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Off-site backups.. Any suggestions?

lindsayanng

lindsayanng

macrumors 68000
Original poster
May 4, 2008
1,515
1
East Haven, CT
I run/own a photography business> We offer life time archival of all of the wedding photos that we shoot. We have a terabyte hard drive, but I REALLY want to get these pictures off site into a storage system/company..

I know this "technically" isnt a peripheral, but in a way it is.. MOST of the back programs are mac or PC specific..

SO i looked into carbonite, and they are great, but I would like something where you can store it on their servers and then delete it from your computer so that i can free up space here at home, but if i need to get to it, i can just log in to my account and get it from the off site server..

The ONLY thing i can find right now is carbonite or mozyonline. Both do the same thing, they dont let you delete a folder form your computer.

so ANY suggestions are greatly appreciated.
 
lindsayanng said:
I run/own a photography business> We offer life time archival of all of the wedding photos that we shoot. We have a terabyte hard drive, but I REALLY want to get these pictures off site into a storage system/company..

I know this "technically" isnt a peripheral, but in a way it is.. MOST of the back programs are mac or PC specific..

SO i looked into carbonite, and they are great, but I would like something where you can store it on their servers and then delete it from your computer so that i can free up space here at home, but if i need to get to it, i can just log in to my account and get it from the off site server..

The ONLY thing i can find right now is carbonite or mozyonline. Both do the same thing, they dont let you delete a folder form your computer.

so ANY suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Click to expand...

Try looking through here

After looking through at some of them on the search, off site on-line backups are slower than heck, than again that would depend on what your ISP's speeds are also.
 
I saw this product recently and was intrigued:

http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/01/28/box.2.box.storage.device/

I would do my initial backup onsite and then move off-site and do the mirroring over the Internet. Not sure exactly how it would work though and it comes in at about $900-$1000. Still, it supposed to give you mirrored backup of your local backup, so you are leveraging the network instead of the hassle of disconnecting things and moving hard drives about town.

At the moment, they say that Time Machine doesn't work, but you are talking about backup of working files, so maybe just highlight the Documents folder and let it go. Ideally, they will get Time Machine running. But in the meantime you can still mirror data directories, which is most critical.
 
wow.. I never THOUGHT of typing off site backup into GOOGLE!! youre a freaking genius!

My issue is i can not seem to find something with a LOT or unlimited storage that isnt a "system backup" because when you have a system backup, if you delete the folder off your computer, you delete it from the backup.. I dont want that.> i want it more of an archiving/storage/

No to mention i was looking for people with experience with one or another.. someone who has actually used it.

the Box2Box thing looks promising.. its just like running your own server.. BUT its pricey, and I was looking for more of a simple solutions.. but if this is the ONLY thing, well.. then it is/
 
I use Recall and Sungard's offsite storage services.

Recall is quite reasonable for physical media rotation and secure storage - their DPS service - at least in the London area. i.e. you control your own archiving, they simply move tapes/disks to/from their storage facilities. A man turns up with a barcode/RFID scanner, you give him the barcoded/RFID'd media, he sticks it in storage. When you need it, you ask for the appropriate media and he brings it back. It's only a couple of thousand a year for very regular rotations (less for less frequent rotations) and stuff like my original music library is held in storage with Recall.

http://www.recall.com/Recall/US/EN/Home/Our_Services/Data_Prt_Svc/


Sungard's online storage / recovery facilities work for us, but will be definitely out of your league pricewise for a typical small business.
 
lindsayanng said:
I run/own a photography business> We offer life time archival of all of the wedding photos that we shoot. We have a terabyte hard drive, but I REALLY want to get these pictures off site into a storage system/company..

I know this "technically" isnt a peripheral, but in a way it is.. MOST of the back programs are mac or PC specific..

SO i looked into carbonite, and they are great, but I would like something where you can store it on their servers and then delete it from your computer so that i can free up space here at home, but if i need to get to it, i can just log in to my account and get it from the off site server..

The ONLY thing i can find right now is carbonite or mozyonline. Both do the same thing, they dont let you delete a folder form your computer.

so ANY suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Click to expand...

Do you need the backup to be instantly available? I would think that you could do with offsite storage of a backup drive or DVDs. How about a safe deposit box?
 
seshi.. that just sounds like too much work for me..

The reason i was looking for internet options was because I would like to have it accessable at any time.. We do have a fire proof data storage lock box that is safe in case of a fire.. but i really would LIKE to have a place on the internet to store LARGE files in an archived manner.. but NOT something that is an automatic backup think.. Because i dont want any changes on my personal computer to change what is on the internet..

I am thinking that my best bet is going with a websiite hosting package that gives me internet storage and just NOT using it for the internet.. I can JUST use it for archiving images.
 
THAT looks like the right thing.. maybe i was googling the wrong idea. Maybe i should google online network drive to see whats out there.. That is basically a harddrive that lets me connect to it wirelessly that is stored in a secure place.

I just want to find out how easy it is to pull them off of the drive, make changes, and trhen put them back up there..

THANKS
 
Just use S3, you don't need Jungle disk, there are free alternatives. The only bad thing is you're going to be paying $0.15/GB/month forever for their photos. Doesn't sound like much but an average photoshoot can be gigs of space so lets say 5GB per user(not much if you're saving raw) that's $9/year for what, 10, 20, 50 years? Now multiple that by how many clients you will have in 10 years.

I would think the best option would be dual-layer dvds. Burn the images and ship them off to a box someplace. Keep one copy locally.
 
It sounds like you're not looking for a backup solution... In fact, you mentioned you want to move something to a remote location and then delete that file off of your system. By definition, that is not a backup. There is no backup. The only copy of the file is on the remote disk.

If you're looking for true remote backup, I do use Mozy. I just signed up a couple weeks ago. My criticism is that the first backup is VERY slow. Now, it doesn't really matter as it can resume at any time so you just let the process run while you go about your life. But that's my criticism. The rest has been great!

If you're just looking for a place to store your files, companies like xdrive exist. Amazon S3 is a good pay-as-you-go approach as well.
 
There is rumors going around that Google is going to be releasing a GDrive here soon that will most likely mount like a removable disk. I am sure the will support Windows only for a month before a mac client comes out or do it right and release a Windows/Mac(/Linux) solution out of the gate.
 
I have been using carbonite beta for the past week or so.. seems like its taking FOREVER to upload my computer... But like i said, the issues witht hose is that I cant put something there, and then delete it from my computer.. So that is not EXACTLY what i want, AND the fact that you cant use external harddrives is a HUGE issue.. We have 1 TB harddrive that has MOST of the information/photos on it.. and THAT is what I am most concerned about..
 
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