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So, should we assume that Carbonite's home plan will eventually be kicked to the curb like Code42 did with Crashplan? Who's still left in the home backup solut

So, should we assume that Carbonite's home plan will eventually be kicked to the curb like Code42 did with Crashplan? Who's still left in the home backup solution ring? Besides iCloud/Google Drive/Dropbox, I count...Backblaze? And that's it?

sombremesa 7y ago
I just moved to a NAS with RAID. My data is in my own hands, Cloud Station makes it work just like Dropbox, and I don't have to worry about paying a subscription or a company going south.
- AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
  I'm planning to do the same, but best practices on the 3-2-1 rule say that at least one of those backups should be off-site. I made a backup of all of my stuff onto a 4TB external and left it at my parent's house last Christmas, but that's probably not what they meant by off-site. :)
  - dublinben 7y ago
    That's definitely a legitimate offsite backup strategy. If your data changes more often than you visit, you may want something more interactive like a Raspberry Pi connected to that external drive that you can send files to.
  - sombremesa 7y ago
    If you use a Dropbox like solution, some of your data is already off-site in the form of the end user machines (e.g. laptops). It's not exactly a "backup" (in that it's not a timestamped snapshot), but it does mean your data is replicated.
    - Chris_Newton 7y ago
      But please be careful because if you use anything based on automatic synchronisation, such as RAID or a DropBox-like service, there is also a danger that anything you accidentally delete or corrupt will then propagate. If there’s no historical version saved as part of the system, or if there is but you don’t notice the problem before it disappears, you can end up damaging your “backup” copies of your data in exactly the same way as the original if something goes wrong.
  - g8oz 7y ago
    Synology Diskstation products include Cloud Sync, software that lets you back up to Backblaze, S3 and many others. https://www.synology.com/en-global/knowledgebase/DSM/help/CloudSync/cloudsync https://www.synology.com/en-global/knowledgebase/DSM/help/Cl...
- abc_lisper 7y ago
  I would like more information on this please. What hardware do you use, and do you have to pay for the software?
  - sombremesa 7y ago
    I use the Synology DS218+ along with two 4TB WD Red drives (which I got off craigslist for a steep discount -- the seller even let me run diagnostics on them for me and they were very lightly used). I don't have to pay for the software. If you stick with the Synology OS it comes with they have a package manager with things like various media servers, Cloud Station, a download client, etc. You can also just shell into it and install your own stuff. You can get NAS disk stations with more capacity (more drive bays), but this was all I needed.
    - eitland 7y ago
      You can even run docker on 218+. I'll maybe try to get one to replace my current Synology at some point :-)
  - snuxoll 7y ago
    Not GP, but considering he said “Cloud Station” I assume he’s using a Synology NAS which is a ready-to-go product (just add drives). Personally I have a 2U Dell R520 I run FreeNAS on which cost me as much as one of synology’s systems with a lot more capability. But I also have a 24U rack in my office and use it to provide storage for my hypervisors in addition to Plex, general SMB shares, etc. so I have use cases that are a little more complicated than even the average HN user from their home network.
    - LilBytes 7y ago
      I ran FreeNas many moons ago, I ripped it out after the FreeNas 10 nightmare. Sounds like it's been pretty unstable ever since and now run ProxMox. How've you found FreeNas recently? Or are you still running the FreeNas 9?
      - deleted 7y ago
abawany 7y ago
I would add Microsoft (OneDrive/Office 365), Amazon, and Mega.nz - latter is said to be end-to-end encrypted.
buzzy_hacker 7y ago
https://www.arqbackup.com/ https://www.arqbackup.com/ is great, you can choose your own backend store, like S3 or Backblaze B2. And there's https://www.arqbackup.com/arqcloudbackup/ https://www.arqbackup.com/arqcloudbackup/ if you don't want to have to manage that yourself, a more direct competitor to Backblaze.
- hnaccount141 7y ago
  Big fan of Arq! Been using it to backup to my NAS + Wasabi + Google Drive for the last year or so and it's been rock solid. https://www.duplicati.com/ https://www.duplicati.com/ is a solid FOSS option as well though I've found it to be a much less polished experience than Arq.
- iudqnolq 7y ago
  Important to know Arq only runs on mac/windows but has an open source client for mac/windows/linux that can do restores. So if they go out of business your data isn't lost (presuming you used a cloud backup that still exists). I left because Google's rate limiting makes them really slow. Also they mix together all errors including permission errors and "the file is being accessed by another program" so every run will have a few hundred errors (in fact, if I got zero errors that always a sign that the backup hadn't run correctly).
rsync 7y ago
"Who's still left in the home backup solution ring? Besides iCloud/Google Drive/Dropbox, I count...Backblaze? And that's it? " If you are a unix user and/or reasonably technical, I think rsync.net would be the best choice. You get an empty ZFS filesystem, possibly with snapshots enabled, that you can do whatever you like with (provided "whatever you like" is something that runs over SSH...). Pointing borg/rclone/restic/git-annex/etc. to rsync.net works exactly the way you'd think it would.
- AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
  Looking at rsync.net's pricing system, I calculate that backing up 1TB of data would run about $25/mth. Do you consider that competitive for a home user just trying to backup his photos? I have considerably more--4TB, to be exact, so that seems really untenable to me.
  - tardo99 7y ago
    2TB of google drive is $9.99 a month. What am I missing?
    - secabeen 7y ago
      iDrive: $100/yr ($8.30/mo) for 5TB.
    - rikkus 7y ago
      Google Drive isn't a backup system.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - matwood 7y ago
    If it’s only photos and you’re a prime member, Amazon has unlimited space. I use them as a cold archive and copy my photos there each year.
- michaelcampbell 7y ago
tiltrus 7y ago
The co-founders of Carbonite started a new storage service named Wasabi. I'm currently checking them out.
- snuxoll 7y ago
  You’ll have to let me know what you think. I’ve got 5TB of data on my FreeNAS box I would like to have a hot backup of, Wasabi is pretty much the only affordable solution on the market outside of shipping another box to my dad and using ZFS send/receive (which I’ll probably also do since he wants a media server in his house someday, it can just pull double duty as my offsite backup).
subhro 7y ago
SpiderOak, Tarsnap.
Chris_Newton 7y ago
Not a typical home user setup given the lack of pretty UI, but we sync our various individual devices to our server using scheduled jobs and then back up everything relevant from the server using Tarsnap. It’s not perfect given the lack of snapshot functionality of both the local devices and the server, and technically we’re vulnerable to corruption if we get something like a database or Git repo at exactly the wrong time, but in practice we run the important jobs at the end of a day when we’re not doing anything else anyway so it’s very unlikely to cause a problem in our situation.
magicalhippo 7y ago
After Crashplan decided they didn't want my money, I just stuck with Acronis TrueImage. I primarily keep my backups on my NAS, but they added cloud storage option not long ago. I've not had to test out a full rescue disk restore from the cloud yet, for file-level stuff it works fine. Nice thing is it can actually store disk images, so when your disk decides to die, like my OCZ SSD did, you can be back up and running within 30 minutes or less. Windows only though. Would like to be able to use some filebased solution ala Crashplan, but haven't found anything that has similar features.

