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Daily cloud backup?

D

DennisMadsen

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 21, 2010
125
0
We have three Macs in this house and an Apple Time Capsule. Further our user documents and files are backed up to the cloud using SugarSync, except large libraries like iTunes, iPhoto etc. (>150GB).

I have this problem: If our Macs and the Time Capsule is stolen our iTunes and iPhoto library are gone. They were backed-up to the Time Capsule, but as it could be stolen too, they are gone.

As I see, I've to ways to go:
1) Buy more space on my SugarSync and backup all my user data to SugarSync including the large libraries.
2) Find a service which enables us to backup the content of my Time Capsule (sparsebundles) to the cloud.

The first solution was the drawback, that my sparsebundles are not backed up. This means, that I have to reinstall my new Macs instead of restoring them from the Time Capsule backup. The second solution makes it hard to restore specific files, since they are (as fas as I know) not easily available from the sparsebundles. Eg. if my iPhoto library gets corrupt and my Time Capsule is gone down, how can I restore the library from a external sparsebundle using Time Machine?

How are you guys backing-up your data to the cloud?
 
Personally, I'd rather put the security and integrity of the back up in my hands and not in some service. It does not help you if something occurs to their system and your backups go MIA.

As Miles stated there's other more secure and cost effective solutions
 
We use crashplan. We don't back up photos and movies to the cloud even though we could do it with our current crashplan. The issue is "seeding" the data to the cloud. I think Comcast would revoke my service if I uploaded 300 Gig of "stuff" to the cloud. They would probably assume I was running some kind of pirate bay or something.

Another solution I've considered is to connect a 2TB usb drive to my Mac and copy everything there once a month or so. Then take that drive to an off site location. I would have 2 of them. One would be always connected locally and get fresh copies daily. The other would be off site and I would swap them once a month or so.

I would NOT invest a penny backing up a time machine sparsebundle. I have been let down by Time Machine about a half dozen times. In fact it has worked fewer times than it has failed. One mistake I made was backing up to a Time Capsule from Mac minis which only have 802.11g. The backups would never finish properly and when I tried to restore there was nothing there but junk. A Time Capsule is fine over 802.11n or gigabit ethernet but it doesn't quite cut it over wifi. Meanwhile crashplan works fine over wifi and saved my wife's data when our Time Capsule failed hence my decision to buy a subscription.
 
i need my backups automated since i am a slacker..

also i want them off-site in case of fire theft etc...

my wife is a shutterbug and if i loose all her media and our digital family history then i would be in unthinkable hot water. 8)

here is what i choose to do to get our data to the cloud:
-setup a unlimited account with a online service. you can find these under 100 USD a year.
- placed a huge internal HD in one of my desktops that run 24/7. some online services will not allow you to use external or mapped drives.
- setup mapped/mounted drives to all mac and pc shares with our data on site using a read-only backup account setup on each machine.
- used a program to synchronize data from all back up locations to the huge internal drive.
- synchronize data on huge HD to the cloud drive
- our laptops use cloud storage that synchronizes to our desktops so they are covered too.

note: your family members or any other users have to understand what directories on the machines are backed up.

You may have to space out the initial upload to keep from getting warnings from your ISP.

i do not send music and movies to the cloud. i keep a local backup only. i really need to move them off-site manually from time to time for safe keeping.

This way i have some on-site redundancy for any HD failures etc... and i can grab this drive and go if we need to evacuate. We also have off-site data if needed.

I am sure this is not a perfect solution but this is a blue collar version of what we do with our Corporate IT infrastructure.

Would like to see more people back up thoughts for ideas.

thanks
-low
 
Sorry to bring up an old thread but I plan on purchasing sugarsync but do not know wich file to select to backup just the photos in iPhoto.
 
I back up my timemachine files once a month on an external HDD and store it in my safety deposit box. Worst case - I lose 4 weeks of data.
 
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