# Cloud Backup Options ? (Backblaze, etc.)



## synthpunk (Aug 7, 2016)

As a third layer (using Time machine and Carbon Copy Cloner locally) of backup I been looking at Backblaze cloud backup, but my experience with the demo it was VERY slooooooowwwwwwwww. That may be just the initila backup, Im not sure, but if not I would hate to have to got through that every time.

Any input, alternatives, ideas, discussion, etc very welcome.


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## kclements (Aug 7, 2016)

In my experience, the initial backup does take a long time. I am switching from Crashplan (which I used for a couple years) to Backblaze, as I have just had some pretty major data loss with CP and the final straw - I can't get to my new backups because the "Destination is Offline". I don't know what that means and have a ticket into CP. But I am done with them and switching over. 

There is a setting in Backblaze: if you go to Performance tab and uncheck _Automatic Throttle_, and crank the _Manual Throttle_ slider up. I am currently uploading at 4.2 Mbps, which is about what my cable connection provides - and that's over WiFi. Also, I excluded a lot of my stuff (like Music, all my samples...) from the backup, which helps a lot.


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## JohnG (Jul 1, 2017)

Hi all,

Backblaze does look pretty good and the reviews I saw were positive. However, it doesn't (according to one review) allow either disk image clones or application backup. 

There was a wildfire near my house recently, while I was 3,000 miles away. I do have a local backup but a total loss would have been -- a total loss.

Is there a remote backup service that would allow a speedy recovery for multiple computers? Ideally, in my mind's eye, it would make clones of each disk so you could simply download and be back up and running.

Naturally, if there is a serious fire, there will be other issues, but being out of commission (no pun intended) for months while reassembling everything would be, at best, daunting.

Thanks,

John


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jul 1, 2017)

I looked into this a while ago and gave up. It's just not feasible to back up 4TB of data over the cloud - not so much because of the technology, but because it's absurdly expensive.

However, as John says, I also want everything backed up to restore, not just what the backup program feels in the mood to back up.

My strategy now is two Time Machine backups (one internal drive and one connected to my router), and one disk image that I keep in my car. That's for my system drive - I copied everything manually from my sample drives onto the same backup drives.


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## JohnG (Jul 1, 2017)

I hadn't thought of the car, Nick, but if I'm out of town and the house burns down, the car might go up too if it's in the garage.

I also have not seen what I was hoping for; most of the solutions I've seen are predicated on all computers being hooked up to the Internet, and it's not even clear about how they handle multiple drives.

And you're right about cost too. I think I may have close to 4TB just on my main DAW computer.

I do have local backups for everything, and it is automatic for files that change a lot (like VE Pro setups on slave computers, or DP files on the DAW). Sitting watching fires burn near the house, though, has given me a different perspective.


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## synergy543 (Jul 1, 2017)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> I looked into this a while ago and gave up. It's just not feasible to back up 4TB of data over the cloud - not so much because of the technology, but because it's absurdly expensive.


Backblaze is relatively inexpensive at $5/month. However, my uploads were limited to 20G/day by the internet speed so that would be 600G/month which consumes most of our entire monthly useage allocation limit which is 1T. Even if we were constantly uploading it would take close to a year to back up just 6T of data. Following Nick's "dump it in the car approach", I can easily backup 6T overnight.


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## dtonthept (Jul 1, 2017)

I'm on Crash plan and have many many TB backed up with them, including my archival NAS which has about ten years worth of projects on there. Took a while to get it all up there but it seems to work okay. 

Kclements could you elaborate on your problem you had? 

My understanding is that you can request a drive to be sent to you with files in the event of a failure, and also, if you're inclined, you can also send them a phsyxial hard drive to be the starting data pool instead of having to do the whole thing online. 

You can also activate an option to back up to a "friend's computer" which could be a way of setting up your own personal offsite archive if you had a spare machine and somewhere to put it.


