More Awesome Than You!

What is the general consensus about online backup and storage services, such as Carbonite (http://www.carbonite.com/)?  There is "no limit" on storage, and it automagically backs up files including your music, pictures, documents, etc.  After having three hard drive failures on various computers over the last year (including my external backup hard drive.  That was harsh.)  and having several backup DVDs decide to be unreadable, I'm looking into this type of thing now.

Edited title for spelling   :P

No really how does that happen that much? Is your place not have room temperature? Do you drop equipment on floor a lot?
I had online service out of London at one time but they decided to shut down business with only a week's notice and everything I had was deleted (luckily nothing important).
It might be better (and cheaper) to just buy your own remote server and have space for a website too. Those sites with auto uploader also are shady sounding think spyware.

I use Orbitfiles (http://www.orbitfiles.com/) myself. Not sure how reliable it really is in the long run, but it hasn't failed me so far.

How does it happen so much?  I have no idea.  The external drive powers on, but no computer recognizes that it is plugged in.  The other two drives were laptop drives.  One of them I did drop a glass of red wine in the laptop, but the other one is only about a year old and the scandisc says to replace the harddrive.  This is over the course of two desktops and four laptop computers, as well as my external harddrive.

You could use your MATYbukkit for all your important Cwieberdinkly Sims-related things.

Ah!  Good idea.  I had forgotten about that.  How much space have I got?

About a metric fuckton.

Speaking of space, do you still have room for a web page with lots full of cc? I have quite a bit of it done, a couple of weeks leave due at Easter and I'm am aiming to finish for upload then.

If it's mostly static content, yes.

The Gspace add-on for FireFox and Gmail will allow you to back things up to your e-mail account.  You get about 7GB per account (and it's constantly rising), and it is cheap as free.  There's no fancy automatic backup, and it's slow as hell (it is still e-mail), but it works most of the time.  You can only do a certain amount at once before they think you are some crazy bot and log you out for the day, but after the original uploading, little bits go quick.  Sometimes the downloading sticks on big files, but you can always just open the "e-mail" the item is stored under and download it directly.  I used four accounts to back up my entire hard drive (at least the stuff I wanted) when my motherboard fried and I had to build a new box.  It took me weeks, and I'm still tediously downloading the back-up, but it is FREE!  Also, I think Google is not going down the tubes any time soon, so your data should be pretty safe from deletion.

Cool!  This is a good tip.  I didn't even know about Gspace. 

I'm pretty sure I read about it in RL.   ;D

such things happen. I can hardly keep a hard disk for more than a year or 2. I suspected micro power peaks or failures but I bought an UPS and the problem still exists. I don't understand why. It makes computer a heavy post in my budget, but the good thing is I always have a very up to date system. For the same price the storage space doubles every year. I can't imagine how to use a 4 years old 80 Go disk nowadays, when I see both my 1TO are already almost full in less than a year

Online storage is not reliable. You can't tell when the server will close or delete your account, and if you stock a lot it becomes very tedious to sort because it is slower than on a real drive.
A better option is to burn DVDs or a spare harddrive. Now the hard disks are affordable for backup  use.

You wouldn't back up onto only one server though -- just like you wouldn't put onto only one external drive, or only one DVD.

I've made mixed experiences with different backup solutions myself, fwiw:

1. burning stuff on CDR/DVDR: worked nicely at first, but turned out to be an absolute shit idea when 5-10 years later I found that BOTH copies of some of the disks were dead. Also, resulted in 2 huge boxes that I'd rather not have standing in the corner taking up space. And CDs/DVDs are easy to lose/misplace (easier than a harddrive) .. with only one copy left, you're hardly any better off than with no backup.

2. Online backup: this worked, but became too expensive after a while because I have a lot of data (I used rsync.net (http://rsync.net), they charge by amount of disk space used -- but are full of win in every other respect)

3. External drives (local): haven't died on me yet, but I've only been using them for about two years now. On the upside, if one would die I'd notice it immediately -- on the downside, both backups are in the same place far too often now (the CDs/DVDs I kept in two different places -- if one house would have burned down, I'd still have had 99.9% of the other backup).


So yeah. If I weren't too lazy for that, I'd probably get myself some cheap webspace on a couple of different servers and distribute my stuff on there; right now I live with the risk of house burning down and me being utterly SOL. I would personally not use a provider (like Carbonite) that forces me to use their proprietary software because I'm far too paranoid for that. The "unlimited storage space" part of their deal does sound nice, though .. then again, they're talking about "1GB! Even 10GB!" on their website which is rather a joke -- who needs a 1GB backup?

Two friends of mine have solved it by hosting the secondary backup drive for each other, that's probably an even better solution -- it has all the advantages of an online backup but doesn't cost anything, and when you're in the same city/area a complete restore would be uncomplicated too.

In any case, I would never again use static media (CDR/DVDR) for anything that I don't access on a regular basis.

I wouldn't use online backup because I trust no-one and because if I lost internet access for whatever reason, I have lost my files.

I have three machines on my network, I sync these every week so all machines carry the same data. I also backup to an external drive weekly. Every six months or so, I burn the crucial data to DVDs. So I'm not scared of a logical hitch causing loss of my data but I am concerned it's in one physical place.

I recently made a deal with my techie-ex to store DVD backups at his place. As long as I get to choose where to put them because he'll never remember if it's not hardware.

I want to buy a 1TB external HDD soon, movies and TV series take up a truckload of room. I also want to install another large HDD in my big PC, then I can use RAID-1 (mirroring) with my two faster drives and just keep the system stuff on them. Currently my fast drives are RAID-0 (striped) for extra space.

Online backup is not a comprehensive replacement for offline backup, it is a complement to it. Besides, if you lost your Internet for THAT long for whatever reason, you wouldn't need a computer anyway. The real point of online backups is that the files are accessible, well, online, and can be distributed nowhere near your other data so that not even nuclear attack can take them all out.

If we had a nucular attack, I wouldn't care about my files anyway.  :P

Any chance I could get a bukkit and awesomeviewer for Matysdoorp stories?  That sounds to me like the best solution to the less-awesome "all pics on the page at once" method I was using.

Yes. Grah MOAR and you can be set up with one.