# Offsite backup strategies?



## Nick Batzdorf (May 5, 2016)

I’d like to set up an offsite backup for about 3TB of sample libraries.

Services like CrashPlan don’t seem to be right for that, because they’re set up for incremental backups of lower amounts of data - which is also useful for system drives, but not for this application.

They're also not like offsite hard drives in that you can't just restore everything and go back to work. And I don’t want automatic encrypted incremental backup in the background, I want large offsite storage of files that rarely change (i.e. separate backup sets).

Dropbox is the right idea, and it’s great, but it maxes out at 1TB. Plus I find the price kind of high.

Until recently I parked a hard drive in the basement of my parents’ house, but it failed when I brought it back to update. That was one of four f-ing Seagate drives that failed within the same 4-week period, and of course it was out of warranty.

Any suggestions?

(I’m totally set with local backups, between bootable disk images, Time Machine, and shelves full of original discs. That’s not the issue.)

TIA


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 5, 2016)

Hm. Carbonite is a possibility...

(This was inspired by a thread a couple of days ago. I do have all my irreplaceable files backed up on Dropbox, but I'd like to find a better system for everything.)


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 5, 2016)

Okay, so now I know I'm not an idiot (as far as this is concerned, anyway).

40 views and nobody else has a good answer either.


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## jeffc (May 5, 2016)

I've gone down into the rabbit hole on this as well. There's one of them - I can't remember if it's Carbonite or Crashplan, that will send you a hard drive for the initial backup so it wouldn't take days. I agree Dropbox it the absolute best in that it's so seamless. But a big downside for me, at least, is that you have the same Dropbox account on all of your computers, so my laptop is constantly synch'ing the Dropbox with stuff I'd rather not, because it slows it down. Until somebody figures this out, I have 3 identical 4 TB drives that I use with Mac TimeMachine that backup all of my session and mix files. I keep one in the studio, one in my car, and one in a safe deposit box. The car and studio I swap out about 1 time a week. The safe deposit box like every 6 months. I figure the odds of the studio and my car both being robbed or failing in the same day are pretty slim, so it's worked out for a bunch of years now. Knock on wood....


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 5, 2016)

That's a good idea: keep one in the car and swap them.


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## jeffc (May 5, 2016)

Yeah, and Time Machine allows you to have more than one drive to backup, so I call them Backup Drive #1, #2, #3 and it will just put the same backup on whichever drive is hooked up, so it's pretty brainless.


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## higgs (May 5, 2016)

Here's the approach I developed:

Redundant Time-Machine backups (2 discs) of MacintoshHD (OS X and everything not on DropBox) to cycle every hour
Dropbox for non-collaborative dynamic/work files - Logic, Premiere, etc

Work RAID 0 drive for all things expensive - Sample libs, client videos, recording sessions, etc
Backup RAID 5 synced with Work RAID 0 multiple times a day using Chronosync whenever using Work RAID 0 
As an aside - RAID 5 is a nice format to resume work without sacrificing too much speed

Fire Safe in separate location with however many Seagate HDDs it takes to back up the most critical RAW & install data
Bare internal 7200 RPM HDD's as another fail-safe backup of RAW and critical data - these only get touched if I'm in tears.
Add to that the obligatory several other catalogued FW800 drives that contain much of the same material, and that's all a part of this complete breakfast.

If you plan to lock.it.down., I highly suggest the use of NeoFinder. It does a fantastic job of cataloguing disks. I can have a disk in the safe and NeoFinder let's me take a pretty thorough and informative glimpse of the unattached drives - the overviews live in it's pretty minimal database files....which I keep on DropBox.

So, is this excessive? Probably. But I can look a client dead in the eyes and completely & confidently obliterate the data-death talk. One time I lost some pretty expensive client files to an HDD failure. It was a very costly (both time and money) procedure for me to recover the files. It turned out these clients didn't really care that my computer had a bad day, and I figure why should they?


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## higgs (May 5, 2016)

I should add one more thought here.

Cultivate an ironclad backup strategy. Don't write off a system with redundancies because "it's only my personal _____." If it's good enough to create confidence in presentation to a client, then it's acceptable for your own use, private or professional. Follow that strategy at home and at work because laziness and inconsistency kills.

Most everything we do is 0's 'n 1's, and sometimes that is too easily taken for granted.


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 5, 2016)

Well, all that sounds good, but the main thing is the offsite Time Machine rotating backups. I think jeffc's strategy of keeping one in the car makes sense.

Also, I will never buy another Seagate drive ever. See original post. Four failures within four weeks, out of warranty. And it's not just me. Feh.


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 5, 2016)

I don't think that's excessive, by the way. It's a sound strategy.


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## higgs (May 5, 2016)

Our luck has apparently not been the same with the Seagate drives. Do you live on a safe street? Safe from the smash and grab?

Side note: the motorized drives in the RAID enclosures are the Toshiba MD04ACA500 internal HDDs which (at least at the time they were being setup) were inexpensive and in the same class/line as the HDDs used by big data companies like DropBox, blah blah.

Okay, Pastor higgs is done preaching. I've got a glass of whisky staring at me like it means business.


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## dbudde (May 6, 2016)

Backblaze.com

Unlimited backup: $5 per month per machine.


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## dtonthept (May 6, 2016)

I run crash plan in addition to two clone drives and a drop 5n in triple redundancy. Took a couple of months for crashplan to back up but it's up to date now. 

Chronosync is about to release a version with a plugin that lets you back up to a cloud server such as Amazon s3. Check them out, the Glacier storage might suit.


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## tack (May 6, 2016)

Keeping a drive in the car is a nice idea except if you're in Canada (or even Northern US) and your winter temperatures drop well below the drive's operational minimum.


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## Baron Greuner (May 6, 2016)

You could keep the drive in your car and the car on your drive unless it gets really cold then you can keep both in the garage and give the drive a rest.


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## tack (May 6, 2016)

Or, for those of who contend with -30C weather and even the garage is too cold (!), just keep your backup drive(s) at a friend's house. That's much safer than the garage, or even the car, neither of which are completely protected from fires in your house.


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## Baron Greuner (May 6, 2016)

tack said:


> Or, for those of who contend with -30C weather and even the garage is too cold (!), just keep your backup drive(s) at a friend's house. That's much safer than the garage, or even the car, neither of which are completely protected from fires in your house.



Why not take a photo of your car and put it on your drive. Take another photo of the drive in your car and put that on your drive. Put the car and the drive in the garage and take another photo of that and then put that on your drive.
Then go over to your friends house and set fire to him but not his house. You'll need a photo of your friend on your drive to remember him by. Go home and get the car out of the garage and put it on the drive. Wait until the temperature drops to -30 and then put the car in your friends house. If the temperature goes to -50, set fire to your friends house _after_ taking the car out and putting it on his drive.

