Are you using cloud storage and doing backups? (1 Viewer)

[17seconds]

Wanted to see what you guys are doing with cloud storage and backing up your computers since I'm going through this right now. I've managed to get something working but it took a lot of research and trial and error. Interested to hear what others with lots of devices and computers have come up with.

My goal was to consolidate all of our pictures and also have a solid scheme for backing up our computers. I have a Win7 PC and my wife has a Mac Mini. We both have Android phones. Organizing pictures has always been a mess because sometimes my wife loads the SD card from our Nikon 5100 on her computer, sometimes I do it on mine, and then we both have lots of phone camera pictures.

PICTURES:

Cloud storage seems like a good idea for keeping pictures in a single location. You put all of them in the cloud and every computer or smartphone you have can sync to it. The most popular ones are Dropbox and Google Drive. Everybody loves Dropbox but it costs twice as much as Google Drive when you need real storage, so I'm trying out Google Drive. I have it installed on my work laptop, Win7 desktop, and Droid X2. Wife has it on her Mac Mini and Droid4. I've started with just phone camera pictures so right now I'm under 5GB (free) while testing it out. Eventually I'll put all of our pictures on there if it seems to work well and I'll get the 100GB storage for $4.99/mo.

One issue with Google Drive is that it doesn't automatically put the pictures into the cloud when you take them on your phone. Dropbox apparently supports this. I found a workaround however. There's an Android app called FolderSync that syncs any folder on your phone to the cloud, so you make that folder the one where your phone puts camera pics. The shortest sync interval is 5mins. I've got that on both of our phones so now if my wife or I take a picture, within 5mins (and if on WiFi) it goes to Google Drive and is seen everywhere we have Google Drive installed. Pretty cool. All that's left to do is buy the 100GB, put our complete picture library up there, and make sure we always put any pics (or videos) from the Nikon SD card to the Google Drive on one of our computers. Damn, if the camera had WiFi then we wouldn't have to do anything!

BACKUPS:

For this I used an old PC to build a Ubuntu server. Has been kind of nightmare but it's working now. I've got 2 internal drives and use CrashPlan to backup from the primary drive to the backup once a day. There is a 2TB USB drive hanging off of the server that contain backups of my Win7 desktop and the wife's Mac Mini. The case on that computer has 8 drive bays so I can start adding more drives to use it as a media streamer later as well.

I'm using Crashplan to backup the Mac Mini every hour. Doing that because my wife does a lot of stuff with documents and images so it's good to have a recent backup. CrashPlan is good for computers where you only care about backing up your personal files and don't have a lot of extra programs installed. Time Machine doesn't like backing up to a network drive and you have to format the drive for journaled HFS+ or whatever... But I want one big drive to backup all computers. For the Win7 desktop I'm using Acronis True Image because I've got tons of things installed and I'd rather just have an image. That way if my comp dies it can be fully restored without having to re-install anything. Just backing that up once per week is good enough.

People say you should have cloud backups as well but I can't see a good reason to deal with the massive transfer times and cost to store terabytes of data. Natural disaster, yeah, but all of our pictures are already in the cloud.

 

[Maurile Tremblay]

PICTURES:

Picasaweb. Free, practically unlimited storage space if you have a Google+ account. Good syncing options. Also stores videos.

 

[saintfool]

 

[snellman]

 

[Jaysus]

I am using cloud storage... just randomly though.

 

[Notorious T.R.E.]

My cloud storage is full and my phone is always #####ing at me when I charge it at home. GET OFF MY BACK, GUY!

 

[azgroover]

We use Carbonite for our office server backup. Previously, we had this stupid system where an employee would physically take an external HDD home with them at the end of each day with the most recent backups.