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## Walra48 (Jul 2, 2017)

My solution is straight forward. All drives are backup up daily to on site backup drives (boot drives are backed up bootable). A second line off site backup of all drives is done monthly and stored in a safety deposit box at my local bank.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jul 4, 2017)

John, it's true that the car could burn down with the house - especially where we are (a narrow canyon). So I bring that drive with me when I travel. It's a very small USB drive, so it doesn't take any space.


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## JohnG (Jul 4, 2017)

Thanks Nick. That certainly would be a start.

I think @Walra48 has a practical, if cumbersome, solution that would go beyond the capacity of a single drive. 

What we all need is a way to get our entire setups back in action in the event of flood / fire.

I think I will ask a friend of mine who has managed online businesses what he does. These are actually public companies so they need "real" solutions to this issue.

Kind regards,

John


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## Jeremy Spencer (Jul 4, 2017)

Walra48 said:


> A second line off site backup of all drives is done monthly and stored in a safety deposit box at my local bank.



I actually just did this as well, I recently learned that my bank account includes a small safety deposit box. It fits two portable hard drives perfectly.


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## Walra48 (Jul 4, 2017)

At this point in time cloud backups are the slowest recovery time for large volume storage. Not useable in my situation. In the event my studio is robbed/gutted or burns to the ground, my fastest recovery is #1 - drive to the bank to retrieve all drives. #2 - hardware gear replacement/via pro insurance compensation. No other backup protocol can match that. The onsite backup drives are just for the advent of drive failures.


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## Walra48 (Jul 4, 2017)

Also, do not assume that standard homeowners insurance will cover gear replacement. In almost all cases, it won't, especially if you use it for professional purposes. All my studio gear is separately insured with a company here in Toronto that specializes in professional media production coverage. Worth the $ for peace of mind. (A tad off topic, but still related.)


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## Jeremy Spencer (Jul 4, 2017)

On that note, it's important to check these details with your insurance company. I thought I'd be covered as well, but if you earn even a single dime from your equipment, you are a "business" and require separate coverage (it's crazy, but in Canada that's how most insurance companies see things). And because you earn money from your home, you need to declare a portion of it to the "business" as well. On the positive side, I can claim this portion of the house (including a portion of the utility bills) on income tax every year.


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## JohnG (Jul 4, 2017)

Walra48 said:


> do not assume that standard homeowners insurance will cover gear replacement. In almost all cases, it won't, especially if you use it for professional purposes



In the US, homeowners' insurance may cover you in part, but the amount of the coverage is usually subject to a ceiling that is a relatively low dollar amount. Moreover, there's typically a deductible as well, so one's loss may not be covered much at all.



Walra48 said:


> cloud backups are the slowest recovery time for large volume storage.



That's certainly what it looks like. Good point to bear in mind.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jul 4, 2017)

You used to need equipment insurance to cover commercial property, but there may be homeowners policies that cover it.

I used to get it through ASCAP.


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## Rohann (Jul 4, 2017)

I've been using Backblaze for a while now, and while initial backup is slow, subsequent backups are considerably faster as it's not backing up unmodified files. For $5 it seems like decent last-resort insurance for sample libraries and projects.


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## Thorsten Meyer (Jul 5, 2017)

Take a look at Amazon backup which comes at a cost now, but it is one that will last with a higher chance if you need a restore in years to come.


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## dtonthept (Jul 5, 2017)

Forgot to mention I had a meltdown six years back that destroyed my working drive. Got it fixed, got my backup drive, set it to restore, then the backup drive died mid restore! I had to send it to clean room and spend $3800.00 on recovery. Suffice to say I now keep multiple backup copies, including one in the cloud (with a company who will mail files back on a physical drive) just incase.


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## Ry.Ja3 (Jul 5, 2017)

For the past 8 months, I had been using ARQBackup to push data to Amazon Cloud Unlimited. Amazon did away with the "unlimited", so after my account expires in August- I'm done.

I've since signed up for Backblaze. It cost $95 for 2 years. I have about 4.7 Terrabytes of data, and in the past ~48 days, it's backed up about 3.4 Terrabytes. No complaints so far, other than I can't control the priority to when files gets backed up. It just seems to randomly pull files from my different connected drives and uploads.