Yours

G. Marx


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## tack (May 6, 2016)

Wait, how could I have gotten to my friend's house to set fire to him if I left my car in my garage? It was _almost_ ideal!


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## higgs (May 6, 2016)

Baron Greuner said:


> Why not take a photo of your car and put it on your drive. Take another photo of the drive in your car and put that on your drive. Put the car and the drive in the garage and take another photo of that and then put that on your drive.
> Then go over to your friends house and set fire to him but not his house. You'll need a photo of your friend on your drive to remember him by. Go home and get the car out of the garage and put it on the drive. Wait until the temperature drops to -30 and then put the car in your friends house. If the temperature goes to -50, set fire to your friends house _after_ taking the car out and putting it on his drive.
> 
> Yours
> ...


I use this slang very sparingly, but LOL!


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## chrysshawk (May 6, 2016)

I did consider using crashplan. However, although backup is nice, be aware that many of these apps open a big security hole to your whole system for anyone wishing to exploit it. So be sure this aspect is also part of the backup criteria.


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## higgs (May 6, 2016)

chrysshawk said:


> I did consider using crashplan. However, although backup is nice, be aware that many of these apps open a big security hole to your whole system for anyone wishing to exploit it. So be sure this aspect is also part of the backup criteria.



There's nothing like having local access to your files if the Internet breaks.


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## RiffWraith (May 6, 2016)

To all of you who put your stuff on the internet... you aren't afraid of your stuff getting stolen?


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 6, 2016)

Reverend Higgs, I posted about a smash-and-grab in the thread that inspired this thread. I live in a safe area, but I do drive the car to other places. And nowhere is safe from that.

The point is that the chances of someone smashing-and-grabbing a drive from my car AND taking the backup from my office AND my computer from the garage are vanishingly small.

Tack: I'm in Los Angeles, eh. 

Thanks for the suggestions about Chronosync and Backblaze.


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 6, 2016)

chrysshawk, I'm far less worried about a security hole than I am about losing everything.


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 6, 2016)

Okay, I was all set to try Backblaze. It sounded perfect... except that it doesn't back up applications.

Total waste of time.


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## dbudde (May 6, 2016)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> Okay, I was all set to try Backblaze. It sounded perfect... except that it doesn't back up applications.



Why do you need to backup applications? What apps are you using that you can't get from the original source?


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 6, 2016)

All the ones I pirated.

Seriously, I need my system backed up. I have old versions of programs you can't get anymore, for example, but it would be a total disaster if everything were gone in a fire. I have all my sample libraries on discs too, for the most part, but I don't want them gone either.

Plus I'd have to set it all up again! Can you imagine reinstalling 4TB wort of stuff!

No. I absolutely don't want any backup system that tells me how it's going to back up. Time Machine isn't a disk image - which I also have - but it doesn't do that.


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 6, 2016)

Chronosync, or really Glacier and Amazon S3 is too complicated for me.

What I really want is a 4TB Dropbox, and it seems like it doesn't exist.


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## dbudde (May 6, 2016)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> All the ones I pirated.



Ah. Makes sense. 

But seriously, you could always archive the apps you can't get so they don't look like apps anymore.


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## resound (May 6, 2016)

I use Zipcloud. Unlimited space for internal drives but you have to pay extra to backup external drives. Don't know if this still works, but when I first found it they were offering a trial. I tried it out until the free trial period expired but did not decide to use it. Then they started sending emails offering discounts. First one was maybe 10% off, then 20%, and it kept going up until it reached the point where it was 90% off or something ridiculous. So I got 2 years of unlimited backup for like $30. After 2 years passed, I canceled that subscription and started a new one with an email and got the same deal. We'll see if works again next time...


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## AllanH (May 6, 2016)

I do something relatively simple: I back all docs, projects etc up to a NAS device nightly. I back up the NAS weekly to off-line storage (USB3 drive) and I rotate a few offline storage devices to/from a bank deposit box. A 4 TB nas is only $160 so hardly expensive in the grander scheme of things.


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 6, 2016)

What is with these people?

Google Drive is $10/month for 1TB - fine- but then it jumps to $100 for 10TB.

Dropbox is $8.25/month for 1TB - even better - but then it jumps to $750 year for unlimited storage.

Ridiculous.


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## Baron Greuner (May 7, 2016)

It's called Capitalism.


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## chrysshawk (May 7, 2016)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> chrysshawk, I'm far less worried about a security hole than I am about losing everything.


Why not have both?

And what makes tou think a sexurity hole does not mean you loose everything, including your credit card details, account details, etc?

So many simple and safe tools exist. Rsync for one. But obviously you also need to get a cloud/server storage as well.


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## AllanH (May 7, 2016)

A key aspects of backup is to have backup-data off the network and off site. A crypto virus is one of the easiest ways to lose a lot of data, and many of the cryptos will also encrypt attached storage.


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 7, 2016)

I assume that's not just for me, but yes, I have an image backup of my system drive + boxes of sample libraries off the network.


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 7, 2016)

Baron, you're actually right. They want people storing photos in the 1TB of data, and they want businesses. You and I aren't in their sight.


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## Baron Greuner (May 7, 2016)

No that's right.

I also can't understand why SSDs are still being advertised as great storage and back up mediums.

Why not just use common external HDDs using good old USB connections.


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## AllanH (May 7, 2016)

there was some discussion of cost, so let me just add: if you lose a hard disk and need one of the professional firms to recover your data, that easily runs $3,000. Paying $100-$200 for a few TB of online storage is a good investment.


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## tack (May 7, 2016)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> Google Drive is $10/month for 1TB - fine- but then it jumps to $100 for 10TB.


What do you mean by "jumps"? If 1TB is $10/month, isn't 10TB supposed to be 10TB * 10$/TB = $100/month?


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 7, 2016)

Guys. Of course you want local backups on hard drives. This is in addition to that - an offsite backup in case your local ones are gone.

Allan, if you see the earlier posts, the point is that you *can't* get usable backup for that price. The services are all way more than that, and on top of that most have weird schemes instead of a backup you can use to get everything back in a usable state.

And no, tack, $10/month for 1TB doesn't mean 4TB should be 4X that. This kind of thing never scales linearly.

Business accounts on Dropbox are $12.50 per user for unlimited storage. But you need five users. Maybe we should get a bunch of users together under one "business."


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## kurtvanzo (May 7, 2016)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> Guys. Of course you want local backups on hard drives. This is in addition to that - an offsite backup in case your local ones are gone.
> 
> Allan, if you see the earlier posts, the point is that you *can't* get usable backup for that price. The services are all way more than that, and on top of that most have weird schemes instead of a backup you can use to get everything back in a usable state.
> 
> ...



