Offsite Cloud Backup? Anyone do that? What do you use?

[AaronH]

Hey everyone, I've been trying to figure out our offsite backup solution for a bit now and I've kinda run out of ideas. We were using Crashplan Pro through our external IT Company which seems to have dissolved and it was no longer working so we stopped using it and can no longer sign in. Crashplan wasn't really working to begin with, and wouldn't back things up as it should have. I'm sure the IT guy didn't set it up properly, there are a whole host of questions I have as to why things were set up the way they were, but that's a different topic all together. Anywho, fast forward a few months we try Microsoft One Drive for Business, turns out they don't support cloud backups from the LaCie NAS OS on our two LaCie 5Big NAS boxes so they nicely let us cancel and refunded our money.

I've attached a little infographic I made this morning showing what we currently have setup. Basically, our working files are on the lower NAS box, which every day at 6pm gets mirrored to the NAS box on top. Everything in our shop is connected through the Netgear Network Switch and connects out to the world through our Comcast Business router/modem.

For lasting backups, we burn a whole month's worth of files to BlueRay discs and keep on a shelf here locally, two local external hard drives and once those get filled up, we move them offsite to the owner's house. Our two iMac workstations are backed up via Time Machine to local external hard drives as well incase something goes wrong there.

Now if something catastrophic happened at we lost both NAS drives, we'd be out of all current files so I've been trying to figure out a better solution. From what I gather, crash plan might work if setup to validate the backup on a weekly basis; I believe it was set to validate every day and validating 5TB of files every day prevented the backup from actually happening. Unfortunately crash plan has to run on my iMac which means it has to be on at all times for the backup to function as far as I know.

So my question for you guys is what do you guys use for offsite. I'm trying to keep this super budget friendly, crash plan looks like it will be $10 a computer. For 5TB of data and then some as I'd like to keep everything not just a mirror Amazon S3 looks expensive but it'd be nice to see what everyone is doing.

Thanks guys!

[Joe]

We use Amazon S3 and it is actually quite affordable for what we do. I can't even estimate how many GB of data we have on there and our last monthly bill was for $9.50. I can tell you though that we do nothing like 5TB a day so that might start to get expensive. S3 pricing is quite complex the way they calculate it while something like Google drive is strictly based on total amount of storage. For example Google's pricing is like this:

[attach width=400]18770[/attach]

We use a program called DragonDisk (FREE for both Mac and Windows) and you can sync folders from local PC's to the Amazon S3 buckets of your choosing.

But for the amount of data you are talking about  I think any of them is going to get expensive.

[AaronH]

I'm not sure how much would get backed up per day. Our total space right now is 5TB on our NAS. Do you backup everything or just some things? Our folder structure has the XMF job archives, common pickup items like dies or indices, then our company specific files like our logos and what not, then actual live and or months past job working files and such.

Looks like the working files for June itself is 105.4 GB so far.

[Joe]

We do not backup everything to the cloud. Our owners own the local newspaper so we back up all of that data to the cloud once a week and our server with financial/billing, etc...gets backed up once a week also plus our Prinergy config, Filemaker Pro databases and Prinergy/Oracle database.

If this place ever burns down we will lose everything in our commercial jobs. Prinergy jobs do get backed up from the Prinergy server to a NAS in a different part of the plant but not offsite. Kodak keeps trying to get us to bite on their cloud offereing but they are crazy expensive like everything else from Kodak.

[AaronH]

Ah ok. Do which Amazon S3 service do you use? The Amazon Glacier one? That one is looking pretty interesting. $0.004/GB backed up. It gets slightly pricy once you need to recover it, but that's an if we get toasted situation.

[Joe]

S3 Standard

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Glacier is cheaper but we use ours to store some of our website content and I don't think you can do that with Glacier.

[attach width=400]18774[/attach]

[abc]

Take into account not only backing it up, but getting it back.
Some of that cold storage (which I assume Glacier is) can get pricey if you retrieve a lot of data.

[StudioMonkey]

At work we use DropBox for sending big files and customers sometimes send us artwork on YouSendIt or suchlike but we don't use it for backing up work, no.  We recently installed a humongous NAS drive which serves our mixed network.  First time I copied anything onto it there was an echo . . .

[wonderings]

I use backblaze. Does incremental backups and is unlimited
https://www.backblaze.com/?_ga=2.198094319.1508295136.1530276946-1559095981.1483720225

This is my first venture into offsite backups and have yet to need it. Every computer at work has a time machine backup, 2 of the main production machines have time machine plus the offsite backblaze backup.  I like that it works similar to time machine. Works in the background and never have to manually do any backups, just set it and forget it.

If you do have a crash you can get an external hard drive with your backup shipped to you, you can either keep the drive and buy it or just send it back, I think you only pay shipping for that. You can also just download it all as well.