My apartment got robbed the day after I got a brand new external to back up my MacBook. Guess where it was at time of robbery? Plugged into the laptop. Luckily, I had a second, much crappier-looking external with most of my stuff that the thief didn't take. But I still lost tons of pictures and music. I've been Dropboxing ever since. But would love recommendations on secondary online storage providers in case Dropbox ever whiffs..
I use BackBlaze. I have 3 accounts with them, one of which is linked to a Mac Mini that I use as a general storage machine. My set up at home is:
3 x Laptops
1 x media centre (Mac mini)
1 x family machine (Mac mini) attached to 2 x 1Tb software-raid drives.
Everyone backs up to the Mac Mini, and this is backed up to the 2 drives. This machine also backs up to Backblaze.
I too had an experience where I thought I'd lost all my photos of my kids (5 years worth) when a HD died. Luckily I had an earlier backup and I lost around 3 months worth in the end
Serious question - I'm a photographer so generating 5-10GB of new data in a batch is far from unheard of, I've got hundreds of GBs stored and it's all on external drives. Mozy's FAQ doesn't seem designed for me ;-)
When I've looked into this in the past, every provider has had issues with the new and archived content volume, and sometimes even the use of external rather than internal drives (!) that has made it unviable. I couldn't see from Mozy's site whether this was the case with them as well? If not and I can genuinely back up several hundred GBs of data (phone calls from ISP notwithstanding) and potentially add tens to low hundreds of GBs new data per month, from whatever drive source I choose, this sounds like what I want. Would this be the case from your experience?
Mozy was a big sponsor of a photography conference I attended last year so they definitely want photographers. I use them myself. Backed up a couple hundred gigs without any trouble (it did take awhile though). I don't use external drives so I can't comment on how friendly Mozy works with those.
Mozy will indeed work for the scenario you described. I easily have over 100GB of photos and 300GB of home videos and have had no problems. When I purchased my Mozy account, it was for unlimited data (not sure what it is now). Syncing of new data is transparent and works very well (though sometimes I've had 5000 small mozy_temp files in my TEMP folder that never got cleaned up). Restore from Mozy will not be fast but they do offer DVD burning service at a decent price. Mozy has an online login but don't expect Dropbox.com quality browsing. I also use Dropbox for personal documents and it works perfectly fine with Mozy.
If you're adding 50GB/month, that's at least 1GB of upload per night. You'll definitely have to have a good internet connection. I haven't had any network speed issues with Mozy personally.
As a counter-point, I had Mozy for several years and eventually dropped it because they throttled the upload and it took forever to get my data onto their servers. If you are aiming to backup a lot of data then I would suggest you find the cheapest all-you-can-eat service to use as a backup to your real backup process and keep a mirror drive that you archive to every week and take offsite. An online backup service will save your ass if you get lazy or forgetful, but it may have a hard time keeping up and will be a PITA if you ever do suffer a catastrophic event and need your data back quickly. Think belt and suspenders, with the regular practice of mirroring your important drive being the primary backup plan.
Thanks to you both; sounds worth a try. This wouldn't be my primary backup because I've already got a (semi-) regular mirror to a backup drive in my workflow, but domestic practicalities make getting an offsite copy complicated so that's what I'm really looking for here and Mozy sounds like a good fit.
I should stress too - 50GB / month is a worst case scenario, not a typical usage! Raws and processed JPEGs for a couple of big events can hit that together but I don't often have a couple of big events in the same month.
The only feature I'm still waiting for, is so you can specify different backup sets to archive to your local HD and to their online sevice, but that feature should be realeased with their next update. Other than that I love crashplan, especially the eature that you cannot disable it for longer than 24 hours.
You can also seed your initial backup, that way you don't have long upload times.
Side-bar: I sort of feel like a sitting duck walking around the city or subway at night with my white Apple ear-buds, especially the ones with the mic, screaming I have an iPhone in my pocket.
I've been a happy customer of SpiderOak for a few months now. Windows, Mac, and Linux clients, with file syncing between your computers, and public sharing of any files you've backed up. Data is encrypted on their servers, and restoring files is very easy.