Keep in mind online systems can go down, get hacked, or just be unavailable when you need them (internet connection/server/download time). My suggestion is scrape that idea, buy a few 5TB USB 3 HHDs that are decent (some are under $100). Backup everything on each and LEAVE 1 or 2 at a friend's house, one at home, one at work (or carry one with you). If you have 3 or 4 backups, and update them every few months (or when a major project ends), you are covered for almost any catastrophe. By the time you want to replace them drives will be $20 and online storage will have become more reasonable, but to me online is the LEAST reliable.


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 7, 2016)

*OF COURSE YOU WANT HARD DRIVE BACKUPS!*

kurt, please re-read my previous post and even the one that started this thread.

This is an off-site backup IN ADDITION to the hard drive backups I ALREADY HAVE HERE.

The idea is that if my house burned down - which I have to admit isn't impossible, because I live in a canyon in southern California wildfire area - then everything would be lost. I want to have a safety stored somewhere else.

For heaven's sake, if you don't already have multiple hard drive backups on drives, you're asking for trouble! Restoring over the internet would be a last resort, because it takes much less time to copy a hard drive.

I have bootable clones of my system drive, Time Machine running all the time, important files on Dropbox, and original discs in boxes.

So far the most practical solution is alternating Time Machine backups, with one stored in my car. It's not as safe as an off-site one, but the odds of that going down the same time I lose the original and the backups in my office are pretty low.


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## AllanH (May 7, 2016)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> .
> 
> Allan, if you see the earlier posts, the point is that you *can't* get usable backup for that price. The services are all way more than that, and on top of that most have weird schemes instead of a backup you can use to get everything back in a usable state.



I don't mean to argue, but one imo solid and usable approach is Office 365. Buy a family pack of 5 and get 5 * 1 TB storage. With a bit of setup, that can be made to work. $99/year.

You even get Microsoft Office included


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 7, 2016)

Thanks. I chatted online with Microsoft about that, and there was some reason it wouldn't work... and I forget what it was, but it was a fatal flaw.

Also, they organize stuff for you in a weird way. If I need the backup, I need to be able to restore it in less than several months.


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## kurtvanzo (May 7, 2016)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> *OF COURSE YOU WANT HARD DRIVE BACKUPS!*
> 
> kurt, please re-read my previous post and even the one that started this thread.
> 
> ...



I read the entire thread Nick. My point was that online backups are substandard for the reasons I listed, but if it eases your mind, then fine. But are you telling me don't have friends, neighbors or family you can leave a drive with (my other point)? Really not a big deal and in my mind better than an unknown third party that you have to pay monthly. If you have a fire are you really thinking you'll download 1000s of GBs to get it back? Or just call a buddy and grab that backup HD? Even paying for a safety deposit box is crazy. Redundancy is your friend. I've had many computer crashes over the years, but never lost anything when I had it in 3 other places. But again, if it eases your mind and the cost doesn't bother you, then by all means.

"but the odds of that going down the same time I lose the original and the backups in my office are pretty low." - I'd say a million to one, or you should buy better drives and stop setting your friends on fire.


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 7, 2016)

I parked a Seagate drive in my parent's basement before. When I brought it home to update after a few months, it failed - just out of warranty.

That was in the thread earlier.

The advantage to a cloud backup is that you can update it without going where the drive is.

And yes, if I have to download 4TB of data off a cloud server to get back everything after my house burns down, that's fine. My 200 meg cable internet would probably go down too, but if not it doesn't take very long.


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## kurtvanzo (May 9, 2016)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> I parked a Seagate drive in my parent's basement before. When I brought it home to update after a few months, it failed - just out of warranty.
> 
> That was in the thread earlier.
> 
> ...



Sorry you had the backup fail, sucks when it happens. The drive company would have just replaced the drive (not the info) if the warranty was good, which is ironic- do I really want another drive when the first one just failed? Heavy research before buying seems the only recourse. Amazon reviews and tech reviews quickly narrows the field. Since my drive issues in the 90's I take research seriously, and have not had a failure since. But it can happen to anyone. Thus my 3 or more backups.

According to an online calculator, 4TB @200 meg would take 2 days, 14 hours, and 50 mins to download IF the speeds were consistent and uninterrupted the entire time. I don't have that kind of time when a project is due, but if you do, that's cool- wish I did . Your right, you wouldn't have to drive to pick up the drive, but I can't believe this is not offset by the almost 3 day download time. But the important thing is that you can rest easy, and I agree, the more places the better.

Crash plan is one some people recommend (haven't used it myself though- obviously ) . Unlimited continuous online encrypted backups for about $10/month. A free version to try too, but no cloud storage with the free version. The program can handle your local backups too (all in the background and continuous as you work) at the same time. It can work in the background and claims a very small CPU usage...

https://www.code42.com/crashplan/features/

I hope you find a service that works well for you.


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 9, 2016)

I appreciate the replies and attempt to help, but please understand that I'm toilet trained, somewhat experienced after working on computers all day long since 1985, and only a little bit stupid.

Really, my goal here is entirely rational: an offsite backup as catastrophic insurance in case my local hard drive backups fail. Getting back to work immediately is not a priority if my house burns down.

I'm also somewhat familiar with the concept of contacting a company for warranty replacement when a product fails. Yes, it's my lack of research that caused four Seagate drives to fail just out of warranty within a 4-week period.

Jesus. These kids today.


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## Baron Greuner (May 9, 2016)

Products that are electrical always fail in the end. It's part of the guarantee. Why even today our Miele washing machine gave up the ghost after nearly 10 years. No I hadn't backed it up.
Went down the town and just another bought another one. Still have faith.
Nick the goal is at our sort of age is to buy stuff that lasts longer than we do.

Have you backed yourself up btw in case you fail before the electrical stuff does?


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 9, 2016)

I backed myself up and improved on the original model. She's graduating from college this month.


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## Cowtothesky (May 9, 2016)

I have been looking for an offsite backup service that doesn't break the bank. I have issues with lightning in my area and offsite backups are extremely important. Right now, I'm risking it and only backing up to 2 hdd drives. But don't worry, I unplug everything when a storm comes.  
I was looking at IDrive. I forgot what it was that I didn't like about Carbonite. I think it had to do with backing up for Mac. For personal use, IDrive only offers 1 and 10TB plans. I wish they had a 5TB plan for half the price. The 10TB is $374.62 for the first year and 499/yr after that. On big uploads, I think they will ship a hard drive for you to send back so that it doesn't take weeks. Interested in hearing how other folks handle offsite backups.


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## cAudio (May 10, 2016)

I'm about to try Keepit.com myself for this purpose. Unlimited storage for 4.95$ a month. They have a free 30-day trail.


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## dtonthept (May 10, 2016)

You can have crashplan (and I think backblaze) ship you a physical drive with your data to avoid downloading for days. From memory you can actually ship them a starter drive for your initial sync instead of spending the months like me to upload!


