patently Posted June 30, 2013 Report Share Posted June 30, 2013 I'm just in the process of looking at our backup processes at home - at the moment we have a mix of 4 Windows PCs backing up to a Windows Home Server and a Macbook backing up to a Mac server. I need to do something about this as the WHS is a little old, and is not happy with Windows 7 64-bit, let alone Windows 8, and the Mac server is not reliably backing up. So I thinking of going for Crashplan - it has a "family" package for up to 10 computers, Windows or Mac. I know of Carbonite as well, but for home use they want $59 per computer and don't seem to do a group package (how many homes just have one PC these days??). Any other suggestions gratefully received Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andy_Bangle Posted June 30, 2013 Report Share Posted June 30, 2013 Crashplan is certainly a forum fav. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cabby Posted June 30, 2013 Report Share Posted June 30, 2013 I'm using crashplan and bought when they had an offer on. Can't say if its good as I've never had to use it. One thing to be mindful of is the time it can take to backup. Admittedly I had quite a bit to upload (300GB) but it took bloody ages to backup . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mac Posted June 30, 2013 Report Share Posted June 30, 2013 Crashplan has been nothing but a ballache for me, and they lost all my backups. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sponge Posted June 30, 2013 Report Share Posted June 30, 2013 Wow! That's unfortunate. I'm in my 3rd year, iirc, and haven't had any problems backing up; but haven't had to recover anything (touch wood). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NewNiceMrMe Posted June 30, 2013 Report Share Posted June 30, 2013 Crashplan has been nothing but a ballache for me, and they lost all my backups. Yup, same here. I dumped it at renewal about 2 months ago after using it for a year following recommendations on here. I found it to be a total pain in the arse and slow. I also didn't appreciate the invasive manner of renewal begging when you don't renew. I won't ever be recommending it to anyone. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CarMad Posted June 30, 2013 Report Share Posted June 30, 2013 I"m with Crashplan and its been great for me not had any backup problems or restore issues, but I do also use it to backup to another drive just in case the online service fails. Carbonite I had a hellish time with and only complaining on Facebook and getting personal contact did things get resolved and I got a free year for my troubles but left them straight away. MrMe / Mac what have you moved to then? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NewNiceMrMe Posted June 30, 2013 Report Share Posted June 30, 2013 I've reverted to backing up to a network drive in our media area. I then do an incremental upload via FTP to a dedicated webserver I have in a data centre. I should have done that in the first place. There have been a growing number of complaints about Crashplan. I noticed before renewal that it wasn't backing up everything it said it was. I then read a good few complaints online of the same type and that brought something else to my attention - their customer support gets appalling reviews. That, coupled with my being nervous about it not doing what it appears to be doing, and the fact I maintain it is slow, was enough for me to not renew. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mac Posted June 30, 2013 Report Share Posted June 30, 2013 I"m with Crashplan and its been great for me not had any backup problems or restore issues, but I do also use it to backup to another drive just in case the online service fails. Carbonite I had a hellish time with and only complaining on Facebook and getting personal contact did things get resolved and I got a free year for my troubles but left them straight away. MrMe / Mac what have you moved to then? I moved to BackBlaze. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NewNiceMrMe Posted June 30, 2013 Report Share Posted June 30, 2013 Weirdly, BackBlaze is the solution one of the bloggers went to. He also set up a Twitter account called @CrashPlanSlow to monitor upload times as he discovered a lot of people were getting below 700kbps most of the time. Many that worked a lot discovered they were 2-3 days behind on file back-up. BackBlaze gets good reviews but to be fair I think it's best just to find one that works for you and stick with it. I do have sympathy for CrashPlan because it is obvious they've become a victim of their own success recently. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Biscuits Posted June 30, 2013 Report Share Posted June 30, 2013 It's expensive if you pay (I don't as have ecru'd 71Gb of free space), but Dropbox is simply superb. Use it for work and home. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NewNiceMrMe Posted June 30, 2013 Report Share Posted June 30, 2013 I concur and I should have said I use Dropbox for all Excel, Word and PDF documents. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
burble Posted July 1, 2013 Report Share Posted July 1, 2013 A timely thread. I've been using Crashplan for a couple of years but I'm fed up of how slow the backup process is. If I upload to their servers I get at most 1.5Mbps despite having 12Mbps upstream. It used to be very fast but it has got slower and slower. It's now slow enough that I've cancelled the auto renew wotsit and will be investigating alternatives. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cabby Posted July 1, 2013 Report Share Posted July 1, 2013 Sounds like crashplan is a victim of its own success + lack of infrastructure upgrade as number of subscribers increases. I'm guessing a lot of newer providers will start off ok and gradually get worse as demand increases. For my purposes I may revert to having a hard disk at a friends house that I swap every few months! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CarMad Posted July 1, 2013 Report Share Posted July 1, 2013 The same happened to Carbonite good at the start then the problems begin. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
S3Bangs Posted July 2, 2013 Report Share Posted July 2, 2013 (edited) Dropbox here. One additional backup microserver at home and some more on MSN I think. I've got too many files replicated all over the place now. Come to think of it, I'm sure some of you guys have some serious amounts of data floating around. Out of curiousity how much are we talking here? I think of all of mine will be around 6TB Edited July 2, 2013 by Daz Spam removed Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mac Posted July 2, 2013 Report Share Posted July 2, 2013 Home system has about 25Tb of storage all in 'Only' need to backup about 2Tb of that though as active data. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hopsta Posted July 6, 2013 Report Share Posted July 6, 2013 This thread is timely as my crashplan subscription is up for renewal, had noticed crashplan not being that quick on upload. Trying out backblaze and not getting a great upload from them either, admittedly I only have a 2Mb upload and with it set up max its giving me 1.15Mb. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mac Posted July 6, 2013 Report Share Posted July 6, 2013 Is that real 2Mb up or raw? What do you get on speedtest? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
patently Posted July 7, 2013 Author Report Share Posted July 7, 2013 Well, the Crashplan trial version has been installed on my laptop for a week now. In that time, it has spent about 20 hours on the wireless network at home and five full (longish) working days on my cabled office network. The user files selected were 315GB and it has done.... .... 9.8% of that! So it could back up my laptop in a mere 10 weeks... i.e. by early September Then there is Mrs P's laptop to back up, and the childrens', and the shared PC. I might be fully backed up by this time next year! So... off to try BackBlaze next Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mac Posted July 7, 2013 Report Share Posted July 7, 2013 As a side note - How do you use DropBox in a way that works as a backup system? Do you just drop the stuff you want to backup into DropBox, and then use another copy, or do you use the copy that's in DropBox? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CarMad Posted July 7, 2013 Report Share Posted July 7, 2013 I'm not sure how some of the Online Backup services make money to be honest most of the home solutions are just too cheap. Unlimited they might be but to allow for that they throttle each connection regardless of the bandwidth you have to upload. Carbonite, started well and started to throttle, its quick at the beginning but the higher the volume the slower you go. It seems Crashplan is the same, I guess if you want a good service then I'd look at some of the more robust business solutions. At least with Crashplan I'm also using the local backup solution so I always have a copy of data in three places but not everyone can do that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hopsta Posted July 9, 2013 Report Share Posted July 9, 2013 Is that real 2Mb up or raw? What do you get on speedtest? I have a 2Mbit upload and see this on Speedtest pretty much all the time. I'm not throttled by Virgin Media as far as I know as I hardly use my connection. Will try it next week on a 10Mb fibre to see if this improves. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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