Cloud Storage

[Webb]

Just wondering what, if any, cloud storage/backup service you guys are using. I was using copy.com but they are discontinuing service next month.

Anyone familiar with hubic? Looks to be one of the lower priced options available with 100 GB for about $11/year or 10 TB (terabytes) for a little over $50/year. I just signed up for the free version that gives you 25 GB of cloud storage for free to test it out. Reviews seem to be pretty good but would like some feedback if anyone here is currently using it.

https://hubic.com/en/

Not to spam, but if you do sign up please use my referral code: VVGIIT -- we will both get an additional 5 GB of space.

 

[iaresee]

I've been a happy Dropbox user for going on 8 years now. Sync works great. File revisioning works great. Service works great. Cost is fine, though I went for 7 years on the free tier I had so much extra space from referrals.

I keep my Axe-Edit and AX8-Edit folders on Dropbox. And my Fractal-Bot backups. That way I've got revisioned history for any changes. Accidentally overwrite a saved blk file in Axe-Edit? No problem! Dropbox revisioned the file for me automatically and I can browse back 30 days of history. Working on my MacBook Pro instead of my iMac? No problem! All my Axe-Edit and AX8-Edit files are there and syc'ed in my ~/Dropbox folder.

My band shares rehearsal tracks and what not over Dropbox.

The wife and I coordinate household docs and whatnot over Dropbox.

My 1Password vault is sync'ed over Dropbox.

Dropbox. Dropbox. Dropbox.

It's one of my essential tools that I need on every Mac.

For long term, cold storage I use Amazon S3. Super cheap. I won't move to Glacier yet as S3 is so inexpensive it's not worth it for me. Plus the retrieval costs from Glacier scare me a bit.

If I was really paranoid I'd switch from Dropbox to SpiderOak.

 

[Sleestak]

+1 for Dropbox. I use it for file transfer (work <-> home), remote storage, online backup. If I'm on the road, and need a document, chart, or access to a sysex backup, it's super handy.

 

[Webb]

I use Dropbox as well but haven't ponied up for anything other than the free plan. But that's why hubic looks interesting. 10 times the storage for less than half the price of Dropbox.

I'm not familiar with Amazon S3 but will check that out. Thanks.

 

[iaresee]

If it seems priced too good to be true...

Always ask, how are they making money if they're not charging me (enough) for the service?

You can have unlimited storage from Amazon Cloud Drive for USD$60, which is backed by S3 (psycho-reliable block-based storage) and most definitely not doing anything with your data that might be shady. As someone who spends a lot of money on AWS services in his professional life, that would be my Dropbox alternative if I needed a lot of space on the cheap.

 

[dr bonkers]

I use Dropbox for file transfers type tasks.

I use Carbonite for HD backup. It works pretty well for file recovery when I needed it.

 

[Webb]

If it seems priced too good to be true...

Always ask, how are they making money if they're not charging me (enough) for the service?

You can have unlimited storage from Amazon Cloud Drive for USD$60, which is backed by S3 (psycho-reliable block-based storage) and most definitely not doing anything with your data that might be shady. As someone who spends a lot of money on AWS services in his professional life, that would be my Dropbox alternative if I needed a lot of space on the cheap.

Maybe so, but the reviews for Hubic seem good. Amazon Cloud looks nice for storing photos and such, but it's not really a backup solution. It's lacking file synching and automated backup. I also read that the sharing capabilities are limited.

I'll check out Carbonite. Any other suggestions?

 

[iaresee]

Maybe so, but the reviews for Hubic seem good.

They do? I don't know what you're reading but this was the top hit in a google search for "hubic review": http://www.backupreview.com/hubic-review/

Amazon Cloud looks nice for storing photos and such, but it's not really a backup solution.

hubIC isn't a backup solution. Neither is Dropbox. Or Amazon Cloud Drive. They're distributed storage.

Backup solutions never delete old backup sets and shouldn't be tied to live changes on the file system. If you're counting on Dropbox or hubIC as your disaster plan you're going to be disappointed.

If it's backup you want look at Crash Plan, Carbonite or Back Blaze.

It's lacking file synching and automated backup. I also read that the sharing capabilities are limited.

