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Online Backup Service - Recommendations?

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ablative

ablative

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Feb 17, 2010
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Just wondering if anyone has any recommendations.

We are using SOS but their customer service is little short of appalling and we are dumping them. Any vaguely difficult issue and they can't be trusted to help out.

I've been reading good things about Crashplan but just wondering if anyone else has suggestions.
 
Thanks for the idea - I took a quick look and there's no prices there which puts me off a little plus their website seems not to have been touched since 2011 (the © notice) which doesn't bode well. Looks a little one-man-band to me which for online backups is a bit of a turn off.
 
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ablative said:
Thanks for the idea - I took a quick look and there's no prices there which puts me off a little plus their website seems not to have been touched since 2011 (the © notice) which doesn't bode well. Looks a little one-man-band to me which for online backups is a bit of a turn off.
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You're quite correct that the web site has been updated for a while. It's something we are looking at doing now but it has been neglected for a while for which I make no excuses! However we do pride ourselves on good customer services and I would be happy to provide you with customer references. We actually run a number of branded services for other providers as well but I am not at liberty to divulge their identities.

We used to publish prices online but never found that was particularly useful as most people who tended to get in touch had specific requirements anyway. I have to say that I am personally in two minds about publishing prices and I can see arguments both ways.
 
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It's just a PC and laptop and some hdd's needing to be archived. (The server takes care of itself.) Business stuff and personal.

Ideally a continuous (when PC is idle) backup is what we're after (which SOS doesn't have) and... if there's a problem decent customer service. Talking to SOS customer service is like getting blood from a stone.

Re the prices, leesmason, I always think that when they are not published then they will be massive and out of our price range; i.e. they only deal with big bespoke solutions and not a fairly small standard setup we are looking for.
 
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Prices start from £1.40+VAT per month. We provide two types of backup client: one for standalone desktop or laptop PCs and one for servers and larger number of desktops and laptops. We do also provide larger bespoke backup systems including onsite backup appliances.

The pricing depends on how much data you need to backup. All data is stored compressed and encrypted so you pay for compressed space (compression is normally about 2 to 1) so to backup 16GB of data you would probably need an 8GB account.

Our system does support continuous data protection (backing up all of the time when the PC is idle and when files have been updated).
 
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Crashplan offer a great service. I have used them personally for 3 years with no issues.

Crashplan com (Can't post links yet)

They offer an unlimited data package which is great.

They are often selected as the best on lifehacker com
 
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Tim @ T J Dixon Limited said:
Crashplan offer a great service. I have used them personally for 3 years with no issues.

Crashplan com (Can't post links yet)

They offer an unlimited data package which is great.

They are often selected as the best on lifehacker com
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I looked at them and again people were complaining about their service when things went wrong. Can I ask if you've had any dealings with their support staff and how that went?
 
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ablative said:
Thanks for the idea - plus their website seems not to have been touched since 2011 (the © notice) which doesn't bode well..
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You are aware that the general rules are you either use the year it was founded in copyright area or you use current year.

I would not base your assumptions on the fact it says copyright 2011
 
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We have used Crash Plan for some time now and have no complaints. I am on a family plan so we have a few laptops, PC's at home all backed up under one account.

We have never had to deal with customer services much. Any time we need to recover a file we just do it using the online service.

They have a good iPhone app as well that allows you to access your files on the go.
 
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There is nothing better than Amazon S3 in my opinion. We back up all our images / videos on there and the cost is extremely affordable and with Amazon you get the peace of mind that your data is as secure & safe as it can get.

If you have a lot of data to be backed up, then Amazon Glacier is 10x cheaper than S3.
 
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We just run all our office files direct from Dropbox with their 'packrat' feature that gives you unlimited deletion recovery and version history. Works perfectly for us and syncing is pretty much instant
 
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I have used Mozy, Amazon and Attix5. All great services and quite simple to use. Just comes down which ever looks best to you. 200mb of storage isn't tough for any online back-up provider. Just go with the one that gives you the best price etc...
 
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I have used Crashplan for the last couple of years out to about 2TB in storage offsite and managing around 8 other PCs, devices etc. into a server allowing internal and eternal backups.

However, I am not convinced that in the case of recovery, we could extract the required data sufficiently quickly at their slow upload / download speeds. Hence, I am in the market looking at potential alternatives.

I am more concerned about circa 100/200GB of core data which I would prefer to have isolated or dual backed up and the remainder could stay with Crashplan or go somewhere else.
 
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Just spent 30 minutes looking at Amazon's offerings and cannot fathom out whether it would cost $10 a month or $10,000. Utterly confused by their use of gigabyte days and other such nonsense.
 
