Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Man, I am going to be paranoid as f%!# from now on, when going through security. If my laptop disappeared, it would screw me over pretty good. I mean, not in the sense that I'd lose anything that is literally irreplaceable, (well, not irreplaceable AND particularly valuable) but it would be a huge time and energy sink to recover from that.

Last time I lost a laptop, was when somebody stole my laptop bag out of my truck (I forgot to lock it one night while I Was in Barnes & Noble having a coffee). That was a double-whammy, because the USB drive with my backups was in the same bag. :-(

The only saving grace then was that most of my really important data is actually in "the cloud" somewhere (eg, code at GitHub) and that I had an older backup of most of my files on another computer that I bought and used temporarily after I spilled coffee on my old laptop (it started working again after it had a few days to dry out, so I switched back to it).

Anyway, after reading this, I think I'm going to go get another 1TB USB drive, and start keeping a set of backups that I leave at home, instead of carrying around in my laptop bag. That or start pushing stuff to S3 or something. Code is already in GitHub, but there's a lot of other stuff I'd hate to lose.

Crashplan. $99 per year.

It's actually just $59/year. Seems totally worth it to me.

I agree. I used to handle backups manually but wasn't very diligent with them. Crashplan works nicely with Linux, and that's now one less mental burden to care about.

Except if you have a bit of data you'll spend a few years uploading it. Their servers are slow. Only getting like 5-20Mbit/s, mostly slower here in Europe.

I use Arq - I can choose where I upload it and I can have multiple destinations.

Arq does not offer storage on the cheapest plan(I have no idea what you are paying for then), and even the $120/year plan only includes 250GB of storage. If I signed up with Crashplan I would upload literally all of my data to it - so 4TB of personal backups then.

Arq is actually a standalone (incremental encrypted) backup tool, though they are now also offering their own storage. Arq can be used with Amazon S3, Dropbox, OneDrive, sftp, Google Cloud Storage, etc.

E.g. I use Arq with my Office 365 subscription that costs me Euro 1.38 per month (four year academic discount) for 1TB.

Arq only runs on Windows and OS X though. I would prefer to use something open-source, that runs on Linux. I won't be renewing my Crashplan subscription when it expires.

I use Crashplan, but it's a bit rubbish. Backblaze is much better if you don't need to use it on Linux.

What issues have you had with Crashplan, out of curiosity? One thing about Backblaze is that they do not keep backups of files that do not exist on your computer, and that you need to connect your computer to the internet at least once every 90 days (or was it 30?)

The desktop interface is unpleasant and clunky. The web interface is significantly worse than Backblaze, and they clearly don't care about the home product as compared to their enterprise product (which I get the impression is kept much more up to date).

I've also found it occasionally forgets my encryption key for unknown reasons and just silently stops backing up. I get an email about it after a few days, but it's a bit of a rubbish solution.

I also like the BackBlaze team - they share lots with the community and they're open about how they work. CrashPlan feels like more of an enterprisey black hole by comparison. Their blog (https://blog.code42.com/) is one of those weird things that feels more like it's being automatically generated by a Markov chain than written by a human.

On the other hand, CrashPlan does work. That's more than I can say about a lot of the solutions that I tried a few years back (looking at you, Mozy).

Crashplan requires you to connect your computer once every six months. I found this out the hard way when I got a notice that I had 5 days to back up all of my files from an old computer elsewhere before they erased them.

Just wanted to clarify this policy.

CrashPlan requires a device to connect to it's backup at least once within a 6 month period. This is to ensure the integrity of the data we're storing. Part of CrashPlan’s ability to maintain the backup health and integrity relies upon regular connection from the device. CrashPlan is able to routinely perform maintenance on the backup by comparing checksums between both device and CrashPlan Central. If you are unable to connect the device to the backup within a 6 month period, you can also perform a restore from the backup as this qualifies as recent backup activity.

What if there was corruption on the local file system, what would happen then?

Also, what happens to files that were deleted from the local file system. I was under the impression that they would remain indefinitely available to restore.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

On linux just use Backblaze B2 [0] and Duplicity [1]

  [0]: https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html
  [1]: http://duplicity.nongnu.org/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com