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Offsite Backup + Home Server? Or should we Fear the Cloud?
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Author:  msawyer91 [ Mon Jan 30, 2012 6:37 pm ]
Post subject:  Offsite Backup + Home Server? Or should we Fear the Cloud?
A group of my buddies at work and I were talking about offsite backup today over lunch. Naturally I'm in the WHS camp, and I'm happy to extol the virtues of the home server and what a great thing it is. Dan is the smart-arse of the group and he is also a strong proponent of the cloud. As an IT professional and geek by trade, I have no problems with the cloud--I've got several GB out there now on Dropbox, SkyDrive and iCloud. But I still like my WHS, to which Dan counters, "What if there was a fire?"

Well, if there was a fire, I guess I would be up shi--ahem--poop's creek. And that got me to thinking...what do I do with what I regard as my most precious data? And what about the dozens of DVDs and Blu-rays that I've ripped?

Sure there are backup services like Carbonite and Mozy, and they say $55/year for unlimited backup--but that's for just one PC/laptop with one drive. If it has multiple drives, including external drives, there's extra fees. But what about my wife's PC? And the kids? Or what about the home server with terabytes and terabytes of data?

Much of my iTunes library is protected by iCloud, but what about things like family pictures? Is it worth the online backup? Is Dan right? Or should we take Gardian's advice and "fear the cloud?"

Later, my buddy Dan, true to form, found a picture of a fire department doing a practice burn and added his own verbiage. (Thanks Dan.)


When you work from your home office, you stir up dust.
When you stir up dust, it collects on your CPU's cooling fan.
When dust collects on your CPU's cooling fan, it stops working.
When your CPU's cooling fan stops working, your precious Intel overheats.
When your precious Intel overheats, it catches fire when no one's home.
When your precious Intel catches fire when no one's home, your house burns to the ground.
When your house burns to the ground, all of your data goes up in smoke.
Attachment:
File comment: Practice burn of a house.
House Ablaze.jpg
House Ablaze.jpg [ 600.47 KiB | Viewed 21434 times ]

Don't let your data go up in smoke. Get Carbonite!

Of course, that doesn't help the house any. :)
Author:  johnoe [ Wed Feb 29, 2012 5:54 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Offsite Backup + Home Server? Or should we Fear the Clo
yeah i always wondered about that... at our workplace we use a pair of EX 490s for offsite backups for our PCs and laptop backups, which is a total of 8 PCs/laptops on each 490. The 490 is then 'taken offsite' to backup every month and rotated... but this isn't so practical for large amounts of data though.. i.e. movies, etc... begs the question you stated above... what happens if there is a fire? What is the answer to Fire's? Ask that to any data backup company... i.e. To Drobo, what is the answer for a fire?
Author:  EricE [ Sun Apr 08, 2012 3:20 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Offsite Backup + Home Server? Or should we Fear the Clo
msawyer91 wrote:
But I still like my WHS, to which Dan counters, "What if there was a fire?"


What if your cloud provider are idiots and the "cloud" evaporates? Thank you very much, carbonite, danger and a host of others.

I'll keep both, thank you. Local copies for my main backups/convenience and the cloud for automated off-site backups. I use BakcBlaze and love 'em.

But people who have lost files due to cloud sites going down, megaupload being the latest, have no one to blame but themselves in my opinion. I forget the one photography site that went down in the dot com bust - I couldn't believe I had friends who were stupid enough to keep their only copies of pictures on sites like that....

Quote:
Sure there are backup services like Carbonite and Mozy, and they say $55/year for unlimited backup--but that's for just one PC/laptop with one drive. If it has multiple drives, including external drives, there's extra fees.


BackBlaze doesn't charge for external drives. Not all backup providers are created equally.

Quote:
But what about my wife's PC? And the kids? Or what about the home server with terabytes and terabytes of data?


Only backup in the cloud the really important stuff - that's where clients like cloudberry that have WHS solutions are nice. Do you really need real time automated backup of ripped movies? Just do a backup to a removable drive after your ripping session and stick it in a safety deposit box.

Hybrid strategies are very effective - who says everything has the same value and has to be backed up the same way?

Quote:
Much of my iTunes library is protected by iCloud, but what about things like family pictures? Is it worth the online backup?


It would be for me. I have 4 TB of RAWs as well as processed JPEGs in the cloud.

Quote:
Later, my buddy Dan, true to form, found a picture of a fire department doing a practice burn and added his own verbiage. (Thanks Dan.)
[...]
Don't let your data go up in smoke. Get Carbonite!


Your friend Dan needs to pick providers with better track records and less jerktastic policies...

Quote:
Of course, that doesn't help the house any. :)


That's what insurance is for and why electronic data is easier to protect than physical things like photo albums/negatives.
Author:  EricE [ Sun Apr 08, 2012 3:22 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Offsite Backup + Home Server? Or should we Fear the Clo
And if you and your friend Dan are really hard core, the Pro version of CrashPlan will let you create your own private storage cloud with multiple boxes over the Internet.

Each person can have their own account and own encryption key, and each server owner can control how much storage is used for backups - but once set up, it will ensure your data is on yours and at least one other server - more if you like and your friends agree to share the space. If I can snag other HP Microserver cheaply I may just reconfigure my MediaSmart, ship it to my parents and tell my mom to plug it into her network :) and then use mine and hers for our own private backup cloud with geographic diversity (my parents are on one coast, I'm on the other).

I guess if you have had data lost, disasters like a fire or theft and are fond of your digital bits this might be a higher priority :cheers:
Author:  DarienA [ Mon Apr 09, 2012 2:05 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Offsite Backup + Home Server? Or should we Fear the Clo
My home setup is a WHS2011 backing up everything and then I have a Crashplan + plan backing up everything on my home server, then since I can also have the crashplan + account install on all the machines I'm backing up as well. So one way or the other I'll be able to get to that data...
Author:  Gardian [ Wed Oct 03, 2012 7:58 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Offsite Backup + Home Server? Or should we Fear the Clo
hahahahahhaah! Yes, fear the cloud!!!!
But really, The reason I say that,
1) The cloud is somebodies else s computers (servers) and I don't care what TOS they have, do you trust someone else to care for your data and not snoop in it? Not me.
2) The cloud just screams subscription based applications for a fee. This is my greatest fear of the cloud.
I use office 2003 because I like it and when I reload my pc I want to install it again, I don't want to have to use the latest cloud version. Some may say there will always be coders/app writers around that will sell you a hard copy of your app and I agree, but the cloud just smells as far as I'm concerned, I think more bad will come from it then good.

My storage, non-pooled drives swapped from offsite (my motherinlaw lives 3 blocks down the street) I am thinking of putting my old 470 at her house just to backup my 510 via vpn but haven't gotten it done yet.
I am looking at Blu-ray, the prices are getting where I might consider having a third copy of the really important stuff (agree, all data is not equal).
Can you believe how many people still only have one copy, that was me just a few years ago. :crazy:
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