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## RCsound (May 10, 2016)

As i undestand, these tools like Crashplan, Carbonite, Idrive, Dropbox, Backblaze etc etc are only sync tools, you cant use to Archive files, you have no control when and how you prepare files to be backed... it isn't?

And what would happen if you empty your sync folder and create new files?...files are replaced, or new incremental copies are created in the "Cloud"?


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## dtonthept (May 10, 2016)

Yes they are sync tools rather than long term storage, the Amazon S3 stuff is an example of a cloud storage system, with some backup software developing plugins to let you back up to them at a time of choosing. I'm looking at S3 as an additional layer of deep storage in addition to my archival NAS stuff, while using Crashplan for my active rig quintupleth layer of redundancy.

On my list of things to do - and possibly replace the above - is build my own personal offsite server and sync to that, might look at convincing a friend in another country to get an identical setup so we can mirror to each other's setups...


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## dtonthept (May 10, 2016)

Crashplan also has versioning going back years - you can configure this in depth, but defaults to versions every 15 minutes for the last week, every day for the previous 90 days, every week for a year before that, then every month for previous years. Remove deleted files defaults to "never".

So, on one level, yes it's storage, but very much still a sync system with unlimited storage and ancient versions. I'd aim to "officially" archive elsewhere.

http://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/4/CrashPlan_App_Reference/Backup_Settings_Reference


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 10, 2016)

dtonthept, I wonder whether there's a way to mount remote hard drives as if they're on your local network, then use the incremental backup software of your choice to update them.

Does that exist?


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## dtonthept (May 13, 2016)

I can't answer with specific certainty, but I don't see why this wouldn't be possible. 

Check out 

And 

For starters...


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## RCsound (May 13, 2016)

What i dont like about Crashplan is that you need JAVA to run the aplication. Backblaze run smooth in my system.

AS3, Glacier, Google Nearline (There is also the new Backblaze B2 and is in public beta Stage.) etc, etc... i see these options for long storage, that do not need to touch every day, more like an insurance for disaster recovery, not a backup plan, but is complex to understand the retrieval of data and facturation involved, its not clear.


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 13, 2016)

Okay. No. Sorry, there's no way I can take ten minutes of that guy.

Does what I want exist: a way to mount remove drives like you can on a local network?


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## wst3 (May 15, 2016)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> Does what I want exist: a way to mount remove drives like you can on a local network?



Define "remote"... but if you mean off-site then no, there is no cost-effective way to mount remote physical drives to a computer today.

Off-the-wall... build an ATM or FDDI network between your studio and your off-site storage, then use Fibre-Channel, which I am pretty sure would work over either of those networks, although setting it up to be transparent would be a challenge. You could also run Fibre-channel directly, but you'd need a dedicated couple of fibers...

Here's what I recommend - although I have not yet implemented it fully - and I think it's kind of what you are describing:
1) separate data from applications and cruft - not as necessary as it once was, but still not a bad idea
2) separate reproducible data from non-reproducible data, e.g. sample libraries can, worst case, be reinstalled. Your magnum opus? Not so much!
3) create rotating images of your operating system & applications, some folks are happy with two, I think three is a little safer. There are imaging tools that will generate incremental images, I haven't used one, not sure I'd want to recover from it either. These get stored on external drives, the most recent lives in the studio, oldest lives off-site, doesn't really matter where off-site, just off site. If your studio is in your home you may need to be creative.
4) create incremental backups of ALL non-reproducible data, daily, every couple of days, weekly depends on your output. Two identical copies is a good idea, one local, one off-site. I used to use Veritas (ages ago) which would mirror the backup to two devices. Only drawback was that they had to be identical. I have not found such a tool lately, so I end up backing up and then mirroring. Annoying, but not a show stopper.
5) create an image or file backup (depends on the OS which works better, I've found Windows seems to handle file level backups better) of your reproducible data whenever you make a change, or two changes, or 10 changes, whatever works for you. Again two copies, on and off site.

Sounds like a lot of work, and it is I guess, or at least it is a lot of effort to set up, and a lot of discipline to maintain. Most of it can be automated. And it is cheating I suppose, I use a pair of 4TB external drives for everything, OS&Apps image and both data backups. I really should separate the non-reproducible data part.

If the first law of backups is two or more copies, and the second law is on-site and off-site, the third is different media. That last one has gone out the window with multi-terabytes of data, and optical or tape that can't really keep up (at least not economically.) And that's where the cloud comes in, I think.

It is off-site, it is WAY more reliable than anything I can do at a reasonable cost, and it can be instantaneous, if that's what you need. Most of the services provide some level of versioning, which we haven't really talked about - so that's a big plus too.

How then do we integrate cloud, and to what end(s)?

Nick's original request seemed to be in the vein of a catastrophic failure. In that case I guess I'd have to weigh things a little, but reinstalling 3 or 4 TB of sample libraries would still probably be easier via the cloud - no disc swapping alone makes it worth considering. So I think it is already viable for really large data sets, if you think along those lines. What it is NOT, is cost effective... yet. There are "near-on-line" backup services that are very inexpensive. but the initial load time is daunting.

For everything else I'm using Dropbox, at the 1TB level. I haven't filled it yet, but I'm working on it. I keep the latest OS image, and all my perishable data there. Most anyway, I'm still playing around with where to store pictures and music.

Which probably doesn't answer the original question, but perhaps it is a bit more food for thought?


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## synergy543 (May 15, 2016)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> Okay. No. Sorry, there's no way I can take ten minutes of that guy.


I was wondering what the heck Nick was talking about...(what a wimp), nothing could be "that annoying"!
But no, he was right,... I could only stand 2m43s before I had to turn it off.

Back OT, I tried Backblaze but its far too slow for the amount of data I need to backup. My best bet so far is to make a hard drive backup of irreplaceable data and physically store it offsite.
I miss the days when sample libraries came on DVDs. Keeping a drawer full of DVDs was the easiest way to backup.


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 15, 2016)

hahaha


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 15, 2016)

Bill, what I mean by mounting a drive remotely is having the drive show up on the desktop just like it does over the local network. The idea is that I could send a full 4TB drive to my brother, who lives in another city, and update it incrementally when I need to over the internet. It would just require that he plug it into a computer there when I need it.

I use SuperDuper for incremental bit-for-bit backups on Mac, and there's also Carbon Copy Cloner.

My onsite strategy is very simple:

- bootable clone of my system drive (using SuperDuper), updated whenever I change anything;

- Time Machine backups going all the time for the latest files.

If the system drive failed, I'd start up from the bootable clone and go back to work. I can then restore everything as it was from the Time Machine backup overnight (because you can't boot from a Time Machine disk).

