Cloud storage

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Ferj

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I've been looking into cloud storage as additional backup solution since a near miss and been looking at the offerings from Google & Microsoft. I have currently main drive and an external backup drive and was planning on cloud as a 3rd.

I plan to use the cloud for my most recent work so keeping it under 1tb.

Microsoft 365 offers the office suite & 1tb for about £7 pm and Google offers Google apps and 1tb for similar price.

Is anyone using either, or got any alternative solutions?
 
I thought 'One Drive' gave you 15GB for free?
 
I use Google Drive. Very reasonably priced. I'm always a little surprised that people don't use cloud storage, let's say your house got burned to the ground. After the insurance had paid out and you had re-built your home you''d be devastated that you had lost all your photos. Photos are precious, thankfully these days we have the means to ensure they never get lost.
 
Grogues said:
I use Google Drive. Very reasonably priced. I'm always a little surprised that people don't use cloud storage, let's say your house got burned to the ground. After the insurance had paid out and you had re-built your home you''d be devastated that you had lost all your photos. Photos are precious, thankfully these days we have the means to ensure they never get lost.
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Steve thanks, yes google Drive does look good and very reasonable IMO :)
 
I'm with Crashplan. I won't be renewing. Top reasons are:

  • Upload speeds are diabolical. I have 10Mbps upload yet barely average 1Mbps
  • See other thread. The software randomly seems to have not bothered to upload this years weddings folder. :eek:
 
With that squirrel package, of you mount a nas as a network drive can you back it up I wonder?
 
theurbanclown said:
That sounds about right. Seems your internet speed is the bottleneck.

Same reason I don't use cloud backups.
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Virgin happily give me 50Mbps download but only 2 upload - what do these people think we'll use all their precious bandwidth on? I'd happily pay the same price for 25Mb each way.
 
Ballyman said:
With crashplan you just mount your NAS as a network drive in windows explorer and then you can use it the same as an external drive and upload away. Full instructions here - http://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/Latest/Backup/Backing_Up_A_Windows_Network_Drive

Does the squirrel offer same service?
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Ah I see. Just had a quick look at the link and it blew my mind! Unfortunately I can't help you with that might be worth an email as they are UK based.

I have my NAS auto backing up to a standard external HD connected to my computer using Genie Timeline, then from there to the cloud.
 
Mega (nz) gives you 50GB FREE!

I've been using them for about 18 months for my photos and no probs.

Plus saving them to DVDs, Blu-Ray, HDDs and also One Drive.

Just trying to cover all bases.
.
 
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I don't get the upload /download speed I've got Virgin 100mb which is great for downloading but still terrible for upload!

Is anyone using Google apps or office 365 though, I'd be interested in any feedback!
 
theurbanclown said:
That sounds about right. Seems your internet speed is the bottleneck.

Same reason I don't use cloud backups.
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No it's Crashplan's network that's the bottleneck. I can upload to a variety of places much faster than the 1Mbps I'm getting from them. I've discussed this with their support and they've all but admitted it. My internet speed is not the bottleneck. I thought it was back when I was ADSL. One of the main reasons I upgraded to FTTC was for offsite backup.

Ballyman said:
With crashplan you just mount your NAS as a network drive in windows explorer and then you can use it the same as an external drive and upload away. Full instructions here - http://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/Latest/Backup/Backing_Up_A_Windows_Network_Drive
Click to expand...

This is what I've done and this is the bit that's not working very well. It's totally unsupported so I would seriously caution against using this.
 
Grogues said:
I use Google Drive. Very reasonably priced. I'm always a little surprised that people don't use cloud storage, let's say your house got burned to the ground. After the insurance had paid out and you had re-built your home you''d be devastated that you had lost all your photos. Photos are precious, thankfully these days we have the means to ensure they never get lost.
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Steve, that's only an option if you have a good internet connection and particularly a good upload rate. Where I live, broadband is not much better than the old dial up speeds and cloud is just not an option hence having to use Hard drives with on site and off site storage. In the future I hope ti will be viable to have cloud and it be quick to upload and access.

