Cloud Back-Up for Your Computer

[VaTom]

My wife and I have separate computers. She is an avid photographer and has thousands of pictures. A month ago her hard drive suddenly died. Fortunately she had automatic cloud back-up with Carbonite so nothing was lost. I never had it on my computer. I have lots of pictures, family history, documents, etc. on my computer. She convinced me to get cloud back-up. (She worked in IT for banks and the railroad for 40 years and back-up was park of daily business, I did yesterday. Carbonite is a good back-up system, easy to use and set up and relatively inexpensive. $72 for a year. Took about 20 hours for all my stuff to get backed up. Now it does it automatically.

If you don't have cloud back up you should consider a second auxillary hard drive to keep your files backed up.

 

[bigwheelzip]

If you don't have cloud back up you should consider a second auxillary hard drive to keep your files backed up.

And keep the backup drive off-site, so data is protected from an event that wrecks the house.

Sent from my motorola one 5G using Tapatalk

 

[DWalt]

Large capacity external hard drives are so cheap now that there is no excuse to not do backups. I have two 2 TB drives for backup, I think they were around $50 each when I bought them, probably less today.

 

[oldbrownhat]

Large capacity external hard drives are so cheap now that there is no excuse to not do backups. I have two 2 TB drives for backup, I think they were around $50 each when I bought them, probably less today.

THIS! You might also consider a NAS (Network Attached Storage). I've just bought a Synology DS220+(Wirecutter review here) to replace my old WD MyCloud and hope to get it up and running this week.

My gf also has tons of photos, backups of DVDs and CDs, and years of lectures (which she now videorecords) so she bought a similar unit with 2 x 10TB drives (not striped for RAID, so no redundancy so she has 20TB of storage!) She also has extra backups of really important stuff which she keeps in her office at the university.

A NAS can also do Time Machine backups (if you're running Macs) or similar from PC using Macrium or Acronis. And it all stays "in house", although you can connect remotely via the web as well.

 

[THE PILGRIM]

Recently had a fairly new external Hard-drive die!
Lost all my music that I had laboriously transferred from CDs.
I have Apple Cloud for my photos.
Few Bucks a month.

 

[oldbrownhat]

Recently had a fairly new external Hard-drive die! ....

"I feel your pain." I had a 2TB Seagate external hooked up to my old iMac that died prematurely last year. I had nearly all my CD's (and mp3 transfers) plus some online videos I'd downloaded backed up on my WD NAS so was able to restore it. I still have the Seagate so may try some disk repair software and see if there is anything I can recover.

iCloud is very convenient but I find their pricing too steep. Plus I really don't entirely trust any cloud service.

 

[THE PILGRIM]

The next external Drive I buy will be Solid State.

 

[jeffrefrig]

I think I have ICloud backup; signed up for when I bought this computer a couple years back. Don't ask me how to retrieve any data, but it's there. Wife uses her phone for everything. I think she can launch an attack from her phone. I don't worry much about personal data, as it's out "there" somewhere anyways. Had my identity stolen twice. They pleaded with me to take it back.

 

[martyd]

Over the years I had 2 drive crashes and one operator error, yes the operator was me, and lost all software and data.

I now have 4 drives on my computer.
1 - is the C Drive with all my software on it
2 - is a RAID drive of the C Drive
3 - is all my data and 12,700 photos
4 - is a RAID drive of #3 drive

I have converted from Hard Drives to SSD Drives.

Call me paranoid but:
I also have a portable drive which I use as a back up every 2-3 months which I have my software and data/photos on.

 

[jeffrefrig]

The next external Drive I buy will be Solid State.

I always thought the Harleys with a sidecar should come with external drives.

 

[oldbrownhat]

...Had my identity stolen twice. They pleaded with me to take it back.

Brilliant. How did you manage this? "Enquiring minds need to know."

 

[johngalt]

I never could convince myself to trust cloud based backup systems. What if they pull a photobucket on you?

