to migrate out of their ecosystem, but I was able to retain all of my data so I'd call it all a win.

bobbyz wrote in post #18976682
Looking at the various offerings. I am not sure how affective compression and dedup schemes are. Say I have 4TB of pictures. How big my first backup would be? Guess I can try by doing a backup to my local USB drive first. Software wise I tried Arq today, interface on windows 7 was bit clumsy but it worked quickly to backup my catalogs to a USB drive. I need to do couple more times and then see how easy to restore is and how well that restore works. Also trying Backblaze (not their B2 offering) and it doesn't allow me to remove my C drive.

You can unselect the "C" drive by holding the Alt key and clicking on the drive letter.

bobbyz wrote in post #18976995
Good to know this. I was reading more and Cloudberry review seemed pretty bad from this reviewer. I am not sure why it is so hard to have a nice front end on these backup softwares. Restic had good reviews but not for windows. I was trying Backblaze (not the B2) last night and on my slow upload link it does 100GB a day. It will take 30+ days to upload all my stuff. But this is just a mirror of what is on the hard drive. Currently all my pictures are < 4 TB. So for B2 it will be < $20/month. But now I am shooting 50MP/60MP bodies, thought at lower number of shots. Another option is I just make weekly backups to a USB drive and shuffle that to work. Wish I had google fiber.

One thing to keep in mind with Backblaze is that when it first runs it will backup the smallest files first before moving on to larger files. Smaller files are much slower to backup so your speed will increase over time. I can backup almost 1 TB/day when it's backing up large files.

Bcaps wrote in post #18979584
You can unselect the "C" drive by holding the Alt key and clicking on the drive letter.

Well, that is the dictionary definition of "arcane."

Anybody have any thoughts on Zinstall Fullback? It seems decent and although on the surface pricy ($200) for the Pro version that is for a lifetime license. The Pro version backs up everything, literally a mirror so that supposedly if you get hit by ransomware you format the drive, reinstall Windows, restore the backup and you are up and running having thumbed your nose at the ransom people. The other version is $99 but doesn’t handle the OS backup. If you back up to the cloud, as opposed to an external drive, it is $99 per year for the additional cloud access.

The company seems to have been around for about 10 years and has a respectable list of clients. The URL is
http://www.zinstall.co​m/backup.