Cloud Storage To Backup My PC

Hi Everyone,
I am in the need of an urgent suggestion. While working on an important project in the office, the hard drive of my PC crashed. This cost me crucial data loss in bulk. So now I have decided to switch over to cloud storage. Can anyone please suggest me the name of some good cloud storage service providers?

Thanks in advance…

I use Backblazefor backing up everything from my pc and external drives and have never had a problem with it. Works out at $3.96 a month if you buy two years worth in one go ($95). No limits to the amount you can back up and to be honest I’ve had external hard drives last about that long which have cost twice as much.

That being said you still want to back everything up on to a separate external hard drive as well. I use a Robocopy batch file which mirrors everything onto my external hard drive when I click it.

www.mega.co.nz

50 gb free

sync client.

it will also have mail, chat and video calling in the future.

You could also use a professional solution like a simple RAID setup. You don’t have to transfer over the net and got your backup instantaneously. And you got your data in a secure place. I would not upload project or clients data to anycloud, at least not unencrypted.

My workstation has a simple mirror raid for my projects using the onboard raid function of the intel sata controller and my network drives are hosted on a linuxserver with a linux software raid.

In my experience software or cheap hardware raids are not worth it. The whole point is to protect your data but you are adding another possible point of failure.

If the hardware fails or the software crashes, the disks may be unreadable even in another PC (from experience!). Software RAIDs also use up your PC’s resources (maybe not so much now as PCs are faster since I experimented). It’s all about research and reading product reviews though.

I did a lot of research into this for my old AVID system and I ended up shelling out for an Areca RAID card. Expensive but rock solid to the day I sold it (4 drives in RAID 10).

Still not a full solution though as an electricity surge or house fire could still destroy your data. Which is why you should also keep your data elsewhere, even if its just leaving a copy of your hard disk at your freinds/family’s house :slight_smile:

Also just to note, Backblaze encrypts your data before you send it.

To add to this, I advocate software RAID unless you got the big buck:

@Hardware RAID:

  1. If a cheap RAID controller fails, you buy a new one for the price of a dinner, if an expensive one fails, you can shell out a few hundred bucks.
  2. Yes you add a device that can fail, but a replaceable hardware device that can fail outweighs the irreplaceable loss of data so it almost converges to infinity.
  3. For a mirror-RAID (RAID1), it doesn’t matter if it’s a 10 Bucks or a 1000 Bucks RAID controller, there’s virtually no performance and quality impact. It’s something different talking about RAID5, RAID1+5 or RAID10.
    Buy a 10 Bucks Mirror Raid controller, or use your OnBoard controller. If it fails, buy a new one for 10 Bucks, no data lost if you get the same controller, which is the downside.
  4. If you buy a RAID controller below 100 Bucks chances are good you still get a software RAID. Google “fake raid controllers”. Most of the stuff is still done by your CPU.

@Software RAID:

  1. If the Linux software raid crashes, your whole system does as it is part of the kernel.
  2. You have no hardware component that can fail controlling your RAID.
  3. Usually you use a NAS/Server type box for data storage/backup, the CPU time the software raid consumes can be considered null compared to the load of a home/small office.
  4. CPU usage is around 2-4% under heavy I/O load.
  5. It supports SSD caching
  6. Supports variable size volumes and allows expanding by adding more disks
  7. SATA3+ allows hotswapping

That all said, RAID is, like ‘rider’ said, no guarantee.
It doesn’t replace backups, it just nullifies HDD failure as source for data loss.

Yeah, a cheap hardware RAID card is usually just a SATA interface with RAID software.

I bought one for about $20 for mirroring two SATA drives and within days it suddenly corrupted my data and both drives became unreadable. This put me off software RAIDS for life as I felt it completely defeated the object of protecting my data.

Probably Linux is more robust but are you suggesting that he buys a Linux machine just for serving?

I don’t need the speed any more thanks to SSD drives so I keep it as simple as I can.

Yes.
Or a NAS.
If you want to work professionally you got to invest at one point.

Ideally you recycle an old machine.
A Pentium 100 or an Atom would even suffice.

My Server is a tad more powerful, I run an old AMD quad and it holds my working data in a software raid, serves multiple webpages, is the print server, runs teamspeak, ftp, groupware for planning projects and offering downloads and a discussion platform with clients and is a streamingserver.
And it is the backup storage as well for the RAID i run in my workstation.
Additionally I got a eSATA Datatank where I do backups (not as often as I should) and store them in a cupboard…

That sounds VERY cool! Do you have a couple of links to the software that you use? Are these things something an average user could set up? Complete overkill for my needs but once an idea gets in my head…

Apologies to the original poster for going on a tangent.

It’s really “easy”

Distro is Ubuntu Server LTS - graphical installer.
http://www.ubuntu.com/download/server
I run it headless, but with x.org installed and administer over SSH and RDP.

Linux software raid needs some reading to understand what to choose, but the rest can be handled via the installer.
I run a mirror+stripe with 3 disks, meaning 2 disks extended to their combined capacity with 1 disk as parity disk.
But there isn’t really a speed gain being able to write to both disks, on the contrary with lots of small files it becomes slower.
But I haven’t had any problems so far.