But I also have the sample drives to back up (even though I have most of the original discs - not counting things like Hollywood Strings, which is on a hard drive), and as I posted, I'd like to have it all off-site as well.


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## wst3 (May 16, 2016)

Nick - I really do understand your application, and reasoning... in fact I have some envy of Time Machine, at least I have SuperDuper covered!

I'm not familiar enough with current MacOS to know how much Unix is left under the covers. It would be tediously slow, but you can in fact remotely mount a drive under Unix. It's pretty cool!

However, uploads would be slower than your upload speed - so small changes would be manageable, but large changes could be awful. And downloads would be equally limited, much slower than the connection to your ISP.

Or at least that's what I remember - and keep in mind when I say slow we couldn't fill an ISDN connection<G>!

Still might be worth trying???


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## wst3 (May 16, 2016)

Just realized - speed might be an issue, but you could install an off-the-shelf NAS box at your brother's house and create a rule that allowed only you to connect to it. D'oh, I feel stupid!


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 16, 2016)

And a NAS box just needs to be on the network!

That's the answer. Thanks. I'll set it up at my parents' house (which is in town), turn it on when I'm there, and use operate my home machine using Team Viewer.

You da guy!


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## JohnG (May 16, 2016)

I have read through this thread in hope but remain stumped, even with the NAS approach. Could one use that to back up, say, 4-6 drives per computer remotely, with both PC and Macs involved? 

I just make physical backups on bare-bones drives and hope for the best as far as "remote" and it's not really even remote, since it's in the same house. At least, though, if there is a small fire or water damage in one spot I don't lose everything.


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 16, 2016)

It sounds like one could, John. I'll post when I get back home and have a chance to find out more details. It looks like the number of drives is irrelevant... but I'm jumping the gun.


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## dnegovan (May 16, 2016)

I use Crashplan for this and I love it mostly because the space is unlimited and it automatically updates every hour. That convenience factor is pretty huge for me.

Another option for what you're going to do Nick is that Crashplan actually has a function where instead of backing up to their cloud you back up to some other machine running Crashplan. Might be worth investigating... especially since it's automatic like I said and works like Dropbox where it just uploads the changes.

Edit: And by some other machine I mean one off site - like a NAS machine at your brother's place. They call it "back up to a friend's computer"

-Dan


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 16, 2016)

Yeah, someone else suggested Crashplan. According to you and him, you can back up everything. But according to their tech support guy, nothing that's installed is backed up. So I'm confused.

However, both Crashplan and the NAS idea sound perfect if they'll work. I like the idea of not buying hard drives that can fail, and I like the idea of not paying a fee. Both are good.


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## dnegovan (May 16, 2016)

Right I guess the way I get around that is I have a folder where I keep any installers I feel like I wouldn't be able to download/obtain again easily. And I make system images of my slaves (since you can do that with Windows) and those get backed up too. So if I had to rebuild my system because my place burned down or something I would have all the tools to do so. It would be a royal pain in the butt and a huge time sink, but it is a worst case scenario kind of thing. Like you said, in a case like that getting your rig up and running ASAP might not be at the top of your list of problems.


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## synergy543 (May 16, 2016)

JohnG said:


> Could one use that to back up, say, 4-6 drives per computer remotely, with both PC and Macs involved?


I backup offsite to another house with BitTorrentSync although mainly with smaller files. I'm using Mac and PCs and it works quite well (be careful with compatible file naming though). You just set up folders on each computer to sync with each other and it updates automatically in the background. It should work with larger files too as on their website is says it handles gigabyte and terabyte files too.
https://getsync.com/


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 16, 2016)

Supposedly the NAS I was looking at works with Time Machine. But I have to figure out whether it will back up over the internet, i.e. whether it writes.


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## alanb (May 19, 2016)

Nick, I can't help you navigate this thread's more esoteric parameters, but I can say that you should steer clear of Seagate drives, and gravitate towards HGST ones. Their high quality and high MTBF have, apparently, not dropped since its acquisition by WD.

Some folks here mentioned Backblaze:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q4-2015/


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## Nick Batzdorf (May 19, 2016)

I will *never* buy another Seagate product. Totally unreliable products, snotty company.

And you may or may not know that I don't just slam companies and products with the wave of a hand. Seagate truly sucks.


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## alanb (May 19, 2016)

I learned that lesson many years ago.

Now I use only HGST UltraStar drives for high-activity uses (_e.g._, audio/video/sample streaming), and HGST Deskstar for low-activity uses (_e.g._, archiving).


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jun 4, 2016)

Well [insert a long stream of swearing].

I bought a 6TB Western Digital Mycloud network drive two weeks ago, then spent about three days copying data onto it over ethernet. It took three calls to tech support to get it going.

Today the mofo failed. After another 40 minutes on the phone with tech support, it was officially determined that the f-ing mf-ing f-er was no f-ing good. F.

At least I got my money back.

I'm scared to buy another one now. What a pain in the ass.


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## tack (Jun 4, 2016)

Not sure if the 6TB WD SKU are duds or not, but every manufacturer has their problems (whether random infant mortality or an obviously bad product).

When I buy a disk, especially spinning rust, I generally beat the shit out of it for about a week before I trust it to data. One of my favorite torture devices is to fill it half way, and then copy the directory tree back onto itself at a different location. This is of course painfully slow because it's abusive to the disk head, constantly going back and forth between the inner and outer tracks.

2-3 runs of that and if I haven't induced infant mortality at that point I figure the disk is safe to trust to hold real data.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jun 4, 2016)

Well, this was a backup, and it only works over wired ethernet - very, very slow. I guess I did beat the shit out of it, and the fact that it died proves it wasn't safe to trust with real data.

And of course all manufacturers have problems. This one just leaves a bad taste after all that time I invested in it.


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## Øivind (Jun 5, 2016)

You have might have come to a conclusion already, so i am not sure if this is helpful at all, but this is what i am planning on doing myself.

A NAS or just a cheap regular computer should be a good solution for offsite backup, perhaps check out freeNAS if you have the time and dedication. I am about to order a Western Digital Mycloud v2 myself.. hope i have a better experience :/

Google ' _How to Remotely Access Files on Your Network Storage Device_ ' , which should show some easy to follow methods to set up a dedicated computer or NAS etc for external sharing. 

Most new NAS setups probably (hopefully) have a decent way to access it offsite, but here are some programs that could work: SFTP, DirectNet, Dokan and Expandrive. These and lots of alternative programs either create a network drive or folder you can access within your OS. I use Expandrive at work to access our offsite servers, where it creates a network folder which i can access, copy/paste/delete and edit content directly on the server, just like a folder locally. You could also just access it with any FTP program like filezilla, a bit more hassle as it does not create a folder, but if you back up manually, it works just as well and uses the same protocol to access the remote drive (which i believe is SSH/SFTP).

