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Online Backup

Taking my cloud backup to Crashplan

by Philip Sellers April 4, 2012

written by Philip Sellers

A few years ago, I wrote about peer-to-peer backup for the first time. To date, its one of my most popular articles on the site. The primary focus of my post was Crashplan, a freely available software that allowed people to backup their data to a friend at no charge. I have really loved their service over several years. I have Crashplan setup to backup some data to friend and I have a couple friends who backup to me.

Up until last year, I was also a Mozy user. I thought they had the best value out there for backup to cloud. But last year, Mozy made their changes to their service offering which would have effectively tripled my cost and so I went on a search for alternatives. I settled on a new product called SafeCopy. After a year, I was not happy and so I have let that go, too. My main compliant was that the SafeCopy software didn’t seem to be very efficient at running backups. I saw long periods with no traffic while it prepared files for backup. With as much to backup as I have, a strong consistent stream of data means a much quicker initial backup.

I realized only a month after I started my SafeCopy subscription, the move I should have made was to subscribe to Crashplan Central – Crashplan’s cloud backup offering. This past week, I canceled SafeCopy and I signed up for a Crashplan Central family plan and have I two computers currently running backup.

As luck would have it, I was also able to subscribe to a higher tier of cable Internet at home which gives me a 2 Mbps upstream connection. With these two things in place, I have already completed about 10% of my initial backup without any interruption to service at home. I do have to stop backups when I get a cell call (which sucks) because of my Microcell needs, but I’m trying to minimize the time needed to complete my initial backup so I have the bandwidth restrictions set high on both computers.

I’m really happy with having a single service and single piece of backup software to handle both peer-to-peer and cloud backups. I should have made this decisions sooner. Well, if I don’t count the Time Machine backups I’m also doing at home… But since that’s built-in to the OS, I don’t count it – it just happens.

Crashplan really excels in allowing you to define how much bandwidth any backup stream can consume and when it can be run. There are many options to limit the amount of CPU that the software can consume under different conditions. There are good inbound and outbound bandwidth options to keep your outgoing backups or your friends incoming ones from saturating your connection. There are pretty easy to understand options for how often files get backed up after the initial installation. Users can secure the backup streams with a custom password and 448-bit encryption or they may use the standard 448-bit encryption. The client software can also be secured with a password to keep a guest or malicious user from tampering with settings.

I also like that there is a background service that runs always and there is a client software to configure the settings for the service. This architecture really works really well.

Strangely enough, the Crashplan software will not allow me to add my desktop computer to my client on the laptop as a ‘Friend’ to backup to it when I am traveling. I’m sure there is a reason why, but just seems strange that they won’t allow me to add a client registered my own account.

But, I have to say, I’m a happy customer so far. Happy enough to write an updated review.

April 4, 2012 1 comment

Started the conversion to SafeCopy

by Philip Sellers April 21, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

I have started my conversion to SafeCopy backup today. In the past, I have used Mozy, but after searching online for alternatives, I found SafeCopy to be most compatible with what I wanted to protect. SafeCopy cost me $50 a year for 200GB of storage. You can backup from as many computers as you desire and it is only based on metered storage. SafeCopy has an iPhone app to search for files, share them and also a web interface for searching your files and sharing them (a la DropBox or iDisk).

Mozy, as you might recall, has changed its plans to a metered plan. My renewal with Mozy would have cost me $178 to cover what I currently have backed up (which isn’t everything I really want to backup, but most of it). Of course, that price doesn’t cover growth.

So, in addition to savings, I think SafeCopy will provide me with the best expectations of what I can expect — and what I can control — for online backup. I can prune my backups using their web interface, I can control what is backed up and I can anticipate additional cost more easily. My biggest beef with Mozy was the lack of tools to control my backups once they were in the cloud. Mozy’s iPhone app was lacking — in that if you used your own encryption key, you could not use their app. I hope they fix that. I liked Mozy. My account says I was a member since March of 2007. Sadly, they are losing me before my renwal hits my bank account in June. I am trying to get all my backups moved over before this time so that there isn’t any time when I don’t have a good offline backup available to me. So, here goes. More to come.

