Diary of a cloud backup – part 5 – Many Months Later

Posted on July 13, 2010 by Martin Harris

Several months ago now I posted a series of articles about offline backup. Its a topic that more and more people are dealing with. The realisation that you have many gigabytes of digital media that could easily be lost combined with better broadband is prompting a move to off-site backups. So I posted up my exploration into backing up off-site. Recently I have had a few people ask me if I am still happy with my final choice, crashplan.

Even my mum uses it!

I am very happy with the choice. In the original posts I managed to setup three home machines, one Linux one windows and a mackbook. Since then I added the iMac that I keep at my parents. This is a sign of how easy crashplan is to maintain. In a nutshell once you have set it up, you just forget about it. This has to be one of the most important things about backing up. It does not require any maintenance whatsoever. This is encouraging when your several hundred miles away from one of the machines. I can use the web to see if its backed up, and get alerts if a period goes by and it fails. I just checked it now, 100% backed up today.

What else?

The backup client allows you to set how much bandwidth and CPU its allowed to use. I use the default as I have never found it hogging either. I am probably lucky that so far several backups on different machines have not started at the same time. If it did its easily curable.

In summary

If you have anything worthwhile keeping, and want off-site backup – get a crashplan account. If you have friends with space, use crashplan for free and backup to each others machines. In fact do both!

Diary of a cloud backup – part 4 – Crashplan

Posted on March 30, 2010 by Martin Harris

Apologies for posting yet another backup page. There are a few people interested in the outcome, although I suspect even they are bored!

After my terrible experience with memopal, I decided to look at crashplan. Manung Han at Lab49 had a good experience. Crashplan was the next best offer price when I evaluated the first time around. This time I don’t need to go over the ADSL issues etc. If your interested in what happened last time I attempted an offline backup read on. I am going to keep this article short and to the point for fear of overloading syndicated websites like Lab49 with backup pages. I will post updates to this final page as I go.

Strategy

After the last attempt I re-thought my strategy. The new idea is to find a service that is free for the first month. Then attempt backups with Linux, Mac and Windows. These will not be full backups but big enough to test the system.

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Diary of a cloud backup – part 3 – Thanks for the refund memopal

Posted on March 27, 2010 by Martin Harris

Day 27 – 31.5Gb uploaded

0.86 Gb/day 0.36 since moving to ADSL2+
I have not managed to upload anything since day 25. The memopal service is terribly unreliable and during this period their support team has not replied to a single email. So today I have decided to try and get them to return my money and cancel the service. I sent them the following email.

Please could you return my money. Your service is too unreliable for me to use. Its been refusing to upload files for three days now. A backup service has to be more reliable than this.

Many thanks.

It will be interesting to see if I can get my money back. In the meantime I would not recommend memopal to anyone.

Day 29 – Promise of a refund.

Memopal have promised to return the funds I will post here when they do:

Dear Martin,

well notesd with thanks.
As promised we will provide to refund you.
Once done you will receive a notification e-mail (by the next 20 days).

with regards,
Walter

In the meantime my quest for a linux/mac/windows offline backup will continue. I have learned an important lesson. Check the service first if possible. In fact my ideal service would be one that you pay for once the 75Gb has managed to upload.

May 13th 2010

On this day Memopal finally returned my funds. I did have to chase, but in the end they paid up. Thanks Memopal.

Diary links:

Part 1

Part 2

June 23rd 2010

Received the following email and re-titled this blog entry.

Hi Martin,

nice to meet you, my name’s Lucia and I work at Memopal web marketing dep.

I am very sorry for the experience you’ve had with Memopal. We work hard to satisfy our customers and when they not like our service we always refund them. Could you please revise the “Terrible service” title of your post?

Please write to me lucia.bracci@memopal.com
I can give you a 300GB free license.

Best wishes,
Lucia Bracci

Diary of a cloud backup – part 2 – memopal reliability

Posted on March 22, 2010 by Martin Harris

Day 22 – 22.8Gb uploaded

1.04 Gb/day

After doing so well for a few days the memopal upload ran into a few outages again today. Lost the service between 14:30 and 20:30 a full six hours. This time I was around and I had no issues between me an memopal. The problem is their end. Once the service resumed, I started seeing a few files upload with a long period before the checks were complete and it moved on to the next file. Another rejection before it kicked in at full speed again. You can see the issue in the Draytek router traffic log. The yellow line is the uplink speed. It will be interesting to see how the faster ADSL service is going to change things. Its possible that I will still be seeing outages sometimes.
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