I'm not sure what you're talking about when you say "it's lacking fily synching" -- it does replicated file sync the same as Dropbox and hubIC do from machine to machine. No comment on "sharing capabilities" though as I don't any experience with its UI. I'd be surprised if it was limited though given it's backed by S3 which is fantastically flexible for sharing access to objects.

I'll check out Carbonite. Any other suggestions?

Carbonite is for backups. Like Back Blaze and CrashPlan. It's not a distributed storage. You don't use these in realtime. They operate in the background. Retrieving data is slow. They're not meant as a way to synchronize data on multiple machines. Just to protect in the event of data loss.

 

[Sleestak]

To clarify : I use Dropbox for storage / transfer. I always keep my sysex backups there because I can access them from anywhere via internet. For backup I use CrashPlan. Everything (multitrack studio projects, all documents, photographs, etc), on my 16TB RAID NAS is continuously backed up to CrashPlan.

As Ian pointed out, they're different services, and have significant differences in performance. Dropbox is super fast, and great for sharing files. CrashPlan is exactly what it sounds like. In the event Godzilla stomps my house, I can still recover my stored files from CrashPlan, but it's a slower process.

 

[jefferski]

So what would be the difference between Carbonite and CrashPlan? Carbonite would be a couple thousand bucks a year for 2TB of storage and has various levels involved if you even just want to back up from an external HD (who doesn't use them nowadays?); CrashPlan is about $60 for one computer, or $150 for the whole house.

I'm looking for somewhere online to store my multitrax, Final Cut video projects, docs, etc. We use Dropbox/GDrive for sharing business projects (generally documents, photos, and rendered videos) and I agree those really aren't adequate backup/storage solutions. Does Carbonite offer something that's worth that much more?

 

[ps43203]

With the price of storage these days I would just buy an external drive. I don't like the cloud thing. My reason being is that anything you put in the cloud, could potentially be harvested by the owner. Read the fine print for sure. I would stick to keeping it at home, if you know what i mean, unless you need to have access to the data on the fly. Plus it so damn SLOW, a TB drive next to your machine is so much faster, more reliable.

 

[iaresee]

So what would be the difference between Carbonite and CrashPlan? Carbonite would be a couple thousand bucks a year for 2TB of storage and has various levels involved if you even just want to back up from an external HD (who doesn't use them nowadays?); CrashPlan is about $60 for one computer, or $150 for the whole house.

My opinion: BackBlaze or CrashPlan. Those are the incumbents. Carbonite is kind of second-tier. Their pricing is a bit sucky for >1 computer and their OS X support is meh.

I've used CrashPlan and have for 5 years now. We've bought 3-year family plans twice now and it works out to $100/year for up to 10 machines. Currently backing up 8 machines with the plan.

I would switch to BackBlaze but re-seeding all the backups from all the machines (we have the family plan on CrashPlan so we've got 8 computers backed up to it) would be time-prohibitive. So, think long term when you invest in these solutions.

My major gripe with CrashPlan revolves around a feature request I filed four years ago (which has been piled on by a ton of people as please-implement) to get schedule-based throttling implemented. They've just sat on the request, radio-silence from them. The java-based CrashPlan client has been bug free for years now though and that's really what you want in a backup service: quiet, steady, reliable. BackBlaze has a slightly better feature set now that's enticing, but not enough to make me abandon my years of backup sets in CrashPlan to switch at this point.

I'm looking for somewhere online to store my multitrax, Final Cut video projects, docs, etc. We use Dropbox/GDrive for sharing business projects (generally documents, photos, and rendered videos) and I agree those really aren't adequate backup/storage solutions. Does Carbonite offer something that's worth that much more?

I do Logic projects and iMovie projects to CrashPlan without any problems FWIW. 10s of thousands of M4A tracks. I backup internal hard drives and external hard drives with it. Everything goes to CrashPlan. Once the initial seed is done, keeping data sets backed up is really not too bad.

For local backup I still use Time Machine. That'll give me quick recovery of accidents. CrashPlan is for my-house-burnt-down. Or someone-stole-all-my-computers scenarios. Disasters.

 

[iaresee]

With the price of storage these days I would just buy an external drive. I don't like the cloud thing. My reason being is that anything you put in the cloud, could potentially be harvested by the owner. Read the fine print for sure. I would stick to keeping it at home, if you know what i mean, unless you need to have access to the data on the fly. Plus it so damn SLOW, a TB drive next to your machine is so much faster, more reliable.