I plan on doing image file backups of my system on a regular interval that i just copy to my external drive. So if/when my house is sharknadoed, i have all program installs, OS settings, files and folders, all neatly tucked away in an image file. A file by file backup is probably better if you don't have an all you can eat internet connection.

Anyway, as i said, this is what i am planning on doing myself, so proven to work it is not. In theory it should tho. Visualized image as attachment.


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## wst3 (Jun 5, 2016)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> Well, this was a backup, and it only works over wired ethernet - very, very slow. I guess I did beat the shit out of it, and the fact that it died proves it wasn't safe to trust with real data.



When you have a ton of data to back up the only reasonable solution is some form of internal connection. Or a three day vacation<G>... when I've upgraded my backup solutions in the past I've always pulled the drives from the enclosures and connected them in the computer. The 15 minutes (give or take) required on either side of the backup operation are more than covered by the reduced time to backup.

Next time around I am hoping to be able to use an eSATA connection, but the target drive will still need to be disconnected from its host. Minor hassle really.



Nick Batzdorf said:


> And of course all manufacturers have problems. This one just leaves a bad taste after all that time I invested in it.


I'm right there with you on this - but have no brilliant solution<G>!


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## wst3 (Jun 5, 2016)

oivind_rosvold said:


> A NAS or just a cheap regular computer should be a good solution for offsite backup, perhaps check out freeNAS if you have the time and dedication. I am about to order a Western Digital Mycloud v2 myself.. hope i have a better experience :/



I keep flip-flopping between freeNAS and a commercial product. I probably have enough parts to build freeNAS, but time (and laziness) are an issue. So I've been looking at all the commercial products lately. The WD does look like a good choice, immediate facts to the contrary...



oivind_rosvold said:


> Most new NAS setups probably (hopefully) have a decent way to access it offsite, but here are some programs that could work: SFTP, DirectNet, Dokan and Expandrive. <snip>



In the past I used scripts with SFTP, but I like Expandrive, and I'm going to look at the others too - thanks for the suggestions!



oivind_rosvold said:


> I plan on doing image file backups of my system on a regular interval that i just copy to my external drive. So if/when my house is sharknadoed, i have all program installs, OS settings, files and folders, all neatly tucked away in an image file.



"sharnadoed" - can I say I just love that?



oivind_rosvold said:


> A file by file backup is probably better if you don't have an all you can eat internet connection.



There was an image tool that did incremental imaging, can't remember what it was, and when I used it I found recovery less than optimal. My strategy these days is to keep the last two images. I'm not going to risk jinxing myself by saying anything more. And for now I don't keep the images on drives, just on optical media to simplify recovery. I need to look into cloud based image recovery!!!



oivind_rosvold said:


> Anyway, as i said, this is what i am planning on doing myself, so proven to work it is not. In theory it should tho. Visualized image as attachment.



And we all know the difference between theory and practice...

So you are going to use a pair of NAS devices, one local and one remote? That's an interesting solution. I was going to use a local NAS and a commercial cloud product - not sure which one yet.

Backups were so much easier when they fit on a handful of floppies<G>!


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## wst3 (Jun 5, 2016)

AHA!!!!!

I did not realize that freeNAS supported off-site replication, that could be a real big deal! I need to do some more research now, and I hate it when that happens!

Thanks for that!! No, really... in a past life I worked as a consultant focusing on information risk management, which covered security, data availability, and the like. One of our 'partners' was EMC, who were just rolling out their multi-site replication. It was amazing. I figured it would eventually find its way to the home and small business space, but no longer really follow that stuff, so this is a very nice surprise.


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## Anders Wall (Jun 5, 2016)

I have a synology nas who holds my timemachine backups and then copies itself to Amazon cloud.
All is fully automated.
Best,
/Anders


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## Øivind (Jun 5, 2016)

wst3 said:


> And we all know the difference between theory and practice...
> 
> So you are going to use a pair of NAS devices, one local and one remote? That's an interesting solution. I was going to use a local NAS and a commercial cloud product - not sure which one yet.
> 
> Backups were so much easier when they fit on a handful of floppies<G>!




I am first gonna just do local backup, and continue using Google Drive for cloud backup, but when i run out of Google space i am going to upgrade to an offsite backup 

Floppies <3


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jun 5, 2016)

Okay, interesting posts here. Will do some more research after watching Golden State beat Cleveland in game 2.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jun 6, 2016)

oivind, following links from your post I landed on hubiC.com, which offers 10TB for €50/year (including VAT, which might not even be collected from the US). That sounds great.

Is there any reason that + Expandrive wouldn't do what I want?

Actually it seems that cloud services like hubiC and Dropbox want a folder to synchronize rather than a drive, and avoiding that would be the only reason to use Expandrive... right?


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## Øivind (Jun 7, 2016)

If you connect a NAS on your local network, you do not need Expandrive or similar programs to access it. You can map a drive or folder from your locally connected NAS to your OS as a network drive and install your cloud service there for syncing. Programs like Expandrive is mostly used if you want to access NAS/servers that are not on the local network.

I would think that mapping the NAS as a drive and then installing the cloud app to create a folder on that mapped drive should work, just as if it was a drive on your computer. 
Like: MappedDrive(NAS)/hubiC/AllYourStuff 

Or worst case, you have to map a folder on your NAS to install hubiC into, which would make the NAS work like: NAS/MappedFolder/hubiC/AllYourStuff

In the case where the NAS is located outside the local network, you can use Expandrive or other programs to create the mapped drive and use it just like if the NAS was stationed locally.

PS i think Expandrive cost money, but there are free alternatives.

Tiresome day at work, sorry if i am not making much sense


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jun 7, 2016)

WD Mycloud has a cloud service. I'm thinking it may be the best solution, so I could give another one a try. Maybe I just got a bad unit. It was very slow, which makes me wonder.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jun 7, 2016)

Also, Bill's suggestion to take the drive out of the NAS box and connect it to the computer while filling it the first time makes sense.


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## JohnG (Jun 7, 2016)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> WD Mycloud has a cloud service. I'm thinking it may be the best solution, so I could give another one a try. Maybe I just got a bad unit. It was very slow, which makes me wonder.



I looked at WD My-something a few years ago and it had way too many "fail" reviews on Amazon. Maybe it's better now.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jun 7, 2016)

What concerns me is that some people had the same issues I had: not found on network. WD tech support told me it was broken, but now I wonder whether it wasn't more than that.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jun 7, 2016)

Another question: gigabit ethernet should be about 2-1/2 times the bandwidth of FireWire 400 or USB2.

Why am it slow?


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## Øivind (Jun 8, 2016)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> Another question: gigabit ethernet should be about 2-1/2 times the bandwidth of FireWire 400 or USB2.
> 
> Why am it slow?



