bertilak wrote:lightheir wrote:Again, Crashplan is meant to be an 'active' computer backup, meaning it monitors your active files on your active computer. It is NOT designed or meant for long-term archival storage. The safest way to use it for archival storage would mean that every time you buy a new computer, you move ALL your old files onto your new one so they never run into the problem I had. Good luck with hard drive space if you do that. So while Crashplan sells itself as 'unlimited' backup, it's really a lot more limited than it seems.
Amazon cloud, on the other hand, is truly an 'unlimited' data backup service. You can keep as much as you upload to it. But it lacks the active file monitoring of Crashplan or other systems. I actually never needed Crashplan, as I use Google drive for all my documents already, and that autobackups in realtime.
Re: "never needed Crashplan"
Yes, I would like to wean myself off of it, but I still depend on it. It does two things for me:
- Saves me from myself. If I mess something up I can rely on getting a file back immediately.
- Once, my laptop was destroyed when a lighting fixture ell from the ceiling! I was able to restore everything to a new laptop from my CrashPlan backup on a USB hard drive. (Actually one hanging off my router and shared with my laptop system -- a configuration CrashPlan doesn't even officially support.) This was tricky, and required me to go through the "adoption" process which I find very hard to comprehend. I had them talk me through it over the phone. If I tried to go that alone I might have really messed up. Their restore interface should simply have a big button: "Restore to new system from a previous backup" instead of a multi-step "adoption" process.
One incident like that was enough to make it worth the trouble.
At least now that I have all my important files on OneDrive I feel much less exposed. I still need a good archival process.
I'll chest-thump and one-up-you on the being-prepared for computer disasters story!
About 5 years ago, I made the permanent move to Google drive and living mostly on the cloud for active files. All office files, pdfs, etc are handled through google docs,gmail, and gdrive.
As a result, I can literally sit down at any web-connected computer, and be 95% fully functional literally the moment you fire up the browser. That last 5% is for the last few things I still use that aren't web-based such as Keepass for passwords, which I prefer to have as a non-browser application. If my laptop was instantly destroyed this second, I can just pick up my old one in the closet, and be up and running instantly, no time wasted with backups. Renders Crashplan unnecessary for office-type docs and pdfs as a result.
One of the biggest benefits of going to the cloud as well is that you don't need to worry about file transfers when getting a new computer or introducing a new computer. It's all there - no application software reinstalls needed.
The main reason I actually still need to know about file backups is that family videos and photos with a young kid accumulate very fast, and while Google does a pretty good job of autobackups, I still want the hi-res video and dSLR jpegs, so I need an archive and backup system that maintains them before I upload it manually to Amazon cloud storage.
So far (knock on wood), I haven't suffered any adverse privacy or hacking issues from going all-cloud, and thus it's been all good. I will admit though that if something in the future does turn up, it will be a hard habit to break, as it works so well.
I would recommend Amazon Cloud storage for archival storage. It costs about $60/yr, but it is for unlimited data upload. The interface is clunky enough to not be good for active file use, but in terms of having yet another offsite copy of your stuff online somewhere in case of disaster, the price is right.