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Hello,
I have about 5 TB of photos and videos, plus some music and lots of code, programs, etc..
I have dropbox and onedrive, and use them to store my documents and share programming bits and pieces, but not much more, as my 5 TB of photos reside on a QNAP NAS.
Until now I was using SOS Online Backup to make a full backup of my main PC and the QNAP NAS for disaster recovery, you know, the house is on fire, full melt-down, etc.. I have USB external HDD where I regularly backup stuff, but those external HDDs still reside at home. Now, SOS Online Backup decided not to offer unlimited backup anymore, and the 5 TB tier would be thousands of dollars, what service can you recommend?
I used in the past CrashPlan, but I found it very buggy and had to map/remap the folders on the NAS all the time for CrashPlan to see them and then hope they get backed-up.
Any suggestions?
Thanks!
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As a side question, do you ever actually look at the gb of photo's (I assume the tb is from movies etc) that you have accumulated over the years.
I have many gb of travel and family photos and really don't actually do anything with them. The wife who is a prolific snapper probably does not even know how to find them on the computer.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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good point. Out of the 5 TB, about 3.8 TB are only photos. I scanned two generations (family was very prolific shooting film ) and have gone full digital since 2004. I go on trips just to take photos and so do other members of the family.
Have them all neatly catalogued in Lightroom, with proper tags and keywords.
Don't look at the photos every day, or every week, but just want to know that if the computer, the NAS and all the HDD were to go, in a disaster, I can still recover the stuff.
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Carbonite is still unlimited. I use them and it works very well.
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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Have you had to do a major recovery from a Carbonite backup? I used the program for a couple of years, and don't recall any problems with backing up, but two independent and relatively small restores to recover earlier versions of some program source were glacially slow, to the extent that it looked as if it would take days to recover from a major crash. I have changed to CrashPlan Pro. Backup is at least equally efficient, and restores are very fast. I have seen more backup glitches than with Carbonite, and you have to keep an eye on the system (which they make very easy), but their support is among the best for any of my major utilities - the techs are knowledgeable and polite, and do not assume that the user is an idiot!
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Yes I did once have to do a major restore with Carbonite.
The speed was limited by the speed of my internet connection, but since I have cable broadband, that wasn't bad.
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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I, too, have a good cable connection, but the restore speed I experienced represented a small fraction of its capacity. YMMV.
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If you have a trusted friend/relative living within reasonable driving distance, why not buy an additional 5TB disk for your photos, and store it with them? Whenever you visit them, take the latest disk over to their house, and swap it with the one already there.
This is what I do with the data from my genealogical research; so far, I haven't needed to use the backup, but it's there if I need it.
(I'm assuming that you are not a professional photographer, i.e. you don't have massive amounts of new photos every month.)
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.
--Winston Churchill
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3 hard drives
1: NAS (actually a mirror RAID), only connected during backups.
2. On the shelf, backup from NAS
3. Off site or safe.
Rotate 2 and 3.
Never leave backup devices connected full time, even cloud if they are mapped.
Helped 2 clients through cryptolocker. Both had air separated backups, minimal data lost. One required rebuild of server (file and Exchange), the other was data restore only. Current NAS only accepts data from limited number of IP addresses and users (administrators). All important systems are now virtual, easy to backup (2x a month) and keep copies off line.
Your are not paranoid, they really are out to get you. 
Arguing with a woman is like reading the Software License Agreement. In the end, you ignore everything and click "I agree".
Anonymous
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That's pretty much my backup strategy. I've been buying drives in sets of 3 for years now. One live, one local backup (disconnected), the third one for an off-site backup that gets rotated with the other one on a regular basis.
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dandy72 wrote: I've been buying drives in sets of 3 for years now. One live, one local backup (disconnected), the third one for an off-site backup
But, damnit, that means that we'll never get to see your photos online, because you don't use a hackable cloud account!
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I suppose that's the one "flaw" in my strategy.
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Hi!
My suggestion is that it is unreasonable to ask for an infinite amount of resource by allocating a finite amount of money.
What you could do, however, is rather different: you could set up a service yourself and charge for it. The money to keep your own backup would be funded by the paying customers. It doesn't even really have to be something akin to Dropbox or OneDrive as those do something entirely different.
A
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Hi,
not completely free nor completely unlimited, but you can have 10 To for 50€ per year at hubiC: Online storage for all your files – hubiC.com[^]
There an intagration with Synology's Hyperbackup solutions, with a possiblility to encrypt locally. Dunno if they have something for QNAP though ...
regards
Julien
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Of course you could always just invest in a good fireproof safe! Just sayin'. 
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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I can't tell if you're trying to back upt he QNAP over the network or if you're referring to a native QNAP Crashplan app. My QNAP server (Intel-based TS-851) oes offer a Crashplan app -- I have installed it but never tried it. I mostly use the QNAP to back up a Windows 2012R2 Server and that does run Crashplan, which works very well and is unlimited. I use the $15/month family plan which protects 5 machines -- very reasonable and I have 4-5TB of RAW and TIFF photos and DV family videos in their system.
I recently signed up for Amazon's unlimited storage ($60/year, I believe) and have been experimenting with using odrive to sync server directories to the Amazon cloud. It offers local encryption/decryption so if the cloud account is hacked, they would see just a bunch of random directory names and filenames. odrive is still a work in progress and is not free if you want encryption (then it's about $100/year for the software), but it claims to work with any cloud (Amazon, OneDrive, Box, Dropbox). The main impediment seems to be Amazon's limited API, and like all cloud drive-type storage, a lack of versioning so if your files get clobbered and subsequently synchronized, you've still lost them. But there are ways to avoid that and I'm using it mostly for offline storage (it can create placeholders for migrated files on the local machine so you can see what you had, and recover a specific file by just opening it). Still, there's a learning curve.