I have other backup strategies in place, but for $47.50 a year- I figure I'd give it a try.


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## JohnG (Jul 5, 2017)

Anyone investigate something like this? It's an external drive that is advertised as waterproof and fireproof.



Though I do like the concept of offsite cloud storage, the recovery time / expense / hassle seems kind of


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## Ry.Ja3 (Jul 5, 2017)

JohnG said:


> Anyone investigate something like this? It's an external drive that is advertised as waterproof and fireproof.
> 
> 
> 
> Though I do like the concept of offsite cloud storage, the recovery time / expense / hassle seems kind of




My only concern would be if you had a house fire, lightning strike, virus on one of your connected PC's, or someone broke into your house and walked off with it. What are the chances of these things happening? Probably rare, but the chance is still there. Cloud storage minimizes some of these risks.

I hear you though, the recovery time from Cloud storage would be slow & getting a loaded drive sent to you would be costly. Why not both?


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## JohnG (Jul 5, 2017)

Ry.Ja3 said:


> Why not both?



I am not too excited about cloud services for two reasons:

1. unworkably slow if you need to recover something; and

2. no way to verify whether it's really working.

Of the two, the speed issue is my biggest concern. Taking months for less than 1 TB makes the cloud recovery time unworkable for a composer with lots of data, who gets interrupted in the middle of a job. Unless you are backing up, say, a laptop, it's too slow. 

Although I have been at this a while and may have more to save than some, I don't think I'm wildly out of line. Total storage on six computers at this point has to exceed 10 TB.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jul 5, 2017)

Another option would be a fireproof box. They start at about $15 at Home Depot and spec 1/2 hour of 1500 degrees.


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## JohnG (Jul 5, 2017)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> a fireproof box



The fireproof box idea certainly couldn't be worse than "upstairs closet," my current IT solution. 

I'm thinking: 1 copy at bank or just a remote friend's house (to guard against a local wildfire), with a second local copy on one of these fire/waterproof network storage things. I wrote to ioSafe to see what they say.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jul 5, 2017)

Be sure to spin the drive up once in a while. I left a backup in my parents' basement, brought it home to update it, and it was dead.

That was one of four strikes that led to Seagate being out.


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## JohnG (Jul 5, 2017)

Good advice, Nick. I think the dual-backup solution sounds like the ticket. ioSafe will give a bit of a discount if you email / call them, and they offer free data recovery for a period of time if you order the whole thing from them.

I'm going to keep investigating, but I'm leaning this way.


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## SBK (Jul 5, 2017)

Anyone knows a backup online site,that is accepting payments with Paypal? Thanks


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## Vischebaste (Jul 5, 2017)

JohnG said:


> I am not too excited about cloud services for two reasons:
> 
> 1. unworkably slow if you need to recover something; and
> 
> 2. no way to verify whether it's really working.



With Crashplan you can get a pretty good idea as to whether it's working properly by downloading random stored files from the app once in a while. On point #1, I'm sure I read that some backup services offer to send a hard drive of the restored data for a price, although I'm not sure if Crashplan is one of those.


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## JohnG (Jul 5, 2017)

Vischebaste said:


> some backup services offer to send a hard drive of the restored data for a price



Yes that is true. It is a pretty hefty price, however. Plus, I don't want to wait for 3 months to upload Round One. It is just too slow, and the "send us a drive" that you can do is also not free.

I would rather control it myself.


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## synthpunk (Jul 5, 2017)

For backup spinner drives you can also look at dual RAID 0 drives which contain a mirrored back up internally on a separate Drive these are sold by OWC & Glyph.


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## JohnG (Jul 6, 2017)

synthpunk said:


> For backup spinner drives you can also look at dual RAID 0 drives which contain a mirrored back up internally on a separate Drive these are sold by OWC & Glyph.



I have one of those for our photos. They afford excellent first-stage backup, but if there's a fire we still would lose everything.


