Carbonite backup, thumb or external drive, or how much stuff do I really have to worry about.....

[DainBramaged]

Carbonite, advertised on all of the progressive shows. $54.95 a year.


Automatically backs up all of your stuff into 'the clouds' of the Internets. Access your stuff from anywhere. But here's the thing. It takes up bandwidth and processing power. OK some of us have blazing intertubes connections, a lot of us don't. And how many times are you going to back up the same stuff? Then there's the simple question, how much stuff do you have to back up? A couple of hundred megabytes of photos, favorite music and documents? A coupe of gigabytes? A truckload of stuff like the entire comedy catalog of SNL videos from the 20th Century?

The alternatives:

CD's (700MB each); a DVD (up to a few gigabytes if your PC has a burner), A TWO gigabyte (2000 megabytes, that's a LOT of music or photos) thumbdrive is as little as $10 (and less, I've bought them for $5 on sale) at Staples, Target or Best Buy. And it's RIGHT THERE. I carry one at all times for use as a software toolbox and instant back up at work.




Then there is the HUGE 250+ gigabyte external drives out there for $59 + if you REALLY have a lot of stuff.



But that's the thing about having your stuff right there right now. NO ONE but you has access to it. Does anyone trust anyone else with your stuff nowadays? They read your email, they listen to your phone calls, do you think that maybe they won't be someday looking at YOUR stuff you store online? So, do you burn a CD or DVD, put it on a thumb drive (up to 64GB capacity available), on an external hard drive (you can buy an enclosure and use an old hard drive if you like, I've made them for friends), or do you trust your stuff to 'the clouds'?

Be well.

[gateley]

1. Thanks -- excellent info! nt

[givemebackmycountry]

Delete Dupe

[givemebackmycountry]

2. Good post

I have a 750gig external hard drive that I carry back and forth to work.
My .pst files (all my work e-mail and it's a massive amount) all my photos, music, favorites and everything else that matters is backed up every other day.

You can by a freaking 1 terabyte external hard drive for what we used to pay for a fraction of that.

Back it up baby.

[DainBramaged]

4. NEWEGG had Hitachi 1 TB drives on sale today for $64.95

That is just sick. And Velociraptor drive prices are falling too (my new favorite).

[Rex]

31. Curious, is that a big heatsink under the drive?

[DainBramaged]

35. On the velociraptors, you bet

I put fans on them too.

[AnArmyVeteran]

38. Off Topic, but we're talking gigabytes here... so

In the early-90s, I bought two 9 gig drives for my company. I paid almost a thousand dollars a gig for them. I needed them for video production. I created and ran the facility so I needed a lot of memory to edit programs. When I look at how cheap a gig is now I am amazed. You can easily get a 250 gig drive for fifty bucks. In the early 90s it would have cost a staggering $250,000! I belonged to ITVA, International Television Association, and I used to go to meetings to keep track of the latest technologies. I still remember one day in the mid-90s when a guy showed us a card about the size of a credit card, but was a little bit thicker. He said his company was developing a 25 gig drive that was that small. It seemed amazing at the time, but now you can get that much storage in the size of a dime. Simply amazing.

BTW, a typical laptop has more memory than all the computers used to send a man to the moon. I used to work for NASA and there were huge building full of tall cabinets filled with computers. Yes, vacuum tubes were even used. The leaps in technology are almost beyond belief and progress is being made at an exponential rate. Who would have even dreamed of the smart phones like the iPhone fifteen years ago, when very few people even had cell phones. A family member had a cell phone about the size of a military walkie-talkie from the Korean War in the 90s, and now they are small enough to put in your pocket.

[Forkboy]

3. I have boatloads of music to backup.

As CDs are rapidly going the way of the Dodo, I import my music into the PC constantly to back them up (I've got around 1400 CDs, about 25% of which I've got in the PC currently, and that doesn't include all my music in Itunes that was never on a CD to start with). I'm up to almost 50 gigs of just music alone, and my friend has well over double that. Forget those wimpy 250 gigabyte externals...we needed the terabyte (and at under $100 they make sense to fellow music junkies like myself who have no intention of slowing their habit). We have big plans for more music aquisitions! :)

Kind of nice having my music in one book size area instead of piles and piles and piles of CDs all over the place (Well ok, I still have those, but I'm getting there!). How could anyone survive on just 2 gigs of music?!?!? I'm pretty sure that a single song by the band Yob would use that up.

Oh, and the thumby you sent has already visited three more states! Great way to share music! Thanks!!! :D

[DainBramaged]

5. YOU are a perfect example of why cloud based storage isn't good for everyone

Just supposed they ask you for your receipts for all of that music? Where did you get it from? Are you a pilferer of music? Are YOU a criminanalll???? LOL.

