Online Backup Services

[RealJimbo]

I'm looking at online backup services for my company (software). We are considering becoming resellers to our customers (approx. 500) so that we can know what they are getting, so we can be sure they have good backups of their data and so that we know we can work with their backups. So far I've looked at Carbonite and a couple of lesser known services.

Any warnings, suggestions, input?

[Lord Helmet]

I've used Mozy in the past, but after hearing nightmares about getting lost data back from them I decided to just buy spare hard drives to take offsite myself. Of course I have 2TB of data so the online stuff can be a pain in the butt anyway just due to the length of time it takes for the initial backup. Took like 9 months...

[RealJimbo]

LH - Have you heard of Offsite Backup ? Offsite Backup Services | Data Backup Software & Recovery Solutions | Online Secure Data Backups & Storage Services Austin, Texas ? OffsiteBackups.com They claim to have agentless backup, doing it incrementally almost in real time. In other words, they only backup data that changes, not the entire contents of your onsite hard drive. Also, they say they will save earlier versions of data for those who need it. The advantage to not using an agent, according to them, is that there is no application to download and/or update. Sounds reasonable to me, but I'm no expert.

[Lord Helmet]

Most of these services use the agent to monitor what has changed, and to compress it in order to transmit it back to them in a more efficient way. Interesting that they do it differently, though I'm sure the initial upload will still take forever if you have more than a few GBs.

[Double Edge]

I used carbonite for awhile and gave it up for its limited options. They have changed it some so I won't go into what I didn't like about it. Currently I'm using Jungle Disk software to backup to Amazon S3. The good thing is you could pay one fee and use the software on all your computers if they all backed up into one Amazon account. I think they changed that but still allow those who bought before to continue to use it under the terms in effect when they bought it.

It's got a lot more options in the user interface than Carbonite but the charges from Amazon are not all that clear and easy to estimate what you might pay since it's based on amount stored, uploaded and downloaded. It's definitely more expensive than Carbonite if you intend to keep a lot of photos and such backed up too. Otherwise, it might be more competitive.

I had one incident where the software seemingly quit backing up and disappeared from my system. I discovered it wasn't running in the background a couple of weeks after the last backup. That's happened to others too so I'm wondering about it while keeping a close eye on it.

[MikeOKC]

Backblaze. Great support and well-respected.
Compare the pricing with similar services.

[Lord Helmet]

Backblaze. Great support and well-respected.
Compare the pricing with similar services.

I've been thinking about trying them out...but I have over 3TB of data...which will likely take me until xmas to upload.

[dustyburchfield]

Not sure how critical your data is, but I hear that RACK59 (Rack59 Secure | Reliable Data > Home) is doing low cost managed services in their secure data center.