Off Topic - Carbonite or Mozy

[mf1973]

Can someone explain these services and the cost? We had our external hard drive crash a few months ago and would have lost all the pictures of our son's birth, except that we had put the pics on Snapfish. We had to order everything on CD which was expensive. We need a better option to protect everything for the future!

Mozy, Carbonite, run about $5/month for 'unlimited' backup space.

Crashplan, the one I recomend is free IF you use the friend-to-friend backup. If you use their "crashplan central' servers its about $5/month.

Crashplan allows multiple computers in the family to be backed up for the $5/month.
I backup 150 GB Mac book pro and a 1 TB NAS with no issues.

They also do not throttle incoming connection speeds, so if you have a screaming upload connection, depending on how many people are backing up to their server at any given time, your speeds will rock.
Additionally, if you do a friend-to-friend backup and you both have FIOS or something really similar speed wise, it is amazingly fast.

I don't have a relationship with Crashplan (other than being an ordinary customer), I just like their services.

 

[alamode]

Another issue you should consider is your bandwidth cap. Backing up all your data can make you go over the cap very easily. Here in Toronto my cap is only 95 GB/month, and I have around 3 terabytes of data. I use a HP home server for internal backups, but unfortunately cannot use an online backup service.

 

[dpuck1998]

Another issue you should consider is your bandwidth cap. Backing up all your data can make you go over the cap very easily. Here in Toronto my cap is only 95 GB/month, and I have around 3 terabytes of data. I use a HP home server for internal backups, but unfortunately cannot use an online backup service.

For the most part, providers in the US do not cap bandwidth usage, so for us that isn't an issue. Always good to check to make sure with your provider though.

Testing out crash plan, seems like a decent option for the free version if you have an offsite computer to back it up to and don't want to pay. I don't see how it is any better than carbonite for online, but I haven't had any issues with carbonite recovery or backup in 2+ years I've been using it.

 

[dpuck1998]

For the record, CrashPlan seems to work just fine, however it is no faster than Carbonite. I'm backing up all my photos (130G) to a computer two houses away and it will take about a month!