Recently lost an external drive due to a few misclicks and a tired night of setting up RetroPie which resulted in me quick formatting it for a few seconds. I just used some software to recover most of the files off the drive but it's done a nice job mangling names, so I'll have a fun time sorting through that! I've seen a few recommendations online for some online backup solutions, some that could be cheap like $10-$20 per month and let you back up as much as you want to them, but everyone seems to have their own opinions on what is good and what isn't. I find the AG community awesome enough to the point where I think a recommendation here would be pretty solid, so if you all use any of those solutions or have one you would like to shout out I'd love to know! If it's a good value that's always awesome, and if I'm backing stuff up I'm going to be backing up and uploading terabytes of data so no data cap is a must have. Please no recommendations for any on-site solutions like a NAS or something similar. I'm wanting to look into an online backup now in case my physical stuff goes POOF and disappears.
The $20-30 range per month would be nice, although if need be I can spend more. Just throwing a number out.
One option you've got if you don't want to run into potential issues with "unlimited space" not really being "unlimited", would be to look at cloud storage, like the aforementioned Azure Storage, or AWS S3/Glacier, Google Cloud Storage (Nearline), or Backblaze B2 Cloud. Backblaze B2 and Glacier will be your cheapest bets - Glacier @ $0.0045/GB a month, and Backblaze @ $0.005/GB a month. Note that everything but Backblaze is API/CLI only by default (Backblaze has a web UI for uploading as well - I have no idea how well it works). You can use third party applications like Cloudberry Backup or Arq to push to them in a much more user-friendly fashion, but they're not free ($30 for CloudBerry, $50 for Arq, one time only for both).
I'm using Crashplan service to backup 3 family computers (it's up to 5 I think). For the moment I haven't needed to restore files. Backup speed is pretty fast. Unlimited space it seems.
Amazon Drive. "Unlimited" storage for $60 a year (was $5 on Black Friday!) - why would you use anything else? Unless their terms aren't to your liking, of course. Dropbox Pro offers 1Tb for a bit more (can't tell you the US price, £79 here).
+1 to retro, I haven't used Amazon myself but only heard good things so far. I use Google Drive (only the first paid tier, 100 GB) mainly for convenience. For the rest I have an 8 TB NAS at home doing regular backups and then I keep a 2 TB portable hard drive at work which I remotely sync every now and then with the important stuff from the NAS.
I'll look into all the options given to me! I've heard of Crashplan before. If we're talking TB maybe at least 10? I'd like to backup my own PC and drive hooked up to it, a nice bonus would be to backup my existing external drives I have sitting around here. Edit - Doesn't Glacier charge you for download bandwidth? If that's Amazon Glacier than I believe that's the case.
Probably because that can get expensive, fast? The place I'm renting a vserver from also offers dedicated storage boxes, and even 5TB is noticeably above the $20 target; there's usually an upper limit on available (or rather, allocatable) space (in my case, 10TB for a whopping €48/month) so you might have to split your stuff across multiple machines. Or are you thinking of a colo? Even more expensive, usually ridiculously so imho.
A backup server or NAS would be something for the future, I've already stated in the OP that is NOT what I am looking for at the moment. The idea right now is to have my data safely backed up off-site in case my data physically goes POOF whether it be a failed drive, natural disaster, or my own tired/dangerous self like what happened with this drive.
It's looking like CrashPlan might be the best bet for me, it has pretty solid reviews all around, has been created in mind for a *POOF* or restore required solution (hence the name), and it's $60 for unlimited storage for one PC. Also $60 for an individual license per year or $150 per year for up to 10 PCs, so I might also set this up for my family!
Big bump, but some developments here... Went with Crashplan - Hated it as it was terribly slow and unreliable. Decided to do an Amazon Cloud x Arq 5 combination, but as most people know Amazon Cloud is no longer going to be unlimited and will now charge you per TB. The other viable options I saw on here were Amazon Glacier/S3 and Backblaze. Anyone have other recommendations for online services? Glacier seemed tempting, I'm thinking of leaning more towards Backblaze after reading this article a few weeks ago: https://medium.com/@karppinen/how-i...0gb-download-from-amazon-glacier-6cb77b288c3e
I'm about to try Backblaze; have only heard good things about it, plus I love the fact they've gone with their own storage devices and made them openly available for anyone to build.
Ive used amazon S3 before for company backups. No real issues but it doesnt have a real interface for things like versioning or for downloading items back. This was a year or two back so maybe thats changed, as it was never called glacier then.
I found out S3 and Glacier are two different things - Glacier is cheaper but for non-immediate backups. You have to put in a request to pull your data down and wait some time. S3 is more expensive as you can pull your data whenever.