April 21, 2011 0 comments

Cloud Datacenter Personal Storage

SafeCopy: My answer to the Mozy changes?

by Philip Sellers February 10, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

I got a comment on my recent Mozy post which offered SafeCopy as an alternative to Mozy. When my current subscription to Mozy ends, I’m certainly in the market for a more favorable solution to meet my needs. Mozy’s new plans, in my opinion, do not offer enough space for the price they charge and they limit the number of computers that can connect to an account . I’d never heard of SafeCopy and so I headed to their website to check them out.

First, SafeCopy looks a lot like Mozy on the surface. I immediately see that they are cross platform with both Windows and Mac compatibility, but they also list iPhone. Digging a bit deeper, I have found that SafeCopy also has a search engine feature for finding and retrieving your data online and thus all your files are from the iPhone or other mobile phone. I have to say, the Google-style search for my backup is cool. The online demo shows that you can see versioning of the individual files, also. Like Mozy, the backups are encrypted. SafeCopy uses 448-bit Blowfish encryption according to their website.

February 10, 2011 0 comments

Cloud

Mozy nixes unlimited backups; disappoints with lack of tools to manage data

by Philip Sellers February 1, 2011

written by Philip Sellers

I have relied on Mozy backup for a few years now. I really like their online backup service. I’ve been a proponent of Mozy for a long time and I’ve written about their service several times on my blog. But this morning, I found out that they had changed the rules of the game and removed the unlimited backup offering. This is a big deal to me, but probably not to most users. This change probably only affects the top 10% of their users, but I could be wrong.

First, lets start with what they changed. Mozy moved from a backup plan of about $50 per year, per computer to a plan of $5.99 per month for 50 GB and one computer or $9.99 per month for 125 GB and up to three computers.

February 1, 2011 5 comments

Datacenter Home Tech Storage

Mozy to the rescue – a review of online backup

by Philip Sellers December 17, 2010

written by Philip Sellers

I’ve written a few times about online backup services and options. I have setup Peer to Peer backup for a friend of mine using Crashplan, but primarily for my own use, I use Mozy. I also setup a Mozy account for my good friend Tammy to keep her photos and other files backed up on an aging eMachine desktop. Shortly before Thanksgiving, the eMachine died an unceremonious death. Initally alarmed, her daughter asked “Oh no! What about all the photos?” Tammy, unworried about it says, “Don’t worry, Philip set something up for that – its all protected.” Mozy to the rescue.

Literally, what better advertisement for Mozy could there be? Or really for any online backup service? That is the beauty of them – you set them and forget them and when the time comes, the only important thing you need to remember is your username and password to recover everything.

After talking it over, Tammy and her husband decided to pick up new computers on Black Friday and I setup those up the following week. The first thing I installed upon booting up the system was Mozy and after installing, restore was as simple as choosing which files to restore (all of them) and then clicking the button. A few short hours later, all the files were restored and Tammy was back in business.

There were a few things that cropped up. First, the original eMachine computer was Windows XP and the replacement was Windows 7, so the default user directories had changed. Upon restore, the files were place in a long folder hive of the original folder names. That was easy to cleanup by moving the files.

The second thing was that little of Tammy’s data was resident on the computer. They use email through HTC (my employer) and so all of their email is stored in Google’s cloud – so that didn’t need to be restored. As a matter of fact, the GMail interface for sccoast.net made it very simple to switch to. They no longer use a desktop email client. One of them mentioned that they get lots of spam in this account, so I took a few minutes to create some filter rules to move a lot of the bulk offers they were receiving into subfolders in the webmail. This cleaned up the Inbox to a useable form and moved all their coupons and offers into a separate folder. With 7GB+ of data storage, nothing had to be deleted – just moved out of the way.

Required Disclosure:
The opinions expressed here are strictly personal opinions authored by Philip Sellers, an employee of HTC (Horry Telephone Cooperative, Inc.) and/or its subsidiaries. Any reference to, discussion of, or content regarding HTC and/or its subsidiaries has not been reviewed, approved, or authorized by HTC and/or its subsidiaries before such content is posted and does not represent HTC and/or its subsidiaries or its views and opinions in any way.