[Forkboy]

7. I'd be fucked.

:rofl:

[Vickers]

10. I'm in the same boat as you...I have around 2500 CDs, and it takes up

about 370 gig, which I have backed up on 2 portable drives that are not co-located.

I started ripping all of them about a year ago when I noticed some of my older CDs (I bought my first one in late 1983) started getting pinholes in them, and I wanted to preserve what was left of them.

Should last forever...heh.

[Forkboy]

13. Yep, many of my CDs are showing wear and tear.

In some cases they were so bad that I just downloaded a new copy. And I take care of my Cds, but after 25 years some of them are pretty beat anyways.

And damn, dude, you might be the first person to match my friend in the music department. I didn't think any such creature existed! :)

[Vickers]

24. I tend to go overboard music-wise.

:P

A lot of mine were bought at used CD places and garage sales and thrift stores, so the financial damage isn't as bad as it *could* be, but still.

[Beetwasher]

39. I've Got More Than 3,000 CD's

So there! :evilgrin:

Haven't ripped 'em all yet. Hardly any in fact, just my favorite few hundred.

I worked in the music industry for many years and really didn't pay for hardly any of them...

[ejpoeta]

17. OMG! i love having all my music on my computer. No CDs to worry about scratching.

I love that I can put what I want on my ipod and don't have to listen to the music i don't like. I don't have as much as you, but I remember when my 80 gig hard drive seemed impossible to fill. Now half of it is just music and pics. The only problem i can see with an external is you can lose everything on it. my sister lost all her stuff on her external when it crapped out on her.

[Forkboy]

26. I'm getting a 2nd external sometime this summer.

I'm going to copy everything from one to the other, and then shelve it. Every few weeks I'll hook it back up and copy whatever new stuff I've gotten in the meantime and then put it away again until the next batch of tunes. My friend and I were just talking about this because he had an external full of tunes that did crap out last month. Thankfully our other friend is a PC wiz and managed to salvage it all, but lesson learned anyways. :scared:

[cbdo2007]

20. Have you ever looked into Rhapsody or a similar service?

I use to save thousands of mp3's also and had a massive collection that I would spend hours organizing and stuff...then I discovered Rhapsody and it's all there for me. For like $15 per month you can get the Rhapsody-to-go thing where you can move any of their Millions of mp3s to a portable device so you could take them anywhere.

After using Rhapsody for a few months I decided to stop backing up and keeping up with my own collection because it's all on there. If anything does happen to all my files and cds - they're all still there on Rhapsody for me to listen to any time I want. It's true that they don't have everything but they have a LOT of stuff!

[Forkboy]

25. I thought about it, but I really don't have the extra money.

Besides, I mostly listen to really oddball stuff and most of what I searched for even Rhapsody didn't have (this was awhile ago, so maybe they have more of it now, I don't know). It's a cool thing though, and if I had the funds and they had my music I'd consider it for sure. :)

[givemebackmycountry]

30. Check this out -

REPLAY MEDIA CATCHER

That's right.
What it does is capture ANYTHING that's playing or streaming.
So, I queue up a Rhapsody play-list of about 50 or 60 songs of whatever I want.
Last night, I recorded about 60 U2 songs for my IPod.

Before I go to bed, I hit the "start record" button on Replay and hit play on Rhapsody and it records every song as a MP3 file and neatly deposits it on my external drive in a special folder for my IPod shit.

Now, this is important and you will Thank Me.

Check out a site called "Wolfgang's Vault" it's a free live concert site that has quality recordings of live concerts from the 60's 70's 80's and 90's.

IT IS AMAZING WHAT THEY HAVE ON THIS SITE AND IT'S FREE.

Did you get that?

Endless concerts from the Bill Graham collection and King Biscuit Flower Power Hour most recorded directly from the engineers soundboard.

Check it out and send me a PM thanking me.

IT'S THAT GOOD.

[Posteritatis]

6. I try to keep my Absolutely Necessary stuff small

I have a decent pile of music and videos that I'd be annoyed to lose, but only annoyed, so I usually just shrug and treat them as expendable. My academic documents folders or my game meshes and textures, though? Those only total a couple of gigs and I try to back them up redundantly enough that technological civilization would have to fall before I lost them irrevocably.

I've got a thumb drive (8 gigs for $20 in 2007 - score!) for some stuff, a Dropbox account (the first two gigs is free, up to four if you jump through some hoops, and I keep the program closed when I'm not actively using one thing or another to cut down on CPU overhead) for things I use semi-regularly and intend to share around, and most of the rest is either on my webspace someplace or in my Gmail accounts. How physically close I keep it to me depends on how much I wanna be sure of it - my papers are on the thumb drive, for instance, while the game meshes are entrusted to the clouds.