So I'll probably stick to a combination of Crashplan, Amazon and ODrive until the next thing comes along.
Uwe Baemayr
Senior Software Developer
Micro Focus
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I actually went for something like this, plus a combination of three HDDs as suggested above.
Crashplan was $59 for a year and it is unlimited, they have a QNAP app, but I like to "see" my backups working so I just installed the Win client and it found all the shared folders on the QNAP and allowed to be added to the backup selection.
Now, waiting for another 7 more days for the initial backup to finish, after that it will be only incremental or differential (not sure how Crashplan does it)
Will be looking also into Amazon's unlimited storage and also thinking about building my own Azure storage powered windows client, but for now Crashplan seems like the best gang for the buck.
Thanks all!
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I use Backblaze and they are unlimited for personal backups. They also have a cloud solution which may help with the NAS but that's not unlimited. If you can mount your NAS with iSCSI it should work as a local drive though.
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I use Backblaze. I have had to do a restore with their tool and it worked as expected. They even offer a method where they ship a drive with your stuff and then you mail it back when you're done.
I do not know about their support for QNAP specifically, but they are the best deal I have seen around. Given their recent B2 launch, they are clearly dedicated to delivering lots of storage for a reasonable price.
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Honestly? Instead of paying for those online backup services (which cost in a year what it would just to buy an external drive) - buy the external drive, make your backups then take the drive and store it in a fire safe or at a friend's house to get it offsite.
If you think hiring a professional is expensive, wait until you hire an amateur! - Red Adair
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I look at it the other way 'round -- a year of cloud backups is the cost of one external drive and my external drives don't last longer than a year or maybe two. I have a pile of external USB drives and they are just incredibly unreliable. That's why I got the QNAP for local backups/redundancy -- largely filled it with 3TB drives extracted from USB cases that kept overheating or simply wouldn't connect to the host. I know these drives are de-tuned but they seem to work fine and they're a lot happier in the actively cooled QNAP server.
This does assume that your ISP doesn't impose a transfer cap, of course. Otherwise the economics change.
Uwe Baemayr
Senior Principal Software Developer
Micro Focus
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Your external drives only last a year or two? Are you keeping them spun up all the time or something? I make a backup and then take 'em offline and put 'em away (in a safe or something). They never wear out that way. Hard drives are typically rated for thousands of hours of use (if active). I don't think I've ever had to replace a USB hard drive because of a hardware failure. I've got some here that are several years old and they work fine.
If you think hiring a professional is expensive, wait until you hire an amateur! - Red Adair
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I have two permanently connected USB drives on my Win2012R2 server: one backs up the operating system and apps for bare-metal restore (that was a Seagate 3TB which failed, now it's a "Fantom" 1.5TB drive) and a WD 5TB drive backs up other family member's desktop/laptops for bare-metal restore (Crashplan only backs up data). The Windows 2012 server & client backup software requires local drives for these functions, so I can't target the QNAP. These USB 3 external drives spin up when they're in use or "touched" by the server and a few times a week, I get health alerts saying they're too hot (the Seagate drive quickly hit 130F+ when under load, the WD drive is more reasonable). I actually have a fan on them and that really helps.
I will say I found that USB 3 drives are more reliable than USB 2 when it comes to not dropping the connection to the computer. That was always a problem with USB 2 and E-SATA. Lots of drive reboots.
The other USB 2 and 3 drives are disconnected and stored and I manually back up my music library a couple of times a year for safekeeping. Twice over the years, when reconnected, the drives were unreadable. They'd spin up but the server gives me the dreaded "The USB device could not be recognized" or "has failed". That's when I started putting more stuff into Crashplan. I also use old bare drives for offsite backup (family recordings, photos, videos) and that's been reliable.
Uwe Baemayr
Senior Software Developer
Micro Focus
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Seems that we have forgotten that backups used to be made with an offline storage medium called tape. OK, so that's not "practical" these days, but keeping backup media online when it's not necessary seems to me to be a waste of equipment and power. Do the backup drives (and I assume you're using them as backup, not as redundant active storage [I.E. RAID]) absolutely have to be spun up and available all the time? Think about it for a second. Is your personal installation so active that you couldn't take a few minutes every week or two, spin up the USB drives, make your backup and then put them away? Bet you'd save money and the aggravation of always having to buy new equipment!
I've been developing software for 40 years and have had personal equipment for the last 30 or so. Aside from the occasional upgrade or self-inflicted issue I've never had much in the way of actual equipment failure. I gave one of the "cloud" backup services a try a few months back. It was as slow as watching paint dry. On the other hand, though, if I need to restore something from my last backup now I simply go into my safe, get the media and plug the drive in and it works every time.
Offhand, in my humble opinion, this "cloud" technology (which really ain't anything different than centralized computing was 40 years ago) has been WAY oversold. With just a few simple procedures I not only keep my material private (and out of someone else's server room) and have reliable backup.
Think about it ... 
Bruce W. Roeser
Senior Software Engineer
Kronos, Inc.
If you think hiring a professional is expensive, wait until you hire an amateur! - Red Adair
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After the fun-and-games with the US election, it seems someone has turned their hand to the French: French candidate Macron claims massive hack as emails leaked| Reuters[^]
It'll be interesting to see if the UK gets the same attention in the next month.
Perhaps this will persuade people to take us seriously when we rant on about security, and "doing the job properly" next time?
Nah, I didn't think so either ... 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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