This is terrible advice. You have a fundamental misunderstanding of the value of offsite backups for your data. They work in addition to local backups, not instead of. Your privacy concerns are unfounded.

 

[Webb]

They do? I don't know what you're reading but this was the top hit in a google search for "hubic review": http://www.backupreview.com/hubic-review/

I'm not exactly sure why you're getting defensive. Trust me, I'm not a shill for hubiC...I only just heard about them today. But anyway, here are a couple of the reviews I read that seemed fairly positive.

http://www.technorms.com/38881/hubic-beats-dropbox-in-storage-space-privacy-and-pricing

http://www.thecloudreviews.net/2014/08/hubic-cloud-storage-for-beginners.html

hubIC isn't a backup solution. Neither is Dropbox. Or Amazon Cloud Drive. They're distributed storage.

Backup solutions never delete old backup sets and shouldn't be tied to live changes on the file system. If you're counting on Dropbox or hubIC as your disaster plan you're going to be disappointed.

If it's backup you want look at Crash Plan, Carbonite or Back Blaze.

Again, I'm no expert on the topic but was going off something taken from the link you posted -

"Like Dropbox, the software will install a file folder on your computer that will download your cloud files, upload new ones, and sync changes in that folder. You can choose which folders in your hubiC cloud get synced either in the original configuration or in the software settings.

However, it also includes a “Create a Backup” feature that lets you backup any folder in your computer to your hubiC drive with a right click option or via the software. You can configure the software to update the backups automatically, never update them, and even keep multiple backup versions. hubiC also supports network locations, so you can back up NAS devices."

Maybe my definition of backup is different than yours but that says to me that it can be used to create a backup.

I'm not sure what you're talking about when you say "it's lacking fily synching" -- it does replicated file sync the same as Dropbox and hubIC do from machine to machine. No comment on "sharing capabilities" though as I don't any experience with its UI. I'd be surprised if it was limited though given it's backed by S3 which is fantastically flexible for sharing access to objects.

Carbonite is for backups. Like Back Blaze and CrashPlan. It's not a distributed storage. You don't use these in realtime. They operate in the background. Retrieving data is slow. They're not meant as a way to synchronize data on multiple machines. Just to protect in the event of data loss.

I'm not sure what I'm talking about either Since I'm unfamiliar with all the above options, a quick search for Amazon Cloud brought up the following:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2382825,00.asp

"But Amazon Cloud Drive is supposed to do more, and the problem is it doesn't—at least not nearly as well as many other cloud-based backup and storage solutions. It doesn't offer file-syncing, for example, so forget about having on-device access to the latest version of all your documents and images. Nor does it offer automated backup. Cloud Drive has limited sharing capabilities, no collaboration features, and a desktop application that's fairly worthless."

 

[chris]

Dropbox is the way to go for file storage/sharing. Copy was always glitchy and I actually lost files using their service. I knew 15GB free was too good to be true as a solid service. Dropbox's $100 a year for 1TB is a great price for basically 99.9% reliability - I've actually experienced 100% over the years. I even use it as a backup for my laptops, granted I keep them pretty lean anyway. (On Mac, create symbolic links for your Desktop, Downloads, etc. folders and bam, instant backup and accessible from your main comp or whatever you choose to sync.) I also pay the additional $39 for unlimited versions and deleted file history - this is basically a full backup system. I've probably tried most of the major players - Copy, Box, SugarSync, etc - and Dropbox just comes out on top every time.

For cloud backup, I prefer BackBlaze. It just works and the price is right. They are at the forefront of data storage; check out their blog sometime. I pay for only 1 computer, because Dropbox is "backing up" my laptops as mentioned above, and then BackBlaze backs up my main comp Dropbox with the other comp data in it.

The advantage of the Cloud backup vs a local hard drive backup is that if your devices get physically affected - stolen, broken, damaged - you can't restore from said devices. You can however log into any computer anywhere and restore your files by download, or BackBlaze will send you a physical disk for different pricing depending on your needs.

Local backups let you access data faster and without the internet, but it's almost more of a pain than necessary these days. It's less likely for you to need that local backup than (in my case) 2 online services to lose my data somehow, or for me to completely lose Internet access.

