The most valuable part of a computer is also its most fragile: Data are the wealth of a digital lifestyle, a currency of which many notes are irreplaceable. At least, that’s how I felt staring at a “Confirm you want to wipe your hard disk” message, my finger poised over the mouse.
During an emergency is a bad time to plan for one. It’s the feeling one might get jumping from a plane before checking one’s parachute.
In the Smashing Magazine article, My Hard Drive Crashed…” (And What I Learned From It), Ben Gremillion covers his experiences and thoughts with several backup services.
For what it’s worth, I do backups manually right now. I use Apple’s Time Machine, but I manually back up to external USB hard drives and store them off-site for safe keeping. That being said, I’m considering signing up for CrashPlan. It appears to be the best option, and in asking about different services from people I know, it’s the most flexible.
I was (or maybe I still am) in the same situation. I run Timemachine and SuperDuper for backups, but I’m looking for some offsite solution. I also read all the reviews that pointed in the direction of Crashplan, so I signed up for a trial and started backing up.
I’m a photographer, and have a massive library. Currently that means 4tb of data to be moved over the internet, one thing is that with the upload speed I could reach to Crashplan, that would take a couple of months – not really a problem, as long as my data was safe. But then it kind of hit me that it would probably take a good few months to retrieve all my data again, should all else fail, my house burn to the ground and all data get lost…
If you live in the US there is a great ‘ship-your-drive’ service where large amounts of data can either be send for backup or restore for an extra fee – great idea! But not available in Europe…
So am I prepared to wait for months to get my data back? Or can I find another (better) solution?
So far I haven’t found one. If you do – or if someone can prove me wrong, I’m all ears!
Hi Kasper,
Thanks for giving CrashPlan+ a try. Restoring files is usually considerably faster than the initial upload, but with 4 TB of data it would still take a long time to do a complete restore.
What you might consider doing to get an offsite solution that would be faster is using CrashPlan’s “Backup to a friend” feature to have an offsite backup that’s faster to restore. You could back up to a drive locally, bring it to another location like a friend’s house, then continue backing up only changed parts of files over the internet. If you need to restore all of that data, you can drive back over, get the drive, attach it to your computer and restore.
The best part? You can do this for free.
The free version of CrashPlan lets you back up automatically once per day to friends or local drives.
Details on this can be found here:
http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/getting_started/back_up_to_a_friend
You can also see how to seed the backup here:
http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/how_to/seed_archive
Let us know if you have any questions.
Sincerely,
Ryan at Code 42.
You’re probably an extreme use case, most likely. With 4TB, I would think it faster just to grab a few large external drives and manually back up your photo archives and store them off-site (bank safe-deposit box, friend/family member’s house, etc.) and use something like Crash Plan for just the most recent backups.