 

[bologna]

One issue with Google Drive is that it doesn't automatically put the pictures into the cloud when you take them on your phone. Dropbox apparently supports this. I found a workaround however. There's an Android app called FolderSync that syncs any folder on your phone to the cloud, so you make that folder the one where your phone puts camera pics. The shortest sync interval is 5mins. I've got that on both of our phones so now if my wife or I take a picture, within 5mins (and if on WiFi) it goes to Google Drive and is seen everywhere we have Google Drive installed. Pretty cool. All that's left to do is buy the 100GB, put our complete picture library up there, and make sure we always put any pics (or videos) from the Nikon SD card to the Google Drive on one of our computers. Damn, if the camera had WiFi then we wouldn't have to do anything!

I've never used it, but the Eye-Fi card looks pretty interesting. It's basically an SD card with WiFi built into it.

 

[moleculo]

I do picasa for photos, google play for music, and dropbox for docs. Seems pretty easy to sync and recover, plus I have access to everything from anywhere. Haven't gotten into storing other media like music and stuff. Right now, that's all i need.

I just did a re-install of windows 7... no need to even think about data migration as nothing important is ever stored locally.

 

[Maurile Tremblay]

I do picasa for photos, google play for music, and dropbox for docs. Seems pretty easy to sync and recover, plus I have access to everything from anywhere.

Yeah, I use picasa for photos and videos, google play for music and audiobooks, google drive for certain docs, dropbox for certain other docs . . .That covers everything.

 

[17seconds]

I do picasa for photos, google play for music, and dropbox for docs. Seems pretty easy to sync and recover, plus I have access to everything from anywhere.

Yeah, I use picasa for photos and videos, google play for music and audiobooks, google drive for certain docs, dropbox for certain other docs . . .That covers everything.

When looking around I saw a lot of people hating on the picasa interface. And if you try to sync your pics through Google+/picasa it shrinks the resolution apparently. Thus I'm trying Google Drive. Plus, I don't want to go from local complexity to cloud complexity. I'd like to use one service.

 

[17seconds]

One issue with Google Drive is that it doesn't automatically put the pictures into the cloud when you take them on your phone. Dropbox apparently supports this. I found a workaround however. There's an Android app called FolderSync that syncs any folder on your phone to the cloud, so you make that folder the one where your phone puts camera pics. The shortest sync interval is 5mins. I've got that on both of our phones so now if my wife or I take a picture, within 5mins (and if on WiFi) it goes to Google Drive and is seen everywhere we have Google Drive installed. Pretty cool. All that's left to do is buy the 100GB, put our complete picture library up there, and make sure we always put any pics (or videos) from the Nikon SD card to the Google Drive on one of our computers. Damn, if the camera had WiFi then we wouldn't have to do anything!

I've never used it, but the Eye-Fi card looks pretty interesting. It's basically an SD card with WiFi built into it.

oh yeah, somebody told me about this. thanks for the headsup.

 

[Maurile Tremblay]

I do picasa for photos, google play for music, and dropbox for docs. Seems pretty easy to sync and recover, plus I have access to everything from anywhere.

Yeah, I use picasa for photos and videos, google play for music and audiobooks, google drive for certain docs, dropbox for certain other docs . . .That covers everything.

When looking around I saw a lot of people hating on the picasa interface. And if you try to sync your pics through Google+/picasa it shrinks the resolution apparently. Thus I'm trying Google Drive. Plus, I don't want to go from local complexity to cloud complexity. I'd like to use one service.

It shrinks the resolution only if you tell it to (or if you go over your storage limit).Any picture that's more than 2048 x 2048 pixels counts against your 1GB of free storage space. Any pic smaller than that doesn't count. So you can re-size larger pics down to 2048 x 2048 or lower if you want. (Personally, I don't think I have any pics that big anyway. That's pretty big.)Similarly with videos, any video longer than 10 minutes (or maybe 15, I forget) counts against your storage space, while any video shorter than that does not.I agree that the interface can be frustrating.ETA: Uploading and especially downloading is much more convenient using Drive or Dropbox than Picasa . . . but Picasa has the advantage of being free. Storage is unlimited for pics and videos meeting the size/length characteristics.

 

[BoltBacker]

We use Carbonite for our office server backup.