Maybe the disks inside are WD Green disks, which may be quite slow, 5400rpm, these are mostly just made for backup or storing music and video, so you will notice a quite the slowdown if you are used to ssd's or even regular mechanical drives. But I would guess you had a faulty one. Some reviewers have timed them, so check for a review with benchmarks and try to replicate the test and check if they line up. Sad that we as consumers have to do such things tho :/


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jun 8, 2016)

Thinking about it, the problem was that it stopped appearing on the network. That seems like a firmware or even hardware failure.

5400 RPM drives are slower than regular 7200RPM ones, but this was more than that. I'm used to both 5400 and 7200 spinning drives, because the laptop I just replaced three weeks ago has a 5400 RPM drive and on my main machine I only have SSD for my system drive. 

For that matter, my regular online backup drive is 5400 RPM. You'd expect them to last longer and use less power.


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## Øivind (Jun 8, 2016)

Aha, if you try out another unit of the WD NAS or any other, let me know  eager to find out how it works out.


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## wst3 (Jun 9, 2016)

hold the presses... I've decided that building my own is not in the cards, just don't have the time right now. So I started looking at other solutions, and I've narrowed my choices down to QNAP and Synology. Both make a very cost effective 2 drive device, which is sufficient if it is backed up to either another 2 drive device (off site) or the cloud. I think I'll still go with a 4 drive device because I do want some local redundancy, but I am wavering<G>! According the reviews I've read thus far the QNAP seems to have the edge on performance, which is born out from the system specifications. The Synology control program is, however, much nicer, more mature if you will.

Both systems can do media streaming, and back up computers, tablets and phones... they probably have more in common than different.

The other choice would be a FreeNAS device - but they are priced beyond what I'm willing to pay, and don't offer any significant benefits over the Synology and QNAP except that I can view the source code. At least as far as I've read thus far...

Nick, you may want to take a look - the two drive box is not a heck of a lot more than the WD and Seagate offerings (similarly sized), and the software is definitely nicer.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jun 9, 2016)

That Synology 1-bay drive looks good. I just online-chatted with a sales person, who said it can back up everything on your system drive as well as the usual stuff.

What I don't understand is why it's able to duplicate itself to a cloud service, or really why any other software can't do that. If I could run software to duplicate a local backup drive to a cloud service, that would solve all my problems without any NAS stuff at all.


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## wst3 (Jun 9, 2016)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> That Synology 1-bay drive looks good. I just online-chatted with a sales person, who said it can back up everything on your system drive as well as the usual stuff.


 Synology, QNAP, and even FreeNAS are all very well thought out products - each has some minor advantages over the other two, but I imagine you can't make a poor choice.



Nick Batzdorf said:


> What I don't understand is why it's able to duplicate itself to a cloud service, or really why any other software can't do that. If I could run software to duplicate a local backup drive to a cloud service, that would solve all my problems without any NAS stuff at all.


I don't know if I understand your question...

You could use FreeNAS or any number of other tools to sync a local backup drive to the cloud. What you might lose with most solutions might include block/track backups (much faster than file backups - counter intuitive though that may be), incremental backups, versioning, and other things that may not matter to you.

And NAS provides an alternate backup that is immediately accessible - which a stand-alone drive and a decent backup/restore program can do too. The NAS packages tend to include robust, feature rich (too feature rich?) and mature software tools, and that is really what you are buying.

If you have a stand-alone backup drive you could mirror it to Dropbox and be done. If you need less than 1TB of space it is actually a pretty good solution - use the built in backup tools in your OS to backup to the local drive, and then mirror that to the cloud. It falls apart if you need more than 1TB because of costs. And your stand-alone drive is still a single point of failure. A NAS can do disk mirroring, or RAID and eliminate that single point.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jun 9, 2016)

That's the original problem right there: I need about 4TB of offsite space, and Dropbox is ridiculously expensive for that. It wouldn't have to be updated very often, because I have local backups, but I need to be able to update it over the internet.

Anyway, NAS seems perfect: put everything on it, set it up at my parent's house 15 miles away, then update it as needed. But it's definitely not perfect if it screws up like the WD MyCloud did.

Plus I have a natural distrust of "my" things. Who started that?! My coloring book, my crayons, my tricycle...


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## wst3 (Jun 9, 2016)

yeah, I know!

Quick, Cheap, Easy - pick two I'm afraid.

I'm back to looking at the near-line solutions for my sample libraries, I'm definitely going with QNAP or Synology for everything else. Let me see if I can sort out the last piece to my (frugal) satisfaction...


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jun 9, 2016)

I'd settle for not ridiculously expensive and usable.


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## wst3 (Jun 10, 2016)

you need to set the bar higher<G>...

I was looking at tools to manage Amazon Glacier, but when I thought about their pricing I decided it wasn't as cost effective as I had hoped. 4TB would cost about $28/month, and you have a separate fee to access your data!

So I'm off looking at similar services, including owncloud, and I'm becoming convinced that folks like us (4-5TB of data that we simply wish to secure - it doesn't change much, and we hope we never need to restore it) are just not a big enough niche to attract attention.

My solution is starting to take shape...

local backup of the operating environment to an external drive (NAS) weekly
local backup of the operating environment to bootable optical media as required (major changes, new app, major OS update, etc)

local backup of all data that I create to NAS, and one or more cloud providers. This will require some cleverness, one guy offers unlimited free storage for photos, another for music, etc. The critical stuff goes on dropbox mostly for the integration with the local filesystem.
That has me covered for everything but my sample libraries, sound effects libraries, etc. These are large collections of data (to me anyway, approx 1TB of Kontakt libraries, about 200GB of SFX, and then some loops and miscellaneous libraries for other sampler formats.) I think I need between 1TB and 1.5TB today, and it will continue to grow. At some point I want to move all my applications and plug-in installers to this same repository, for now they go on the NAS.

Because the changes to this data collection are becoming less and less frequent I'm seriously considering buying a pair of 4TB external drives and simply copying everything over to them, and leaving one at a friends house. The 4TB drives are reasonably priced, and would provide room for multiple copies so I could rotate through the last four iterations, making things a little easier. Eventually I'll probably use owncloud or FreeNAS or some other open source solution to mirror these drives. Ironically, at that point I don't need the 4TB any more<G>!

So for me it is all about reorganizing things so that the first phase of the backup/off-site backup is cleaner, and easier to manage, and handles not just the studio computer, but all the devices in our home. Then I'll worry about the libraries. Because on top of the amount of data I need to decide between saving the installers vs saving the library drive...

It never ends!


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jun 10, 2016)

I had a large Sea-f-ing-gate :( HD with all my sample data that I left in a box at my parents' house 15 miles away.

When I brought it home to update it - like a week out of warranty - the mf failed. That was the first of four Seagate drives that failed in a period of a month.