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## synthpunk (Jul 6, 2017)

John, if I cross the street without looking first tomorrow I'll get hit by the bus


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## SBK (Jul 6, 2017)

Hey guys anyone knows a site,that is accepting payments with Paypal, for file backup?


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## JohnG (Jul 6, 2017)

synthpunk said:


> John, if I cross the street without looking first tomorrow I'll get hit by the bus



an uncontrolled wildfire reached within a mile of my house while I was out of town. I don't want to lose what I have because I didn't have a plan.


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## synthpunk (Jul 7, 2017)

I sent out inquiries to the few of the I.T. experts that I know including one who works for CERN. So far one response was Microsoft Drive One. They mention it is as fast as your connection can be and Rock Solid. One caveat is the definitely check and research privacy issues as with anything of course. Their second alternative would be Amazon. I'll add additional responses as I get them from others.


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## JohnG (Jul 7, 2017)

Do they still take months though, unless you pay extra for some kind of expedited service? It would be great for a single computer, perhaps, but not sure it works for a full setup.


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## JohnG (Jul 7, 2017)

Amazon looks ok for small amounts of storage, but they have just changed from "all you can eat" to a 1 TB plan (or 100 GB if you don't need that much). Reading the reviews online, one immediately sees quite a few complaints about the software but that could reflect an unsophisticated user base more than the software as such -- just starting to research this so I don't know for sure.

However, bulk storage is fairly costly; both Amazon and Microsoft recently introduced a 1TB ceiling on their storage plans, which had been unlimited, according to this article:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/amazon-drive-drops-unlimited-storage-plan/

The "1 TB Amazon Digital Storage Plan" today costs $59.99 per year, about what it used to cost for unlimited storage. 

That said, backing up is not "all or nothing" and some might find a hybrid approach satisfactory. 

For example, you could decide to store only your custom documents (maybe VE Pro setups, your DAW sequence files, and notation files like Sibelius or Finale) in the cloud and use some other method to back up applications and sample libraries. This might make sense if you have a smaller setup, since applications can be re-downloaded in the event of a fire or other loss. So can sample libraries, but much more slowly of course.

I'm going to keep researching the ioSafe route for a bit.


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## synthpunk (Jul 7, 2017)

Here is what another IT guy says about Backblaze...


I, myself, use backblaze. Their uploads use to be slow, but they must have changed something in the past couple months as it is much faster now. Still, if you have 4TB of data that's still going to take you awhile for the initial seeding. What I like about backblaze is that if you have a full data loss event, they will FedEx you a 128GB usb stick or a 4TB drive depending on how much data you need. I think the 4TB drive is around $200 USD and you can either keep it or return it for a full refund. They also have implemented 2-factor authentication. They use a combination of encryption technologies that let them encrypt/decrypt at a fast rate for the volume of data they manage but is still considered very secure. https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us...-me-more-about-the-encryption-Backblaze-uses-


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## JohnG (Jul 7, 2017)

thanks!

I haven't counted Backblaze out at all as a secondary, remote layer of defence. I would love to encounter a user who's actually had to try recovering from a disaster with them.


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## dtonthept (Jul 7, 2017)

You can send crashplan physical drives to establish your archive all in one go, and have them send you a drive in the worst case scenario. You can also use them to back up to a friend's computer offsite as part of your automated backup routine, which is in effect your own cloud server, if you have an appropriate friend, and, of course, that's the place you could go with a drive to start or recover your backups.


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## JohnG (Jul 7, 2017)

To me, this comes down to three main avenues:

1. *"Joe Consumer"* -- single user with single laptop or desktop with a single drive. For this person, Crashplan or Backblaze makes sense. The interface is relatively straightforward and easy to understand (notwithstanding a fair number of negative complaints about some of them online).

2. *"Need Data Access for My Team"* -- small business, like photographer, who needs his team and clients to be able to access images from a database that is constantly being sync'd with new material. These solutions aren't backups as such -- more a total transfer of storage to cloud services that _include_ guarantees of backup.