I think these types of services are the best solution for most people. Carbonite, Backblaze, CrashPlan+ seem like great services that require the least amount of work by the user to backup all their data. Typically they cost about $5/month for all the data on the boot drive of your computer. With hard drive prices so low(3TB @$150)....http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136874... all but the absolute most demanding data hoarders can fit everything on their hard drive. Use a program that allows you to access your home pc remotely so that you can access all the music/photo/video/etc on your phone/tablet/laptop and you are both backed up and can access your data anywhere with very little effort. Most people reading this thread are likely fairly advanced and I'm sure there are advantages to backing up each type of different media at a different place but it's much easier to get the average user to put everything on their main computer and have everything backed up for them in the background without any effort required.

 

[BoltBacker]

One issue with Google Drive is that it doesn't automatically put the pictures into the cloud when you take them on your phone. Dropbox apparently supports this. I found a workaround however. There's an Android app called FolderSync that syncs any folder on your phone to the cloud, so you make that folder the one where your phone puts camera pics. The shortest sync interval is 5mins. I've got that on both of our phones so now if my wife or I take a picture, within 5mins (and if on WiFi) it goes to Google Drive and is seen everywhere we have Google Drive installed. Pretty cool. All that's left to do is buy the 100GB, put our complete picture library up there, and make sure we always put any pics (or videos) from the Nikon SD card to the Google Drive on one of our computers. Damn, if the camera had WiFi then we wouldn't have to do anything!

I've never used it, but the Eye-Fi card looks pretty interesting. It's basically an SD card with WiFi built into it.

oh yeah, somebody told me about this. thanks for the headsup.

They recently updated these from class 6 and 4gb or 8gb of storage to a more reasonable 16gb class 10 card. If you shoot in RAW or shoot video you'll definitely want the newer card. Some people reporting connection issues though so be sure to purchase from a reputable store with a generous return policy.

 

[DA RAIDERS]

 

[johnnycakes]

I'm giving CrashPlanPro the 30-day trial. So far I'm entirely underwhelmed with the speed of the initial backup. It's been running now for 24 hours and has less than 23gb backed up. And I have FIOS running at 150/75mbps. And the speedtest comes in very close to that. CrashPro runs less than 2.0mbps. Might as well go back to dialup.

 

[Mr.Pack]

A friend of min just told me about Zipcloud

He's using it and likes it.

Can back up multiple computers for $6.95/mo unlimited storage.

 

[Garrett]

Google Drive for family photos/videos.Google Play for music.Box.com account for work documents.I use TrueCrypt on a locally attached USB drive at home and at work for two additional copies.

 

[boofatty]

I just got a synology ds212j with a 3tb. Love it so far, syncs with everything, apps for mobile devices. Lots of other capabilities I haven't even figured out yet. Setup was easy for the simple storage. So far it's best $300 I've spent in a while.

 

[17seconds]

update from me...All I'm doing for cloud is using Google drive to consolidate the pics from my phone and my wife's phone. As soon as either of us takes a picture on our phones, it gets automatically put in the cloud on Google drive and both of us can see it.For backups the easiest thing for me was to just treat every computer separately. CrashPlan did not work well as a single backup method for all computers. It just kept failing. I'm using it on my Ubuntu server, but for the Mac I'm using an external USB drive with Time Machine, and for the Win7 machine I'm using True Image to backup to a USB drive.

 

[SacramentoBob]

Probably going to spring for the pay version of SugarSync. I think they work on the most platforms. No Linux client, but it works under Wine. Unlike Dropbox or Google Drive, you can select whatever folders you want to sync and can choose what computers sync what files.

 

[Pick]

icloud for music, vids, and picsdropbox for docs

 

[Dentist]

 

[SacramentoBob]

Probably going to spring for the pay version of SugarSync. I think they work on the most platforms. No Linux client, but it works under Wine. Unlike Dropbox or Google Drive, you can select whatever folders you want to sync and can choose what computers sync what files.

Finally started doing this. Paying for 250GB worth of space. My upload speed is a #### though, so I haven't even used most of it. I backed up my most important folders which came out to about 17GB and that took several days. Not looking forward to the other 100GB+.