Oh I also got a free trial to Amazon Cloud backup or whatever. I don't like it granted my workflow is already in Dropbox. But Dropbox has way more integration with other services than any other platform. I think Box comes closest, but it's because it's the "Dropbox" for businesses. That said, I did try Dropbox's business service and it was amazing. Additional Admin panel control, stats, etc. but too expensive for my small team. If I had a bigger team and more data usage, I'd choose Dropbox for Business.

 

[iaresee]

I'm not exactly sure why you're getting defensive. Trust me, I'm not a shill for hubiC...I only just heard about them today. But anyway, here are a couple of the reviews I read that seemed fairly positive.

http://www.technorms.com/38881/hubic-beats-dropbox-in-storage-space-privacy-and-pricing

http://www.thecloudreviews.net/2014/08/hubic-cloud-storage-for-beginners.html

Sorry, I didn't mean to come off as defensive. I just hadn't read anything particularly awesome about hubIC. Not bad either. Just middle-of-road. You don't sound like a shill at all. I'm typing fast, at work, so I'm probably being too terse. Didn't mean to be a dick and was genuinely curious about anything that's better than Dropbox (which has flaws of its own I'm not too fond of).

However, it also includes a “Create a Backup” feature that lets you backup any folder in your computer to your hubiC drive with a right click option or via the software. You can configure the software to update the backups automatically, never update them, and even keep multiple backup versions. hubiC also supports network locations, so you can back up NAS devices."

Maybe my definition of backup is different than yours but that says to me that it can be used to create a backup.

Yea, that's sort of a cross between Dropbox and CrashPlan/BackBlaze/Carbonite. Interesting.

"But Amazon Cloud Drive is supposed to do more, and the problem is it doesn't—at least not nearly as well as many other cloud-based backup and storage solutions. It doesn't offer file-syncing, for example, so forget about having on-device access to the latest version of all your documents and images. Nor does it offer automated backup. Cloud Drive has limited sharing capabilities, no collaboration features, and a desktop application that's fairly worthless."

Ah. Well, one thing about Amazon: they iterate fast. That article coming up on 12 months old now. Might be worth a try if you have Amazon Prime already as you get some free space.[/QUOTE]

 

[Sleestak]

With the price of storage these days I would just buy an external drive.

I agree with you on this point. Local storage is fastest and cheapest. I have a pretty fast 4 drive Synology NAS in RAID 5 configuration, and for local storage it's fantastic.

My reason being is that anything you put in the cloud, could potentially be harvested by the owner.

On this point, it depends on the service. CrashPlan encrypts the backup data with either Blowfish or AES 448-bit encryption before it is uploaded, and then all upload packages are re-encrypted at 128-bit for transmission.

For what it's worth, I don't bother encrypting my local files on the NAS , or on my machines. The only exception to that rule is sensitive personally identifying data, such as high-resolution scans of my social security card, driver's license, credit cards, and passport. I recommend scanning those documents, appropriately encrypting the files, and putting them on a file service such as Dropbox. If you ever need your documents due to loss or theft, it's super handy to have them available via the internet.

 

[Tahoebrian5]

I use iDrive purely for back up of my work files. 5GB free. Works pretty well and easy to view and grab your backed up files.

 

[fox5150]

I've used Dropbox for years and upgraded to their Pro plan pretty much as soon as they offered it to me. I also pay for the file edits history option too. For stuff I'd be heartbroken to lose (family pictures and the like) I have copies on a local NAS and on an external drive that I keep at my in-laws.

The thing that gets overlooked about Dropbox is its integration options. Pretty much every app vendor supports Dropbox and that's a big thumbs up from me. It also just works. I've got my entire 'My Documents' folder set as the Dropbox folder and off there is every piece of data I need access to. The initial sync took a while, but it's seamless now.

Its integration with 1Password is another big thing for me as it allows for my security information to be replicated across multiple devices, independent of the OS, providing there's a 1Password client of course.

There's a reason they're the market leader...

 

[ps43203]

This is terrible advice. You have a fundamental misunderstanding of the value of offsite backups for your data. They work in addition to local backups, not instead of. Your privacy concerns are unfounded.

I wouldn't say terrible advice, just something to think about. I have been doing this crap for 25 years. I do not have a fundamental misunderstanding of the service, I mean really? Privacy concerns unfounded? You must not have heard about the icloud breach, or similar incidents. Cloud storage is a hackers playground dude.