I will *never* buy another one of that company's products - and not just because their quality sucks, but because they were really unpleasant dicks when I called customer support. F them.

***
Now, the large drive failure may have been because it wasn't used. I wouldn't blame the S company if it were just that one drive.

But that's why i don't trust the strategy.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jun 26, 2016)

I just returned the second WD MyCloud to the store today. The first one was defective, so I wanted to give it another try.

Well, in four days - that's 96 hours - it didn't finish backing up my 2TB sample drive in time for a trip I took, never mind the other drives. For heaven's sake. If it sucks that badly connected directly to the computer with a Cat6 cable, it's certainly not going to be usable over the internet.

I'm trying to figure out what someone would do with a 6TB NAS drive that takes a couple of weeks running 24/7 to fill up. So far it seems like tits on a bull - the perfect example of what we in the art world call "TOTALLY F-ING USELESS WASTE OF TIME."

Is there something I don't get?


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## Baron Greuner (Jun 27, 2016)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> it didn't finish backing up my 2TB sample drive in time for a trip I took,



Where D'Ya go?


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jun 27, 2016)

New York


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## Baron Greuner (Jun 27, 2016)

That's a fair old trip there and back. 6000 miles.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jun 27, 2016)

My fifth trip east in less than a year, and many people go back and forth much more than that.


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## dtonthept (Jun 27, 2016)

May or may not be applied able to the WD drives, but NAS can have a very slow write time as my understanding is that it has to go through their on board "OS" which thinks about where to put data. I run a Dropbox 5n set to triple redundancy, and write times are slow too, but there is an option to put a small M.2 SSD in there which apparently speed things up. Apparently.

I've mentioned Crashplan before and I know you didn't like the idea, but it does have a feature whereby you can "back up to a friend's computer" which can be off site, in addition to their unlimited cloud storage. I'm only using the cloud stuff at present so can't vouch for their off site stuff at this point, but the concept of being able to locally copy mass data to a drive then move that drive elsewhere, to then be able to incrementally backup is an interesting one.

Just been noticing these Mac mini online services too, macminicolo seems to be good, haven't quite figured out if there's much use in our work flow just yet...


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jun 27, 2016)

Actually I do like the idea of Crashplan, but it doesn't seem to back up things like programs - anything that's installed. I'd be here for 50 years trying to resurrect a system drive, and I have some things (such as Pro Tools 10) that you can't even get anymore.

macminicolo is a silly price. At this point it seems that two big hard drives is the most practical option.


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## Øivind (Jun 28, 2016)

After some serious digging, i have found that the "not to expensive but mabye the best NAS in the mid range" is a Synology NAS DS216+ (as someone mentioned before) with some HGST Deskstar drives. It's more expensive than many WD NAS, but what i have read is that this is really good shit. Read&Write speed is 100-110 MB/s. Now 100 MB/s is probably just BS anyway because it depends on the file sizes. Lots of small files take longer than few bigger files, even though they in the end equal the same size. So probably not faster than the WD NASes.

If you want to do it the fastest way possible, i guess it is to take a System Image of your system. That would be 1 gigantic file for each harddrive, or perhaps 1 file for your whole system, depending on what program you use to create a system image file. That way, everything is backed up (including your programs, settings, everything). That way you can set your system image program to save to your NAS (windows at least has a save to network drive option for this). The problem for this tho is that you just have a large file to recover, and not a mirror of files and folders. You could probably piece it up, like having 1 image of your OS drive that keeps updating. And maybe back up instrument drives and projects drives the regular way. Which probably will take a lot of time the first time, but after
that, it will only update changes and new files at a set interval. But if you do not need to access the folders easily, system images are probably the fastest way to do it. Here is a guide (albeit old it seems) on how it can work on windows https://www.synology.com/en-global/...y_NAS_using_Windows_or_3rd_party_applications (if you are on win 10, click the start flag windows thingy and write Backup & Restore to get to the point they are in, in the link above, the link to Microsoft does not display anything.)

Synology also seems to have been verified for a lot of 3rd party backup programs, so they should work seamlessly, even with many cloud backup services.

There are cheaper drives and NASes tho, but i think going for a Synolog NAS is a good call (as others have mentioned). A setup with the DS216+ and 2x HGST Deskstar 4TB would probably go for around 450-500 bucks tho.

So i have changed my wishlist from a WD NAS to this setup, now everything that is missing is.. the money ^^


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jun 28, 2016)

There are at least two Mac programs that make bootable clones - SuperDuper (which I use) and Carbon Copy Cloner. That's not an issue; I have everything backed up here no problem. I use Time Machine, the built-in Mac OS X back-up program, to make incremental backups, combined with SuperDuper copies of my system drive in a working state (you can't just start up from Time Machine and go back to work - it packs everything into a sparse image, which takes time to recover from).

The only issue is offsite backup in case my house gets sharknadoed, as someone put it earlier. 

I looked at those Synology things. One advantage is that you can attach the drives to your computer and use SATA or something to copy everything over, then put the drives in the NAS box.

But I just don't see a way around the basic problem: writing over Ethernet (and then Internet) is not practical.


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## Øivind (Jun 29, 2016)

Yeah, the first backup is going to take a while, but after that, it will be incremental. Also, Synology should work with Time Machine out of the box. 

And as the NAS can be set up offsite, and you can connect to it as a local drive if needed (the program to do this without any hassle comes with the Synology NAS as far as i can tell), making cloud backup not necessary, also eliminating the Ethernet + Internet part. 

Computer -> backup SuperDuper/Time machine -> offsite NAS. 
Or connect 2 together, one local and one offsite.

I feel there are many many ways to do it and it's very customizable. The big hazzle is probably getting the 2TB of files over to the disks, and as they are just regular hard-drives, you can probably just copy stuffs over by connecting it to your computer first, as you said in your post. Or just set it and let it run until done, and then move the NAS offsite and connect to it to continue backing up.

It will probably take a couple of months before i will have my stuff backed up and running, but will let you know how it goes.


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## dtonthept (Jun 29, 2016)

For system mirrors I totally see where you're coming from. My "solution" at the moment is that I also have a fireproof safe that I'll keep backups in when I'm away. You can get them from a hardware store for not too much money, mainly designed to prevent documents getting burned in a fire, and, well now it looks after digital documents too.

I do have crashplan set to clone my entire system drive, but yes, you certainly couldn't boot up off their server


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jun 29, 2016)

Time Machine only works over the local network.

A safe is a good idea, though.


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## Brobdingnagian (Jan 30, 2019)

Any update on going the Q-Nap route? Looking at various NAS options for the studio and thinking of this unit: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1413687-REG/qnap_ts_863xu_4g_us_2u_8_bay_amd_64bit.html

Any thoughts? Experiences?

TIA,
B


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