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ablative said:
Totally my mistake: more like 400 GB! (My only excuse: I hadn't had coffee when I posted that figure.)
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That's a bit different. Is that all on the one PC? What I would suggest with that is to perform an initial seed load. This is where we would send you a disk that you do an initial backup to. This disk is then sent to our data centre and loaded onto our backup servers. Then you can start the backup with just an incremental and then continue from there. If you ever had a disaster and needed all of the data back quickly we would send you a seed disk back so that you can restore from this rather than try to download 400GB+ over the web.
 
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ablative said:
I looked at them and again people were complaining about their service when things went wrong. Can I ask if you've had any dealings with their support staff and how that went?
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I haven't needed to call them. But I have had issues with the app crashing, I found the solution easily on their website.

On the speed comments - I have found them to be ok after tweeking some settings.

One key setting is to increase the memory cache for the Java side of the app - this increased the speed when backing up large numbers of files.

I also use Crashplan to backup my files to local storage providing me with two backups - one local and one on the internet.
 
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Hi @ablative

Just to stick my oar in... 500 GB of backup stored in UK datacentres with oodles of bandwidth and super-fast speeds, including 30 days of retention as standard, would be £95+VAT per month.

Initial seed-load could be uploaded (if your speed is good enough), or sent to our Maidenhead datacentre on an external USB-powered HDD. After that, only the daily file changes you make are uploaded at a time you set (usually overnight).

The software client itself can also backup to a local external HDD at the same time; great for immediate restores (so you don't have to download everything) if a simple event like a hard drive fails, while the online backup store waits to help you in the event of full disaster.

Free trial is available if you want to have a play with it - http://www.questcloudcomputing.co.uk/solutions/online-backup/

Cheers,

Ryan
 
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I'd be worried at the fact that you need ANY tech support for an online backup solution! It should just work seamlessly in the background.

One thing to consider when looking at Online Backup is certainly the cost, because you do get what you pay for. The cheaper solutions may well back up everything for you - but how fast can you restore data? This isn't an issue when you need one or two accidentally deleted files back, but if you need to restore an entire computer the cheaper offerings will take way longer than the pro solutions such as Attix5.

We had a client whose entire data was wiped out by the CryptoLocker virus. Even over her fairly slow internet connection she was back up and running within hours, once the virus had been cleaned, using Attix5. Some of the cheaper packages would have taken days.
 
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The IT Dept said:
I'd be worried at the fact that you need ANY tech support for an online backup solution! It should just work seamlessly in the background.
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The technical support very often comes in when you are deciding what to backup, how, and when. It's not unusual to find that people really don't know what they need to backup. Whether it be a Windows System backup, a VMware or Hyper-V virtual infrastructure, Exchange database backups vs Mailbox backups. Many people need advice and support at this crucial time. And when it comes to restoring a strategy is needed for Disaster Recovery which needs expertise and again this is where support matters.
 
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leemason said:
The technical support very often comes in when you are deciding what to backup, how, and when. It's not unusual to find that people really don't know what they need to backup. Whether it be a Windows System backup, a VMware or Hyper-V virtual infrastructure, Exchange database backups vs Mailbox backups. Many people need advice and support at this crucial time. And when it comes to restoring a strategy is needed for Disaster Recovery which needs expertise and again this is where support matters.
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Thanks Lee, that's all very true.

The original post said, "We are using SOS but their customer service is little short of appalling and we are dumping them. Any vaguely difficult issue and they can't be trusted to help out." Which is where I got the impression they were calling for support a lot and not getting anywhere.

Our clients get help with deciding what needs to be backed up, we set things up for them and restore whatever needs restoring, but the rest of the time we don't really hear too much from them. We do check their backups are succeeding too, so we tend to call them more often than they call us, usually to find out they've been on holiday which is why the backup hasn't been happening!
 
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The IT Dept said:
Thanks Lee, that's all very true.

The original post said, "We are using SOS but their customer service is little short of appalling and we are dumping them. Any vaguely difficult issue and they can't be trusted to help out." Which is where I got the impression they were calling for support a lot and not getting anywhere.

Our clients get help with deciding what needs to be backed up, we set things up for them and restore whatever needs restoring, but the rest of the time we don't really hear too much from them. We do check their backups are succeeding too, so we tend to call them more often than they call us, usually to find out they've been on holiday which is why the backup hasn't been happening!
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You're quite right. We do pretty much the same and as you say we tend to contact them more than they contact us when we see backups failing or missed.
 
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