December 17, 2010 2 comments

Home Tech

CrashPlan backup is awesome

by Philip Sellers June 12, 2009

written by Philip Sellers

I setup CrashPlan for a friend overnight and the software really lives up to its advertising. The software is really easy to install and registration is straight forward. After install, you select what data to backup – which is less robust than Mozy’s default filters – but its easy enough to point to her user directory on her Mac and backup the entire profile.

After setting up her selections to backup, just need to point it to a destination. CrashPlan makes that really simple. You have 4 options – folders, computers, friends or online.

June 12, 2009 0 comments

Personal

One month later, Mozy backup almost complete

by Philip Sellers June 11, 2009

written by Philip Sellers

One month and two days ago, I posted about my experience with online backup solution Mozy. I’d tried the product once before and been disappointed with the backup speeds, and so I abandoned it, only to begin again last month. After a month of backing up, I’ve almost got my initial 60GB plus a month’s worth of changes backed up – well, by the time I get home today anyways, it should be done.

As I’ve chronicled, I think the initial backup is the biggest challenge for all online backup solutions, Mozy included. My experience taking one month really isn’t that bad given a relatively slow upstream connection and 60GB plus of data to backup. The process was relatively easy, though I needed to throttle the bandwidth to keep my Internet connection usable while I was at home. Thanks to a comment on an earlier post, I was able to find that very hidden setting in the Mozy client.

June 11, 2009 3 comments

Home Tech

Mozy status update

by Philip Sellers May 29, 2009

written by Philip Sellers

Its been a couple weeks now since I’ve written a Mozy backup status update. We have progressed quite a ways in the backup process. I have interrupted the backups almost every evening once I get home because it was saturating my upstream connection and degrading my internet performance while I was trying to use it. So, that hasn’t helped my speed issues. But that does bring one point which Backblaze includes in their software – bandwidth throttling. That would be a nice feature to keep the client software from saturating your full upstream or downstream connection.

Beyond that, the backup is progressing nicely. I have less than 10GB of data left to be processed and uploaded. I think that we will be complete by the end of next week, if not sooner.

Since some data is now online, I am able to see the restore features of the Mozy website. As somone from Online Backup Reviews commented earlier, Mozy has added the feature of getting your data (snail) mailed to you in the event of a disaster. The rates are significantly better than Backblaze’s simliar service.

I let my Backblaze trial account lapse. I haven’t done much more with that software, but I genuinely liked the service and the yearly cost. I didn’t like the offline restore cost, though, and that kept me from subscribing. I thought those prices were very high ($99 for DVD?). I may sign up for a trial of another vendor just to see what the experience and software is like. More updates soon.

May 29, 2009 3 comments

Home Tech

Mozy backup update

by Philip Sellers May 15, 2009

written by Philip Sellers

So, its been exactly a week since I started my Mozy backup. I have now progressed to completion of approximately 20GB of my data backed up. My iMac froze (yes, it does happen…) one day and I had to restart it when I got home from work, but the backup kicked off again. So, 20GB in a week isn’t that bad. But I’m impatient. I can’t help thinking how much fast this would be on Bluewave (my company’s fiber to the home product). I’d have a much faster upstream. That brings me back to my point in the last post – the biggest hurdle to online backup is upstream on home Internet connections. But, that’s where we are today. I’ll be following up later on this.

May 15, 2009 0 comments

Home Tech

Trying out Mozy again…

by Philip Sellers May 9, 2009

written by Philip Sellers

Since posting about Backblaze, I got some very good comments about Mozy. They have also not been sitting idle and they’ve added a few features to the service. One of those new feature is the ability to get your restore on external media shipped to you, a key differentiator to Backblaze, I said earlier. The price of a similar service was Backblaze was a little costly, I thought, so Mozy’s options are a much better approach. More on that soon.

So, I setup my iMac at home to use my Mozy account. I had signed up for full service a long time ago, but I have to admit, I was too impatient to let the initial backup complete. So, this time, I made a consious effort to backup only the data that I knew I didn’t want to lose and leave away things like the system files and applications which I knew that I could replace easily. That brought my data total to about 60GB to backup on my intial.

May 9, 2009 1 comment