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Comment by kristofferR | Hacker News Reader

Why don't just use Arq (encrypted cloud backups for Win+MacOS, $49) and Amazon Cloud Storage (unlimited storage for $59 a year)?

I've got terabytes backed up, no issues at all.

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Because I had no idea about this Amazon unlimited Cloud Storage, thanks! Need to read the fine print though, home DB snapshots forever sounds really great. Plus there's not much to save space on their side if I encrypt them first. But even without it, I trust Amazon to keep my photos secure more than I trust CrashPlan which already have lost my data once (yes I think it's worth repeating, and no it was not PEBKAC, they admitted it and all they could do about it was "sorry").

edit: I wonder if Amazon goal with this was to get their hands on as many photos with their full metadata as possible (for training).

That might be their goal with Amazon Cloud Photos (unlimited photos, free with Prime), but it's obviously not the goal with Amazon Cloud Storage.

Interesting. Was this data loss of CrashPlan announced publicly? Did it affect more users?

It's concerning to hear, since I know people using it for backups.

I'm not aware of it. But you know, in some other company (don't even know which) I remember a story where after the data loss the CEO contacted the user and tried to do whatever he can including sending hard drives to speed up uploading new copies.

In my case it was 90GB, a whole single machine. The fact that they were pretty causal about it, is worrying. But I still use them for some use cases because they have unlimited storage with software for Linux, although I don't depend on them.

Quote from the support ticket:

"I have looked again for your data, but we are unable to locate the archive anywhere in our system.

I am sincerely sorry that we have let you down as there is not a reason that I can find that this data should not be here.

If there is anything that I can to for you, please do not hesitate to ask and I will do so."

I tried an online backup service, Amazon Cloud storage, and saw upload speeds of about 0.7 Mbps (speedtests say my connection has 5-20 depending on the day). That would take over four months of continuous uploading to back up a single terabyte.

Weird, it's working at max speed for me (8-11MB/s).

I can upload several hundred gigabytes per day without any throttling or other issues, so I suspect your issues are with your ISP and not Amazon.

I wouldn't be surprised if you are right.

> Amazon Cloud Storage

sounded good, and got depressed from the Australia Tax. US$59, but AU$100.

AU$100 - $10 = $90 (ish) as taxes are built into our prices, not added later

90 Australian play dollars = 69 American real dollars

US$69 - $59 US price = Australia Tax of ~US$10, approx 16%.

You do realize that it's per year, and not per month? We are talking about $5/m here.

I didn't mean that it was unattainable, I just meant that it's sad how, yet again, we pay more for goods and services 'just because'.

Australia is a remote island, so the packets need to travel a long way. That's why digital services are more expensive.

This is definitely true. I'm always shocked by how much relatives over there pay. However, outside the Asian markets, Australia is a bit off the major trade routes to the rest of the world, so general product prices never surprise me much these days. Bandwidth costs too, although I think having a much lower population density also helps drive up those prices (sadly).

In your case, even with the exchange rate as it is, price parity would be ~$80. If the taxes are ~$10 as you suggested, that means you're paying another what? $10 for essentially the same service? In a way, I'm surprised it's "only" that much more, but it's still terrible for Australian consumers.

Arq is great, but: - no support for Backblaze B2 (cheapest cloud storage) - Arq + Dropbox on mac = hell - dropbox triggers Arq's full rescan every few minutes, even though I'm not backing up Dropbox folder

Have you successfully completed a full restore yet? If not, it is not a backup but just some data on someone else's computer.

I've tested partial restores all the time, but not a full restore. Good idea, I'm testing it now.

Will report back.

No issues :)

You did a full restore of "terabytes" in <7 hours?

No, the 3.4 terabytes were composed of hourly incremental backups of the home folder on my Macbook Air and my Hackintosh + some external drives with media content.

I downloaded a full restore of the state of my Macbook Air as of roughly one month ago for testing. I don't have the storage space for a total restore (which would be tens of TBs I guess, since it's an incremental backup solution [unless you could restore all the files instead of all the backups]), but I've tested everything I care about.

I actually just deleted most of the backups from Amazon (just to be nice), since I don't really need to have backups of everything that has ever touched my Downloads folders or web browser cache for example.

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