Backing up the data on my computers at home has been one of those things that’s been on my list for a long time, but I just kept putting it off. Lately it seems like there’s been a handful of articles bringing it back in the spotlight, so over the holiday weekend I set out to actually do something about it. The following is partly a writeup I did for some advice to Jen’s work, but I thought it might be of interest to others out there, so here it is!
First, my setup that needs to be backed up: I have two computers with data in the house that I needed copied somewhere. Jen has a Windows laptop with ~8-10GB of documents, images, and music, and mine is a Linux laptop with ~2GB of similar data. I ideally wanted a way to backup both to a single location with a single process, so I could manage the whole thing easily. I did consider doing local backups at home, but I would probably need to invest in some more hardware first. I do have a spare “server” of sorts, but I would need a new bigger hard drive, and have to mess around with automating everything. An external drive for my needs I thought would be more complicated than I preferred, too. The prospect of online backups intrigued me because they would 1) automate everything for me, running in the background, and 2) automatically be offsite and available anywhere, should something happen locally. Here’s a rundown of the services I looked at:
Mozy (www.mozy.com)
They offer a “free” home version, that lets you back up up to 2GB for free, no questions asked. I think this is what my boss uses. They have unlimited storage for $4.95/month ($59.40/year), and I’ve read that it’s very easy to use. The thing is, they only offer Windows or Mac clients, and we’ve got more than two gigs of data anyway.
They also have a “mozypro” for businesses, which is set up to backup more than one PC, and geared more towards business use. Technically, this is probably what I should be looking at, but the lack of a Linux client pretty much clinched it for me. I did think about just setting up Jen’s PC on it, or trying to copy all of our stuff to a single intermediary location and running mozy on that, but that seemed overly complicated.
The “pro” pricing says:
Desktop Licenses: $3.95 + $0.50/GB per month
Server Licenses: $6.95 + $0.50/GB per month
Additionally, I emailed Mozy’s support, explaining my situation and what I wanted to do, and have yet to hear back from them two weeks later. Hmmmmm….
Carbonite (www.carbonite.com)
I’ve heard this mentioned with Mozy above, it sounds like maybe it’s not quite as easy to use, but priced well. It’s $49.95/year for unlimited backups. I think this would only be for one computer (like the mozyhome version), but is slightly cheaper. Same deal with the Linux client, and I couldn’t find any references to handling multiple PCs.
Jungle Disk (www.jungledisk.com)
This is the one I went with at home. I don’t know if it’s as easy to use or setup as the others, but it was the only one I found that met our situation at home. They have a partnership with Amazon’s storage service, so you pay for Jungle Disk, and then you pay for the amount of space you use for your backups.
They have a “desktop edition” that is a one-time $20 purchase, and can be installed on as many computers as you want (so it says…I’m not sure how that would work for separate data sets). Then you only pay for what you backup:
Storage
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used
Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB of data uploaded
$0.17 per GB of data downloaded
Requests
$0.01 per 1,000 upload requests
$0.01 per 10,000 download requests
So depending on the amount of stuff needed to backup, it can cost less per month than some of the other guys. Basically you’re charged $.15 each month for every GB you have stored, and $.10 per GB of what you upload (backup). Initially the backup upload will be larger, but then it only incrementally uploads what has changed. If you download (restore) anything, it costs you $.17 per GB. I’m not sure how the Requests pricing works exactly, I’m not sure if each file upload counts as an upload request or not…it looks that way now that I just checked the account page.
I went with their multi-computer “workgroup” edition, which is $2/month for each client, plus the above storage costs. It lets me manage each of our backups separately, but from one place, and should cost roughly 5-6 dollars a month to backup both of our computers. So far the Linux client installed on Ubunutu just fine, and seems to be working great. I’ve still got to set things up on Jen’s computer, but I don’t expect a problem there.
All in all, I like the idea of having our data securely backed up, but off the premises. Since Amazon’s storage service is behind it all, I’m not that worried about it going away anytime soon. The initial data upload takes some time, but after that everything seems pretty straightforward and easy so far!
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