Ferj said:
I don't get the upload /download speed I've got Virgin 100mb which is great for downloading but still terrible for upload!
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That's because you've got ADSL - Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Link - not many providers will give you SDSL - synchronous connections (upload and download the same) and if they do the cost tends to be prohibitive! We looked at this for work this week as we wanted to install an additional broadband connection into the business and the cost was phenomenal! We ended up going with business broadband 70-80mb up and 8-10mb down.
 
Buck said:
Steve, that's only an option if you have a good internet connection and particularly a good upload rate. Where I live, broadband is not much better than the old dial up speeds and cloud is just not an option hence having to use Hard drives with on site and off site storage. In the future I hope ti will be viable to have cloud and it be quick to upload and access.
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That's a fair point, I suppose I take for granted the fibre optic speeds we get here in Manchester. Definitely a good idea to store a back up off-site if you can't upload to cloud storage. :)
 
Grogues said:
That's a fair point, I suppose I take for granted the fibre optic speeds we get here in Manchester. Definitely a good idea to store a back up off-site if you can't upload to cloud storage. :)
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(y) lucky so and so ;)

I'm looking forward to the day I can do away with physical swap outs and have a robust / cheap / quick 'cloud' service. In the meantime, it's a chore but I would dread losing my photos and other information.
 
I have fibre and like i said, I'm disappointed with the upload speeds. I understand Backblaze is faster but even so it still languishes behind my upload speed and when you factor in how long it takes to upload 1TB then it still takes too long. Even if I arrive home with 50GB of photos, I'm still exposed whilst it takes best part of 24 hours to upload.

So i've resorted back to the old USB disk in the car's glovebox. I'm just setting up my second NAS and one will live in my detached garage. The theory being if my house, garage and car all burn down somehow then i've got bigger things to worry about than my photos.
 
gadgeteer said:
No it's Crashplan's network that's the bottleneck. I can upload to a variety of places much faster than the 1Mbps I'm getting from them. I've discussed this with their support and they've all but admitted it. My internet speed is not the bottleneck. I thought it was back when I was ADSL. One of the main reasons I upgraded to FTTC was for offsite backup.



This is what I've done and this is the bit that's not working very well. It's totally unsupported so I would seriously caution against using this.
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The best you can hope for is 1.25MBs upload with that connection.
 
gadgeteer said:
I'm with Crashplan. I won't be renewing. Top reasons are:

  • Upload speeds are diabolical. I have 10Mbps upload yet barely average 1Mbps
  • See other thread. The software randomly seems to have not bothered to upload this years weddings folder. :eek:
Click to expand...

Don't forget, 10Mb/s is not with compressed data and jpg's are compressed. You might see 10Mb/s with a plain .txt file, for example.

Also, it's 10 Mega Bits, not Mega Bytes. 8 Bits = 1 Byte. For example, a 10 MB file is 83,886,080 bits. 1GB is 1,073,741,824 bits.

Capital B means Bytes and lower case b means bits.
 
OK Let me be very clear....At all times I am talking megabits per second. (Mbps or mbps). Not MBps which I do know is megabytes per second and entirely different to megabits per second. Given my day job is a network engineer dealing with wide area networks I do understand the concept.

I can upload only at around 1 megabit per second to Crashplan.....my fibre connection can upload at up to 10 megabits per second. I can upload many other places way faster than 1 megabit per second. I have contacted Crashplan and they've all but admitted it's their network that is the bottleneck. Not mine.

Hope that clears things up.
 
If Squirrel are UK based do they offer to bulk transfer if you send them an HDD with the multi GB batch of files?
 
If you have Amazon Prime at £79 per year you get unlimited storage plus you get next-day delivery on parcels and free videos too.
 
Prime is photos only and I have video also. Plus their t&cs state
  • Prime Photos is for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use it in connection with a professional photography business or other commercial service.
 
Nobody using Dropbox? I think their price plans are around £8.00/month for 1TB of storage.
 
Dropbox is a little pricey. As well things like that aren't really a backup. i.e. - you have to manually send stuff rather then it just going g wheb it changes
 
This is the reply from squirrel

Unfortunately we do not currently support NAS or external hard drives, and we cannot accept hard drives for the initial backup or allow access to the servers/datacentres directly.
 
They are obviously morons then :)
Its a bad start if their technical team don't know what they support?
 
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