PCA Forums

I am looking for a trouble free way to backup my parents laptop. They just can not figure out how to plug in a portable drive...even though I have a script to run backup once they plug it in.

Anyone recommend an online backup ... Dont mind paying a yearly subscription because this would be backing up a business computer.

i'm in my second year of using Backblaze...no issues so far. i have about 230GB uploaded to them. each service has a bit different approach, so check out comparison reviews and such. i went with Backblaze because of USB drive support and a few other features that weren't there (at the time) with other services.

here is an old thread about it: http://pcabusers.org/forums/showthread. ... =backblaze

For myself and clients I use JungleDisk which now uses RackSpace as their cloud storage. They have a personal client that's very easy to use. Their personal plan is $2 a month, first 5Gb is free then it's 15 cents per Gb: https://www.jungledisk.com/personal/sim ... p/pricing/

I've also used Carbonite for noob clients, although I find it's client software is a little bit of a resource hog on older PCs. Flat $59 a year unlimited: http://www.carbonite.com

Whatever service you use, make SURE it pre-encrypts with an encryption key that is not known to the service. That way if they have any kind of data leak, no one gets anything readable. Both Jungledisk and Carbonite pre-encrypt. Just make sure you don't lose your encryption keys.

The Startup I am working with use JungleDisk as well Very easy to use from the client's end.

CrashPlan was one that i looked in to a year or so back as well...it was somewhat unique with the feature to allow multiple backup copies. you could have a local copy (usb drive or similar), an offsite to another pc, as well as online w/ their storage. i forget why i didn't end up going with them, but it's another option to consider.

I was looking at Carbonite, but it cost is only for one PC. I also have my wife's pc that I would like to backup online. With JungleDisk, are you able to backup more than one PC?

EXEC: Yes! You can have as many PCs backing up to the same Jungledisk account as you want. I have my server, my workstation and my wife's laptop all backing up to the same account.

They just charge you by the bits.

FlyingPenguin wrote:EXEC: Yes! You can have as many PCs backing up to the same Jungledisk account as you want. I have my server, my workstation and my wife's laptop all backing up to the same account.

They just charge you by the bits.

Ok thanks for the info.

yeah, just be careful with how much you're backing up to Amazon...if i used them for all of my data, it would be about $35/month...

i still have a jungledisk/S3/rackspace account, i just haven't used it much.

When you set it up, they give you a choice of Rackspace or Amazon S3. Use Rackspace. Both are the same price for storage, but Amazon S3 also charges for transfer fees.

I still use Amazon S3 only because I have a very old account and it would take a long time to re-backup everything to Rackspace. Plus I have an old lifetime subscription account so I got grandfathered in without having to pay a monthly subscription fee.

To give you an idea, I'm backing up 28Gb total and it cost me $5 last month.

BTW: Carbonite IS a better deal, and the way you get around the multiple computers issue is to just install it on your workstation and then use Allway Sync to backup the wife's files nightly to a spare folder on your PC and include that folder in the Carbonite backup.

FlyingPenguin wrote:When you set it up, they give you a choice of Rackspace or Amazon S3. Use Rackspace. Both are the same price for storage, but Amazon S3 also charges for transfer fees.

I still use Amazon S3 only because I have a very old account and it would take a long time to re-backup everything to Rackspace. Plus I have an old lifetime subscription account so I got grandfathered in without having to pay a monthly subscription fee.

To give you an idea, I'm backing up 28Gb total and it cost me $5 last month.

BTW: Carbonite IS a better deal, and the way you get around the multiple computers issue is to just install it on your workstation and then use Allway Sync to backup the wife's files nightly to a spare folder on your PC and include that folder in the Carbonite backup.

Doesn't Carbonite run the background all the time? I want something that I run when I want to.

Yeah that's one downside of Carbonite for me, that and it a bit of a resource hog and occasionally I see it cause a problem with an app because of the way it hooks into Explorer.

Jungledisk can be set to run on a schedule. I have it run at 4:15 am on my server. You can set it to manual, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, hourly, 6 hours, daily or weekly:

Well I signed up for Jungle Disk. Now I'm uploading about 18GB of data. Says it will take almost 2 days for the upload LOL.

Yeah, initial upload takes a while. Unless you have a really fat pipe, 2 days sounds conservative unless you're allowing it to backup 24/7. Might take a week or two.

Once it's synced, then from then on only files that change or are new will be uploaded and it'll only take a short amount of time every night.

When it was installing, one option was Basic or Encryption. Basic was selected by default. I was not sure which option to select so I just left it on basic.