I am debating between backing up media to external hard drives and cloud storage. A couple months back I started a JustCloud account, but cancelled because they added on ridiculous charges for videos, large files, and external hard drives, plus their customer service was sleezy and unreliable. Before I bite the bullet and spend $400 in external hard drives, does anyone have a good cloud storage program that they really like and trust?
Thanks,
Evan
You cannot trust any of them. Besides losing data, many of the newer/smaller companies may go out of business in the next few years with little notice. The liability is usually limited to the only the storage fees, so keep an independent backup somewhere. That being said, the outsourced storage is useful for small daily or continuous backups, just not a substitute for a full archive or two.
I do not trust any "cloud" services. As others have noted, the market is new and unsettled, with players likely to drop the service, or increase price unexpectedly.
For storage I use Western Digital "Green" hard drives. They are slower than the "Black" drives, but are offered up to 3Tb in size, at reasonable prices (per Gb of storage). Got a few as network attached storage, which I can access from anywhere a wireless signal can be obtained.
My normal work drives are 64Mb cache "Black" drives, and 10,000rpm 500Gb Velociraptor dives for operating system / boot.
Cloud storage solutions have their place as part of a comprehensive backup plan. I use BackBlaze's service to keep backups of my media drives. I chose them because of their unlimited storage, price, ability to backup external drives, and clean user interface.
I also backup to external drives and DVDs for redundancy. The cloud backups are great for accessing your photos when away from your computer.
A lot has been written on this topic, so if you have specific questions or want to compare service providers, I would encourage you to do the Googles.
harrygilbert wrote:
I do not trust any "cloud" services.
I don't either. They can be convenient for access anywhere but that's about it. Don't use them as backup or archive solutions. Hard drives are now very cheap as are the enclosures. You can go inexpensive like the WD Reds or good quality like the Hitachi Enterprise drives.
I use a little server with mirrored hard drives and back up from this to Crashplan. Works great, even restoring from the cloud. It is the biggest name in the game for personal backups, and they have lots of big time clients so I don't see them going out of business soon.
Unlimited storage for private use is not very expensive either, even for multiple computers.