 

[Mr. Ected]

I'm giving CrashPlanPro the 30-day trial. So far I'm entirely underwhelmed with the speed of the initial backup. It's been running now for 24 hours and has less than 23gb backed up. And I have FIOS running at 150/75mbps. And the speedtest comes in very close to that. CrashPro runs less than 2.0mbps. Might as well go back to dialup.

Been using CrashPlan for several years now. Been very happy. The first b/u takes a loooong time, and some big back ups will also. Once you get the first one done, you only have a little to do. The idea is it kinda just runs in the background and back ups all the time. That way, you don't have to do a big back up or you don't have to do one yourself

 

[Dentist]

i back up my important information with google drive now.

15 GB for free covers most of the important documents and stuff that I have.

Most pictures i care about are on flickr or facebook so they are already uploaded to some sort of internet service.

Everything else is movies and music and would all be easily replaceable.

 

[Nick Vermeil]

Dot

 

[AhrnCityPahnder]

I am using combinations of the following:

Docs:

MEGA https://mega.co.nz/ 50GB free, browser support and iPhone and Android Apps

Evernote (love this app)

Personal webserver/FTP accounts

Pictures from phone:

Google +

separate MEGA account from what's listed above

music:

Google Play

Amazon Cloud Premium (I use this the most.)

 

[rascal]

Isn't it cheaper, faster, safer, and more private to just get an external hard drive?

 

[boofatty]

I just got a synology ds212j with a 3tb. Love it so far, syncs with everything, apps for mobile devices. Lots of other capabilities I haven't even figured out yet. Setup was easy for the simple storage. So far it's best $300 I've spent in a while.

9mo update since the thread was bumped. So far I can't speak highly enough for my synology. I now have a full fledged server setup that I can access anywhere on any device. All my wdtvs are fed via network and can run simultaneously from the server.

I haven't been able to fully explore the remote access from outside my network. This isn't my area of expertise so I have to learn all the setup from tutorials and trial and error. Networking is so tricky they should have degrees for it .

I have expanded to a cloud backup of my server to amazon glacier. Dirt cheap and the app on my synology does the backups automatically. Glacier runs $.01 per GB per Mo. I've only got my family pics backed up so I'm paying about $2 a month for close to 100gb in the cloud.

The synology can be setup to serve as my own "local" cloud, which I use. But I wanted some extra protection for family pics which is why I setup with glacier. Our honeymoon pics were deleted accidentally when digital cameras first came out. That still bugs me to this day.

So far glacier seems great. The trade off for low prices is that when time comes to retrieve the files, the speed with which you download your backup determines the price you pay. Need it now then you pay more. If you can do a slow download then its cheaper to recover the files. So you wouldn't use this as a true "cloud"; but that's why I've got the synology.

Overall very good experience for me. Just wish I had more time to learn of all the different synology features and get full use of it.

 

[lod01]

Isn't it cheaper, faster, safer, and more private to just get an external hard drive?

Yeah.

 

[SacramentoBob]

Isn't it cheaper, faster, safer, and more private to just get an external hard drive?

The point is to have some type of "off-site" storage that you can access from anywhere at anytime without having to lug something around.

 

[BoltBacker]

Isn't it cheaper, faster, safer, and more private to just get an external hard drive?

The point is to have some type of "off-site" storage that you can access from anywhere at anytime without having to lug something around.

It's possible to do both if you opt for a flash drive instead of an external HDD. Now you can get a 128GB flash drive on your key ring for a very reasonable $53...

http://www.officemax.com/technology/drives-memory-storage/hard-drives-usb-drives/usb-flash-drives/product-prod5290335?cm_mmc=CJ-_-TechBargains-_-OfficeMax+-+Homepage-_-227502&affcode=CJ

I think for data 128GB would be more than enough for most people assuming they aren't backing up video.

 

[snellman]

Google drive announced a price drop on plans. You can now get 1 TB for 9.99 per month. I use Plex for most of my media which supports google drive and am considering just moving all of my pictures, movies and music over to Drive. I am not the most technical savy so am I nuts for considering this.