Tips to expedite backing up online?

[m021478]

I've tried a number of different online backup services, and I've wound up choosing CrashPlan as my choice service.

What I'd like to know is if anyone had any tips to expedite the process of backing up my files online to CrashPlan?

I know CrashPlan offers the ability to seed your initial backup for a fee (http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/feature/seed_service), but they limit this service to 1TB. I have several Terabytes of data that I'd like to be backed up online, and my cable modem provides me with a max upload speed of a mere 120KB/s, which means that it could take a year or more to backup my files on CrashPlan if I tried doing so using my own broadband connection.

I wanted to know if anyone knew of a service out there that would somehow allow me to use their super fast upload connection to expedite the process of backing up my files to CrashPlan. Maybe a service that would allow me to send them a drive which they could then hook up to a remote-controllable server computer which has a dedicated T1 connection, or something of the like...

Perhaps someone knows of some other way of moving mass amounts of my data to I haven't considered (aside from going out and signing up for my own T1 connection... and FIOS isn't available to me).

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated... Thanks!

 

[Patrick J]

Since you are kind of a special case, you could send them an email and ask them for special conditions.

 

[miles01110]

Seems like you should look into choosing another backup plan. For that amount of data and only 120 KB/s up, it's going to be very difficult to find one that is practical on the upload speed.

If you're wanting to mail them drives, why don't you just get your own RAID array or something?

 

[velocityg4]

Seems like you should look into choosing another backup plan. For that amount of data and only 120 KB/s up, it's going to be very difficult to find one that is practical on the upload speed.

If you're wanting to mail them drives, why don't you just get your own RAID array or something?

Not only that downloading would take quite a long time as well.

In your situation I would do backups to hard drives, as well. Perhaps getting two Lacie 5big's. They are NAS devices so you can connect them over your network they are also Time Machine compatible. I suggest two for you to rotate the backups with one stored in a fireproof safe or off site.

Though they are NAS the 5big can also work as an external hard drive if desired. They also make the mildly cheaper and smaller 4big Quadra which lacks the NAS functionality, and carries fewer drives.

 

[zhenya]

Yeah, while online backups are becoming a great option for home users, they are still practically limited to a few hundred gigabytes for most people limited in upload speed like you are. I would recommend you create a good local backup plan for all of your data, and then use the online service to back up only the most critical data. This is what I do, backing up a full TB to a local disk at home, and backing up only ~100GB online of documents, photos, music, etc.

 

[m021478]

I do backup locally as well to multiple sets of hard drives (one stored locally, and one stored off site)... and I am using a DroboPro with 9GB of storage as the primary storage device for all of my data, but I wanted to add in the online backup option as another level of redundancy because it's so affordable, and because it seems all signs keep pointing me to do so (for example, carbonite now offers an iPhone app to access files you have backed up online from you iPhone, and I imagine other companies will soon offer similar services; and Google is now setting it's sights on FIOS by testing ultra high-speed Fiber connections)...

I figured I might as well get started by backing up online now, because I don't really have anything to lose in doing so!

 

[flynz4]

I do backup locally as well to multiple sets of hard drives (one stored locally, and one stored off site)... and I am using a DroboPro with 9GB of storage as the primary storage device for all of my data, but I wanted to add in the online backup option as another level of redundancy because it's so affordable, and because it seems all signs keep pointing me to do so (for example, carbonite now offers an iPhone app to access files you have backed up online from you iPhone, and I imagine other companies will soon offer similar services; and Google is now setting it's sights on FIOS by testing ultra high-speed Fiber connections)...

I figured I might as well get started by backing up online now, because I don't really have anything to lose in doing so!

I am using crashplan, but my total backup size is just under 500GB. It took a bit over a month to get it all uploaded.

I think you need to think of priorities. My analysis was:

Importance:
1) Photos
2) Home camcorder movies (I have not digitized these yet)
3) Documents
4) Music
5) Videos

Size:
1) Documents
2) Photos
3) Music
4) Videos

What I did was correlate the two lists above and decided on:

1) Documents (1 day)
2) Photos (1 week)
3) Music (1 month)

For videos... I decided NOT to back them up externally. They just are not that important to me. However, after the above backup was done... I have been backing up just the h.264 versions of my movies... just so that I can get them back quickly without transcoding all over again. Those are what I view regularly. I generally do not use the "full versions".

Personally... in your case I would use the HDD option that Crashplan offers. They claim that you can get about 1.5TB after compression onto the drive. I would backup using a priority scheme that works for you. Then I would consider backing up the lower priority items over time... or simply archiving them off-site on a cheap USB HDD.

One final recommendation. Make sure you use Crashplan+ (not Crashplan). You should want the 448b encryption.

/Jim