As groupwares/cloud storage I used:
Owncloud - http://owncloud.org/ - also has Clients for Win/OSX/Linux/iOS/Android - keeps your storage in sync. Only Linux server.

Now I use:
Seafile - http://seafile.com/en/home/ - like Owncloud but a lot better as it offers a “Mobile Office” and has collaboration solutions. More than just a cloud storage. Client for Win/OSX/Linux/iOS/Android, and what’s great a server for the Raspberry Pi is available additionally to OSX/Linux/Win servers.

The rest is onboard already with the distro and configurable either via shell for the purists, or plenty of tools if you decide to setup x.org with a WM.
SAMBA for Printer/File sharing in the LAN.
sftp daemon for file sharing in the WAN.
SSH for remote access.
Apache/Tomcat/PHP/mySQL - for hosting webpages with whatever. Easy to install Joomla/Drupal/Wordpress.

Additionally I run:
A minecraft server for multiple worlds I wrote myself, with mapping and backups.
Teamspeak because I need it sometimes.

And with “cron” it’s easy to setup a service that for instance syncs your most important data every day at 12:00am for instnance with a remote FTP/Cloud storage… wherever.

A word of advise, be sure to secure your system properly if you extend the interface from your LAN to the WAN, and maybe encrypt the data to be sure it’s useless if someone breaks in.

Another option is a nice NAS with some Linux running on it already. Consumes a lot less power.

Hi arexma, sorry for the delay in replying and thanks for all of that info - you have given me a solid starting point!

I will definitely get myself a low cost, headless machine in the future (when I have a little more money and room). I’ll probably use it for rendering, backups, serving files over the internet etc.

Am I right in thinking you don’t need a graphics card on a headless machine? Even if you are using remote desktop?

I think,backup is one of the oldest needs in computing. Whether it’s hard disk failure, computer theft, or just a wandering three year-old with a fruit juice carton, it’s very easy to lose data on a computer.Although at one time offsite backup was niche and often expensive, the cloud has brought about a revolution in inexpensive storage, making backing up online inexpensive and fuss-free.

I use RACS (yes, I just came up with that). It stands for Redundant Array of Cloud Services.
All current projects are backed up to Dropbox.com and Mega.co.nz, and if it’s mainly coding, Gitbucket as well.
Past projects are only backed up to Mega.co.nz, and an external hard-drive.

Additionally, my Dropbox and Mega accounts sync to another computer that is running all of the time (it is … an old cellphone with a large microSD card)

My chance of losing data:

  • My hard drive, mega.co.nz, my old cellphone and my external drive simultaneously break = past projects lost.
  • My hard drive, mega.co.nz, my old cellphone, Dropbox.com, (gitbucket) all simultaneously break = current projects lost.
    A fire = still 2 or 3 cloud services
    An internet blackout = still 3 physical drives

Sound likely to anyone?
Not to me.

The only problems with RACS is:

  • The potentially high cost if you have a lot of data. My current projects have never exceeded dropbox’s free quota (2gb by default, I’m at 5 or so due to referrals), and my past projects (zipped with non-essential files stripped) are well below mega’s free quote.
  • The chance of data theft is increased. Yes, I am trusting these companies with my data. None of my data is sensitive, so not critical for me.

But there are benefits:

  • Showing off your work or accessing it from other peoples computers is really easy.
  • The redundancy
  • Little need to handle backups manually, they just happen if you have the sync clients.
  • Most cloud storage services have a roll-back option on files, so if a file corrupts, just roll it back
  • Can be set up in a few hours, and left overnight to sync/upload.

Also, my OS is partition-cloned to my external drive, so if my computer dies, everything can be back up and running where I left off in a matter of hours. No redundancy in the backup for that though.

Hiiii friends, currently i am using CloudBacko software to backup my PC or system. And frankly says this is best backup solution for our PC as per previous experiences. Previously, i have used lots of backup software, but CloudBacko provides best service till now. CloudBacko software is easy to use.

It provides free cloud storage from Google Drive, DropBox and OneDrive into a large single storage. No installation required for CloudBacko software. It needs only a common web browser to run. We can start backing up right away after logging through any of the social media site. Atleast, try this software one time.

Try gmail, mediafire or amazon. All of them offer some storage free. google gives 15gigabytes or so, mediafire gives 50gigbaytes (but is a bit infested with adverts), amazon gives a few gigabytes. Also be advised it is better to manually backup files at the end of the day than it is to trusts a piece of software to do it automatically, backups should not be synced with the original copy, they should be utterly separate. And for extra protection make multiple backups, one in the cloud(or copies in sveral different clouds), one on a usb stick for the best stuff, one on a cheap external drive,etc,etc,etc.

Cloudbacko software - “Your data are absolutely secure”.

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Hi everyone,I use CloudBacko (http://.cloudbacko.com?r=1d) as an automatic backup solution, then I do some manual backup once a month on a local hard drive. But I’d like to skip that manual thing and get instead a second automatic solution.Do I sound too cautious, or do you guys also have not one but two backup solutions? What do you use?