Still need to get around to picking up an external drive, though. One terabyte for a hundred bucks still blows my mind.

[nadinbrzezinski]

8. I got SEVERAL backups

including several Internal Hard Drives, thumb drives and an external HD for the Mac... I do my backups almost religiously, and I still have managed to lose a few files over the years.

In my experience you will still lose some even if you are religious. That is the advantage of carbonite, but I do not feel like I have the money for yet one more layer.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

9. This can be trustworthy if (a) the desktop application is open-source, and (b) it runs in Linux. -nt

[Cronus Protagonist]

11. I have a couple of 500G external USB drives

I think they can store everything I have done and will ever do on the computer.

[cprise]

12. Many options

And it looks like you have the major ones scoped out.

I will say this about a service like Carbonite:
The process they describe (encryption before upload) is the expected 'standard' practice to keep prying eyes out of your data. You retain the key and your data should theoretically remain secure. However, as a commercial service using their own proprietary program installed on your computer, their procedures can't really be independently audited and tested for security. They are a greed-driven corporate entity that would control the security software at both endpoints (your computer and theirs), which is a recipe that is proving more and more unhealthy for people's private info these days. Even if the company is honest now, a few years and some turnover among executives and board members will probably change that for the worse.

The best way to go is to start backing up to an external HD, then start to look at how much data you have and get it nice and organized. Once your data is well organized, you can easily identify which few folders contain the most important information; these you can backup to a smaller drive (like a USB stick) and store it off-site, such as at a relative's home or safety deposit box. You can even safely store it on an Internet site (like Carbonite or other service) providing you use a widely trusted tool to encrypt the data first... such tools tend to be open source (like GPG) but there are a handful of convenient closed source programs like WinZIP that are trusted by security-minded experts. In the case of WinZIP, you can archive and encrypt your data to your backup drive in one step. So, having a complete local backup plus an offsite backup of only essentials is usually the preferred way, but to do the offsite backup backup you need to be organized and also use an encryption tool that is trustworthy (I wouldn't mind having Carbonite's software upload my data to their servers, as long as I encrypted it first with something I trust).

[Born_A_Truman]

14. I use Carbonite

I have for a couple of years. Now that it also has remote access, it was great when I was away for a week and I brought my laptop and was able to access my work files via Carbonite.

I am also going to have a flash drive backup so I'll have two backups.

[slay]

15. Terabyte external hard drives can be found for under $100

that should back up plenty - don't trust the cloud - least not if you value what's left of your privacy.

[csziggy]

16. I just had to retrieve all my data from a dying computer

Over 200 gigabytes. Granted, some is redundant - original scans of photos, edited versions of the same photos, ISO images for CDRs of the same photos, etc.

But this is not all my important data - I have stacks of CDRs with backups of photos, music, contracts, financial data, and other stuff that was not on the computer I just replaced.

I've been backing up data to CDRs for over ten years and so far the only times I have lost anything was when I attempted to use CDRWs and when burning to DVDRs - the program was not compatible with whichever (+ or -) I was using and did not warn of that incompatibility.

Frankly, I have been disappointed with data DVDRs. They hold far too much data and searching for the files takes far too long. With a slower computer, they can be a nightmare to deal with. CDRs are much more universally accessible, faster to access and easily labeled for the smaller amounts of data. Of course, if I get a higher megapixel camera, I may need to go to DVDRs to back up pictures, since even my old 6 megapixel camera's images fill up a CDR really fast.

I burn to CDRs in convenient chunks and do not worry about redundancy - I do not bother checking to see if the pictures have already been archived, I just do it again. I also go through my CDRs and copy off the data and reburn on a regular basis, usually about the time I replace a computer, so I am due now. And I need to work on off-site storage, just in case.

I am not sure I trust an external hard drive - hard drives fail and the bigger the drive, the more likely it is to have a catastrophic failure and the more likely I am to lose a massive amount of data. Flash drives might be more reliable - I don't know since I have not read up on their reliability - but they are small and easy to lose. My husband loses at least one a month.

I've thought of using my extra storage space on my website to upload data - but I do not want it accessible to the public and I am not sure how to secure it against invasion. So for now, I will keep my data on my CDRs. It has worked for over a decade and it is easy for me to do.

[Liberal In Texas]

18. Using an external HD - 1 Terabyte. 2nd back-up 500G.

Not only do you want pictures, documents and music backed up, but your programs as well. Just check out how many programs you will have to reload (click on Start > All Programs) if there is a catastrophic crash. When the inevitable hard drive failure happens, you can be back in business minutes after the hardware is fixed.

