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Who has ditched local backups?

fridgeymonster3

fridgeymonster3

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 28, 2008
493
14
Philadelphia
I was wondering who here has ditched local backups completely in favor of cloud storage? I've always had local and cloud backup since it's inception, but now I'm considering just ditching the local backups. I was thinking of transitioning to Crashplan. I know use backblaze but have heard crashplan is better.

For those who have gone to cloud only, any regrets?
 
Have you needed to restore a whole system with, say, 250GB of data yet?

My experience is that I want a local backup of my working machines so I can quickly recover from a data loss, whether that's caused by a broken machine, bad drive, or accident. Cloud backup only is fine for things which I can be without for a few days while getting things restored.

Services which will ship you a hard drive overnight with your data can help, but that's still more downtime than I like.

(I have had occasion to restore machines from local backups and lots of data from cloud backups.)
 
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Before you decide, you might want to verify the cost and time to restore all of your data. That's where people usually get bitten, and it's not a situation I would want to find myself in (pay a potentially exhorbitant rate to restore, or kiss my data good-bye.)
 
AlanShutko said:
Have you needed to restore a whole system with, say, 250GB of data yet?

My experience is that I want a local backup of my working machines so I can quickly recover from a data loss, whether that's caused by a broken machine, bad drive, or accident. Cloud backup only is fine for things which I can be without for a few days while getting things restored.

Services which will ship you a hard drive overnight with your data can help, but that's still more downtime than I like.

(I have had occasion to restore machines from local backups and lots of data from cloud backups.)
Click to expand...


Well this is for a home computer that I use for personal use only. Neither my wife nor I use it for work because we have work computers. This is one of the reasons I was thinking of ditching local backups. I have important media but don't need it immediately upon failure.

I always have a clone of my boot drive so not too worried about the failing and not being able to recover.

I have 5 x 4TB drives and I'm thinking of consolidating into two 8 TB drives and then using cloud backup for that.
 
fridgeymonster3 said:
I was wondering who here has ditched local backups completely in favor of cloud storage? I've always had local and cloud backup since it's inception, but now I'm considering just ditching the local backups. I was thinking of transitioning to Crashplan. I know use backblaze but have heard crashplan is better.

For those who have gone to cloud only, any regrets?
Click to expand...

Not a chance! No way in hell I'm trusting my valuable information (photos & documents) to a "cloud." Granted, I'm only a lowly writer and don't have gigabytes of information to store. But what I do have, I backup locally to external hard drives. They're inexpensive, always accessible, and for my eyes only. Call me old fashioned, but I've never had a problem with my method of backup. Kind of like Apple: It just works!
 
lambertjohn said:
Not a chance! No way in hell I'm trusting my valuable information (photos & documents) to a "cloud." Granted, I'm only a lowly writer and don't have gigabytes of information to store. But what I do have, I backup locally to external hard drives. They're inexpensive, always accessible, and for my eyes only. Call me old fashioned, but I've never had a problem with my method of backup. Kind of like Apple: It just works!
Click to expand...

But if you don't have off-site or cloud backups, if a disaster occurs at your location won't you lose it all? I'm care more about losing my stuff rather than someone seeing my stuff. Everything important I have is already put in an encrypted disk image before being backed up.
 
I also used to use Crashplan, but have recently switched to using Arq Backup to backup user profile contents: https://www.arqbackup.com/

The Arq backups are encrypted by the key you set, so wherever you store the backups, they're encrypted at rest.

I use it to write to my Unlimited Amazon Cloud Drive ($60/year): https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/home

I do a time machine backup to my Synology NAS as well for local backups.

So local for fast/complete recovery.

Cloud for disaster recovery of the most important content. Some things like irreplaceable photos, I copy to other places as well.

"Sh*t happens", might as well cover my butt.
 
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fridgeymonster3 said:
But if you don't have off-site or cloud backups, if a disaster occurs at your location won't you lose it all? I'm care more about losing my stuff rather than someone seeing my stuff. Everything important I have is already put in an encrypted disk image before being backed up.
Click to expand...

I'll take my chances at home rather than trusting some off-site site company and their team of morally upstanding employees. But that's just me. My opinion doesn't necessarily mean it's the right one for you. For every "me" there's someone on the other side who loves off-site data storage. So take my comments as an opinion and nothing else. Do what's best for your situation.

Edit: Go to Harbor Freight and get a fireproof safe. Problem solved.
 
I don't see myself ever eliminating local backups. I learned my lesson after a drive failure in the middle of an enormous time-sensitive photography project ended up costing me over $1K in specialized recovery services.
 
lambertjohn said:
I'll take my chances at home rather than trusting some off-site site company and their team of morally upstanding employees. But that's just me. My opinion doesn't necessarily mean it's the right one for you. For every "me" there's someone on the other side who loves off-site data storage. So take my comments as an opinion and nothing else. Do what's best for your situation.