I have 2x 8 TB drives in a RAID-1 (mirror) configuration. If one dies, I still have the other and should have time to replace it. I have a 3rd 8 TB drive to back up the mirror.

I have a Mac, with the mirror set up as the destination for Time Machine backups. Hopefully that does the job...

 

[arjay]

I have a huge hoard of pix somewhere on an iCloud and not a clue how to retrieve them lol

 

[Tom S.]

I back up both to the cloud and to a hard drive at home. The cloud is kind of a back up to the back up as the number of pictures and other files I have would take more than a day to restore from the cloud where it's a few hours from the hard drive.

 

[oldbrownhat]

I never could convince myself to trust cloud based backup systems. What if they pull a photobucket on you?

Or are hacked or otherwise "indisposed."

I have 2 x 6TB drives or my new Synology, which I still have to get set up. I'll probably use RAID just to be safe. It'll mostly be used for Macs as well. Hopefully Mac access will be quicker than my olf WD MyCloud was. My PC accessed it just fine, like a regular external drive, but access from either Mac was pretty slow, whether from the old iMac (2009!) or my MB Air.

I'm also hoping that once I get the Synology on my netork, I can transfer data to it from the WD (not online) via a USB cable between the two NAS, and the Synology will just see the WD as an attached USB drive.

 

[DWalt]

You might also look at downloading AOMEI backupper software. The basic standard version is free and it will probably do everything you need and then some. It works with all versions of Windows. Get on their website and look at it. I think the bottom pay version is around $40, but you are unlikely to need the additional bells and whistles it has.There are much more expensive versions available, but those are really for the IT pros. AOMEI Backupper | Best Backup Software for Windows PC and Server

 

[wundudnee]

Imagine my surprise when I found out the "cloud" was just someone else's electronic device and not really a cloud. I had paid photo storage with fototime. I had had really good service with them for several years and felt pretty secure with them. When Photobucket went to their ransomware I thought I had picked a winner. Fototime went down overnight with no explanation, gone. I hear it was ran by two guys in Texas that disappeared.

I had backups recorded on most of my pictures, but it was a real hassle. I just don't trust anybody's cloud.

 

[BKLooney]

I don't backup anything to a cloud, whether right or wrong, the trust has just never been there for me.

I have a 1TB SSD internal to my iMac, as well I run two OWC Thunderbay (Thunderbolt2) boxes connected to the iMac, one houses a 18 TB raid 5 (4x6TB drives in the raid as you lose one in the process), the other is just a box of discs consisting of three 6 TB drives and a 1 TB SSD used to backup the internal SSD.

I run everything from the internal SSD and the raid 5, the box of discs is just used to backup the raid and the internal SSD.

I also have 4 6TB drives in a fireproof safe in my detached garage that I bring in on a schedule to backup my raid.

I'm pretty paranoid about losing data, some of which can never be duplicated...so I don't lose data.

 

[venomballistics]

Over the years I had 2 drive crashes and one operator error, yes the operator was me, and lost all software and data.

I now have 4 drives on my computer.
1 - is the C Drive with all my software on it
2 - is a RAID drive of the C Drive
3 - is all my data and 12,700 photos
4 - is a RAID drive of #3 drive

I have converted from Hard Drives to SSD Drives.

Call me paranoid but:
I also have a portable drive which I use as a back up every 2-3 months which I have my software and data/photos on.

With RAID, your backup portable might be unnecessary.
I think I read where they figured the reliability of RAID stored data was measured in centuries as long as you replaced drives as they failed

 

[Muss Muggins]

At some point, e’erbody needs to come to the understanding that the “The Cloud” is just somebody else’s computer . . .

Amazon is by far the biggest purveyor of “The Cloud.” Due to Black Friday, they have created massive server capacity for that one day. The rest of the 364 days of the year, they sell that capacity. They have secure partitions for the Yankee Gov’t, and others for every website you can imagine. I’d be amazed if this forum wasn’t ultimately hosted by Amazon . . .