The bigger the external HD, the more room there is to move stuff around and write to it. Therefore faster. If you don't delete old backups periodically the external can fill up quickly. Even if it looks like there's still room, without enough free space the thing will take forever to write or just stop in the middle of a backup.

Also, a good program to do the backups is Acronis. Set it on a schedule for at least once a week. Some geeky folks do it every day.

Don't forget to defrag your external when you defrag the HDs on the computer.


Samsung 1 TB about $97.

[cbdo2007]

19. I just back up photos and important documents/files every few months

in two different locations on 1TB external hard drives - my house and my parents house.

I use to save music and had all my cds double backed up as well but that stuff is entirely "replaceable". I only backup the stuff that is not replaceable. If something DID happen, I would have no moral dilemma with going and downloading all my music that I lost.

[hobbit709]

21. Nothing important is stored online

Any real important is backed up on external media, usually at least two copies.
Anything Extremely important is stored in the most secure location of all-inside my skull.

[tabatha]

22. They also still advertise on Glenn Beck.

[Warpy]

23. I've done the CD backup ever since CD burners came out

However, new puters don't come with a rescue disc and if you fry your HD, as so often happens after a few years, you're screwed. Oh, they'll let you make a rescue disc of all your drivers, just don't expect the damned thing to work when you're trying to get a new HD up and running. Win 7 might be better. I'm not counting on it.

Enter the clone. Yes, you can clone your whole system onto an old HD. You can use a docker for that old HD you pulled out of a puter you junked some years ago (you DID keep the HD, right?) and if you need to get a new system up and running, just clone that back. There is all sorts of cloning software out there, let your wallet be your guide.

Then again, if you're wealthy, just back up what you need with the burner and buy a new system every time the old one fries its HD or power supply and you'll be just fine.

Those online services are a ripoff and the potential is always there for bored techs to access your stuff.

[NeedleCast]

27. I have two 1GB thumb drives on my keychain

Because I am a dork. Still nice to have resumes and other things I might need to access avaliable pretty much all the time.

[DainBramaged]

28. I use password protected SanDisk Cruzer 4GB secure drives

With Avira portable anti-virus ,

portable XoftspyXE by Pareto logic, and most of my 'tools' I use along with one for document backups.

[Grand Taurean]

29. Western Digital portable 500 GB hard drive on sale at Amazon.com for $75.

I would not let my private information be held by any stranger.

edit: Other options:

Seagate external portable 1 TB for $88
http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Expansion-Desktop-External-ST310005EXA101-RK/dp/B001UI49XA/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1271456044&sr=1-5

[ManiacJoe]

32. It depends on what you are trying to protect against.

CD/DVD and HD copies work great against hard drive failure. They can also work well against theft if they are not near your computer.

Off-site storage has the advantage of protecting against house fires and other disasters. Internet backups are one example of off-site storage. Keeping your external HD backups at work is another example.

[Ian David]

33. Carbonite sponsors Glenn Beck. n/t

[GrantDem]

34. Apple Time Machine here...

plus a 1Tb NAS.

[MattBaggins]

36. There is only one true way to back up your data.

Download programs that will let you view your data in binary, then purchase a few packs of pencils and reams of paper and get to work.

[AnArmyVeteran]

37. Carbonite is a RUSH LIMBLAH sponsor. Don't use their service. You'll be paying Rush!!!!

[TreasonousBastard]

40. I've decided that very little of what I have must...

absolutely, positively be backed up. I've got tons of stuff "just in case..." and even more "maybe I'll get around to..." and most of it is recoverable from the original sources.

Stuff of my own, or not reasonably recoverable from anywhere else is a few gigabytes, and that easily gets stuffed on a few DVDs or CDs.

Now, no one really knows just how long a homemade DVD or CD will actually last. It's a different technology from factory ones, and some have already had the strata turned to dust under some conditions. Should I need something in another 10 years from one of those, I fondly remember the backups I made on a bunch of 120MB floppies made with a drive I was apparently the only one in the world to have bought. (I shoulda got a ZIP drive-- there might be one or two still out there.)

I had a small collection of backed up stuff on 5 1/4 floppies years ago and chucked them all when the oxide started flaking off. Mighta been something important on them, or maybe not. Same thing with those little floppies-- even though I actually have a drive for them, there's a lot of oxide flakes and dust in the box they're in.

And no one has heard of a hard drive failure? Thieves, floods, and fires?

Sooo... in the grand scheme of things, cloud backup where they have lots of redundancy is probably the best of a lot of mediocre solutions for those thousands of songs that will never be listened to, movies that will never be watched, and actual important stuff. Another alternative is the commercial services that take your daily backup tapes and store them in some cave, but if you have a decent sized business you probably heard about them.

Afraid of a backdoor that some asshole up there can use to see your stuff? Encrypt it before you send it up.