Edit: Go to Harbor Freight and get a fireproof safe. Problem solved.
Click to expand...


I used to have an external hard drive that I kept in a bank safety deposit box, but I've become lazy and don't like making the trip...usually because I forgot.

I might need to look into a safe anyways and I guess I could just stick an external HDD in there.
 
Multiple backups.
/thread

Ok, not ended yet --

Fun fact: The US Marine Band in Washington, DC, maintains a library of all the music they play. All of it, going back to John Philip Sousa and earlier. They scan all of the sheet music into electronic form, too.

They also maintain an identical library in Chicago just in case anything happens to the DC site.

So, for myself, I do local backups of the entire system, and I have my Documents folder backed up in iCloud. I'm much less worried about photos and movies.
 
You're removing one of your failsafes. It depends on how much you value this stuff and how redundant you want to be. I personally have raid at home and do the safe deposit thing twice a year or so. Adding a cloud would pretty much guarantee the data. However, any one (or two) of the 3 can be lost depending on how much you subscribe to SHTF or other disaster scenarios. I'm rolling the dice a little by not having full cloud backup, but I'll take the chances with the added benefit that my data is not "out there" somewhere. So it's just about how safe you want to be. 2 out 3 is good for me. Sounds like you are also planning on 2 out 3, just a different way.
 
I don't know a single cloud backup solution so far that would offer zero-knowledge encryption and correct handling of extended OS X metadata. Without that, cold bs jump is of only limited use to me.
 
The cybergods hate those who do not have redundant backups, both onsite and offsite. I will *never* give up the option of local backups lest I risk their wrath. Seriously, it doesn't take that much time or money to keep a regular local backup in addition to the easy cloud method. In fact, I even make sure once or year or so to do a massive DVD burning project so I have copies of my files in a format that wouldn't be destroyed by a hypothetical EM pulse, the way unhardened external drives might. I even splurge on the gold-plate DVDs, since those probably will last for centuries rather than decades.
 
BarracksSi said:
...

So, for myself, I do local backups of the entire system, and I have my Documents folder backed up in iCloud. I'm much less worried about photos and movies.
Click to expand...

Pretty much the same - Local for the entire system(s). Google (encrypted) for critical documents and other data.
I don't use iCloud after they mangled my backup twice.
 
A system recovery that takes hour to do a recovery from a locally attached disk will take days with a cloud based solution.

You definitely don't want to do the recovery over wireless internet.

Cloud based ones as a last resort failsafe for system backup. Can be convenient if away from home/office base to recover just a few files.
 
I keep my data local, I don't feel waiting a long time for my data to be downloaded from the net.
 
I used local only because at work I need to be able to back up 10-20 gigs quickly, so that takes about 1 minute or 2. Cloud would take awhile but I think everyone should have a core critical cloud back up once in a while.

I have a Mac where I can replace the SSD blade. So one of my local backup is actually a formatted OS Home drive, not a time machine drive, and I manually put critical data on there, so if my drive ever dies, I can pop in the drive and my Mac is back up in running only physical installation time required, or if you don't have the time boot into via usb 3. I really really love this aspect of Mac.

Huge life saver if you work on time sensitive projects or don't want to deal with the whole recovery, download, and installation of OS and apps.
 
Redundancy is key.

No reason back up any OS or complete drive. If I have to replace hardware I always go back with
fresh installs. Crazy to use a failed copy.

Arq for encryption. I have the keys! Encrypted before it leaves me.

Local - but on the table to go.

Offsite:
AWS S3
Google Nearline
Neither has a delayed restore. Fast too. At multiple different geo locations, west, central and east. Redundancy!

If a loss/failure of most or all offsite locations, I have more to worry about than backups!
 
Weaselboy said:
https://www.arqbackup.com

Arq does.
Click to expand...

Ah, yes, I remember looking into it some time ago. In the end, I didn't use it because they don't offer a full solution (you need to use storage space somewhere else). It just feels weird to me using Dropbox or friends as a backup destination (doesn't it violate the EULA of most of these services btw?) and Amazon Glacier its just too expensive if you actually need to restore...
 
leman said:
Ah, yes, I remember looking into it some time ago. In the end, I didn't use it because they don't offer a full solution (you need to use storage space somewhere else). It just feels weird to me using Dropbox or friends as a backup destination (doesn't it violate the EULA of most of these services btw?) and Amazon Glacier its just too expensive if you actually need to restore...
Click to expand...
What do you mean by full solution? Arq by default only backs up the users folders... is that what you meant? I think the idea is in the event of a catastrophe you would reinstall the OS and apps locally then just pull your personal data back down using Arq.

I see your comment in parentheses about "somewhere else"... Arq was designed chiefly as an online backup tool, but it can also backup to a local drive if that is what you prefer.

Arq now works with Amazon Cloud Drive and is unlimited for $60 a year, so that might work for you. That support is fairly new, so might not have been available when you last looked at Arq.

https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/home/
 
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