3. *Professional composer*. For us, I haven't found a really good, automatic solution that is practical. Personally, I don't think the Backblaze / Crashplan is cost or time effective as a "main" backup, though it could be ok for backing up some files that change often. Based on my research and calls with "help" desks, to implement many of the pro backup solutions you need someone around who really knows IT. The hardware/software packages available are both fairly expensive and lack, in many cases, simple-to-understand GUIs or functionality, and the user has to know how to tweak OS for Windows and Mac in much more than a basic way to be sure of making backups that are actually going to be usable in an emergency.

Anecdotally, the "I store a backup in the trunk of my car" or in a safe deposit box is looking pretty good, at least compared with some of the pre-packaged solutions. At least you know what you have with that -- disks formatted for Windows or OS X that you can replace if something fails or is destroyed.

I'm going to keep looking though.


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## chimuelo (Jul 7, 2017)

I've been using Acronis for a while now.
Great Tools, and used the Cloud to make clone drives on a new install recently while traveling.
Worked great for me.
I've made clone drives manually for years, never once had a problem.
Guess I am biased but when something has a 100% track record I don't shop around much.

A 4TB WD External USB Drive with a bootable partition, acting as a 4 x drive array was my latest project.
If I don't have WiFi access I can build a new PC in a hotel room if need be.
No big deal, but certainly nice to know I can do it.


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## Jeremy Spencer (Jul 11, 2017)

JohnG said:


> Anecdotally, the "I store a backup in the trunk of my car" or in a safe deposit box is looking pretty good, at least compared with some of the pre-packaged solutions. At least you know what you have with that -- disks formatted for Windows or OS X that you can replace if something fails or is destroyed.
> 
> I'm going to keep looking though.



And it's the most cost effective, considering you only need to pay for the actual hard drives (and safety deposit box if it's not in your bank plan). You could store your backups this way, plus keep your current projects on something like Gobbler.


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## JohnG (Jul 12, 2017)

Hi all,

I have decided on a solution -- influenced by all the suggestions, so thank you

1. Ordered a 4-bay disk enclosure (not an NAS) with the following properties:
a. The 4 bays can be divided into two separate RAID 1 locations -- Disks 1&2 form the first RAID 1, and Disks 3&4 comprise the second.
b. The two RAIDs can be formatted differently from each other, so the first can be "standard" Mac format (for Mac backups) and the second can be NTFS, for PC Windows backups.

2. Plan to use either Time Machine or Carbon Copy Cloner to back up the two Macs; will use AOMEI to back up the PCs, though of course there are other programs that will do these functions.

3. The manufacturer wrote that all four of the disks will be readable independently. In the event of failure, however, they implied getting another, identical enclosure would be more reliable. Here is what their support wrote, specifically:

_"Yes, there will be 2 readable hard drives if you create a RAID 1 for 2 hard drives in D2-310.* ...if you pull either one hard drive, the remaining hard drive is readable and the data is complete. If the D2-310 is broken, it’s suggested to get another D2-310 to read the hard drives or a TerraMaster DAS unit."

* I am ordering their D4-310 instead of the D2, which differs in having 4 bays instead of 2.
_
In line with Nick Batzdorf's suggestion, this is a "what you see is what you get solution;" you are backing up in native format, whether Mac or Windows. This contrasts with the scenario in which your backup files are stored in a different, or (even worse) proprietary format that Windows and OS X can't read directly.

I'll also rotate a copy to a safe deposit box or some other remote location periodically in case there's a fire when everyone's away from home.

One could supplement all this with a Cloud solution for files that change frequently.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jul 12, 2017)

A long time ago I used Retrospect for backups, but I stopped using it for exactly that reason: it had a proprietary format. No thanks.


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## justinleecooper (Jul 14, 2020)

For the past year, I have been using this solution at https://spinbackup.com/products/google-apps-backup/ for my Google apps backups. It has shown tremendous efficiency in doing multiple backups and protecting my data from ransomware.


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