backup software renewal

[BrokerB]

I do not want to use Carbonite anymore. Is there a good company that isnt such a limp wrist-ed social justice lgbtqtuv company for backup?

I have had no issue with carbonite technically,. I have recovered using their software back up twice pretty much flawless.

My renewal up and woudl rather spend my money with a less left wing company...if possible.

I did a search in here and it was way too much tech world then I want to setup. It needs to be offsite storage so if the house burns down Im not worried about it. I dont have some huge amount..still under 1 Tb

Thank you for any leads

[SkyHawk]

I use Crashplan. Not sure of their politics though.

https://www.crashplan.com/en-us/pricing/

A bit pricey at $120/yr per computer. But it is geared toward business / power users. You have control over file versioning. You can keep a version as frequently as 15 minute intervals for a day.

Carbonite only lets you keep 12 total versions and no more than one version per day, and no control over the versioning interval.

[ibanezfoo]

Whatever you find dig as deep as you can because a lot of them just rebrand and resell someone elses product. I was using one for a while then my $60 a year plan jumped up to a 700-800 a year plan for that amount of data out of the blue because the main company jacked up all their pricing on the resellers. Complete bait and switch.

[Zorba]

I use something called "iDrive" (not Apple related). $60/year if I remember correctly. I'm not aware of "virtue signalling" by them, if any.

[nine mil thrill]

why not stick with what you know and what has been working good for you ? do you stop being friends if they have a different political outlook ??

[Dan_Eastvale]

I back up important directories and files manually. Don't have "pay for" software. If something crashes the system I have always prefered to format the drive and do a fresh reinstall of the OS ..Something that happens extremely rarely.

[DolphinFan]

I use a 1TB external drive and backup once a week, sometimes at the end of the day when i create a lot of new data.

[DrjonesUSA]

Don’t forget to purchase a ~4TB USB drive and configure a local backup for yourself.

Especially with backups, it is critical to have at least two; one online / offsite / cloud, and another local.

With all these crypto-viruses going around these days, it is also extremely, extremely prudent (pretty much necessary) to also have a THIRD backup; an offline backup; a backup that only gets connected to your PC / network for long enough to backup your data, then gets totally disconnected from the world.

This can be accomplished as simply as getting a second USB drive, setting a reminder to yourself to plug it in & then disconnect it as often as is suitable for you; weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.

It is again extremely prudent to keep that drive in a safe or similar secured location.

Back to your original question, here are some suggestions that have been around forever but I have no clue of their politics;

- CrashPlan - I second this. It is just an amazing product. Phenomenal.

- SpiderOak. Has been around forever.

- BackBlaze.

- heck, here’s a good article:

https://www.pcmag.com/roundup/226992/the-best-online-backup-services

I forgot but iDrive seems pretty well liked also....


Last thing is, if you are not manually verifying your backups, then you do not have any backup at all.

This is as simple as digging through your files & folders located in your backups, ensuring that you can open docs, PDF’s & spreadsheets, view photos and videos, play MP3’s, etc.

Backups can fail for a staggering variety of reasons and often backups become corrupted or otherwise screwed up & stop working.



Good luck.

[TFA777]

I use idrive. Something other backup software doesn't do is keep history of files.

A risk with ransomware etc is files can be encrypted / corrupted slowly over time without you knowing.

A lot of cloud software only keeps the latest file, which will be useless in a ransomware scenario (your last backup will have been the encrypted file).

Back blaze only offers 30 day history.
iDrive has no history limit save for the amount of space you purchase.

Acronis is pretty good too but expensive for their cloud solution (although 1TB shouldn't be too expensive)

[BrokerB]

Thanks for input

[SkyHawk]

Another nice thing about cloud backups, at least Crashplan, is I can access them from my mobile devices. I can get a document, a photo etc that is stored on my PC, no matter where I am. It has proven to be convenient and has even saved my bacon a few times.

Crashplan also lets you backup mapped drives, so you can backup from other systems on your network that way without paying extra.

Also Crashplan is unlimited storage and keeps versions forever. There is no limit to the number of versions of a file you can have there. Nothing is ever deleted. And since they are geared towards business, they have actual support. They have a case management system and they are very responsive.

I also take image backups of my PC periodically onto a spare drive (using Acronis), so I can quickly recover from the worst type of disasters.

[TFA777]

I went with idrive as, depending on space needed, it is cheaper than crashplan if you have 2TB or less.

Crashplan also had an issue for a while where the app would use evermore melry and CPU resources as the backup got large. Not sure if they resolved that

[Bushwack44]

I use iDrive. Works seamlessly behind the scenes.

For local back ups (i.e. to an external drive), I use SyncBackSE from https://www.2brightsparks.com/.

[Dragunov]

Just use Macrium Reflect. It's free, and it just works.

[MrFancyPants]

I use something called "iDrive" (not Apple related). $60/year if I remember correctly. I'm not aware of "virtue signalling" by them, if any.

Another vote for iDrive. I think I pay $70 per year for 5 TB of storage, best deal out there for cloud storage as far as I've seen. Bonus, if you have a QNAP NAS, they provide an app you can download to automatically sync data from your NAS to your cloud storage.

I use a 1TB external drive and backup once a week, sometimes at the end of the day when i create a lot of new data.

Do you store that drive in another physical location? The major problem with keeping all your backups local is all your eggs are in one basket, and if that basket ever catches fire, well...

Just use Macrium Reflect. It's free, and it just works.

I see you tout this software quite a bit, and while it may work well for whole image backup, if you just want to back up specific files and folders, whole image backup isn't an efficient way to do that. Looks like the free version doesn't allow file and folder level backup. One of the nice things about file level backup is you can backup only updated files based on time stamp, and you don't have to shuffle through a directory full of differential images to find what you need.

As an aside, you can easily accomplish 99% of everything most backup software does using nothing but PowerShell and Robocopy and scheduling tasks, which are both available natively in Windows. I write my own backup routines and they work perfectly.

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