sombremesa 7y ago

I just moved to a NAS with RAID. My data is in my own hands, Cloud Station makes it work just like Dropbox, and I don't have to worry about paying a subscription or a company going south.

AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
I'm planning to do the same, but best practices on the 3-2-1 rule say that at least one of those backups should be off-site. I made a backup of all of my stuff onto a 4TB external and left it at my parent's house last Christmas, but that's probably not what they meant by off-site. :)
- dublinben 7y ago
  That's definitely a legitimate offsite backup strategy. If your data changes more often than you visit, you may want something more interactive like a Raspberry Pi connected to that external drive that you can send files to.
- sombremesa 7y ago
  If you use a Dropbox like solution, some of your data is already off-site in the form of the end user machines (e.g. laptops). It's not exactly a "backup" (in that it's not a timestamped snapshot), but it does mean your data is replicated.
  - Chris_Newton 7y ago
    But please be careful because if you use anything based on automatic synchronisation, such as RAID or a DropBox-like service, there is also a danger that anything you accidentally delete or corrupt will then propagate. If there’s no historical version saved as part of the system, or if there is but you don’t notice the problem before it disappears, you can end up damaging your “backup” copies of your data in exactly the same way as the original if something goes wrong.
- g8oz 7y ago
  Synology Diskstation products include Cloud Sync, software that lets you back up to Backblaze, S3 and many others. https://www.synology.com/en-global/knowledgebase/DSM/help/CloudSync/cloudsync https://www.synology.com/en-global/knowledgebase/DSM/help/Cl...
abc_lisper 7y ago
I would like more information on this please. What hardware do you use, and do you have to pay for the software?
- sombremesa 7y ago
  I use the Synology DS218+ along with two 4TB WD Red drives (which I got off craigslist for a steep discount -- the seller even let me run diagnostics on them for me and they were very lightly used). I don't have to pay for the software. If you stick with the Synology OS it comes with they have a package manager with things like various media servers, Cloud Station, a download client, etc. You can also just shell into it and install your own stuff. You can get NAS disk stations with more capacity (more drive bays), but this was all I needed.
  - eitland 7y ago
    You can even run docker on 218+. I'll maybe try to get one to replace my current Synology at some point :-)
- snuxoll 7y ago
  Not GP, but considering he said “Cloud Station” I assume he’s using a Synology NAS which is a ready-to-go product (just add drives). Personally I have a 2U Dell R520 I run FreeNAS on which cost me as much as one of synology’s systems with a lot more capability. But I also have a 24U rack in my office and use it to provide storage for my hypervisors in addition to Plex, general SMB shares, etc. so I have use cases that are a little more complicated than even the average HN user from their home network.
  - LilBytes 7y ago
    I ran FreeNas many moons ago, I ripped it out after the FreeNas 10 nightmare. Sounds like it's been pretty unstable ever since and now run ProxMox. How've you found FreeNas recently? Or are you still running the FreeNas 9?
    - deleted 7y ago

abawany 7y ago

I would add Microsoft (OneDrive/Office 365), Amazon, and Mega.nz - latter is said to be end-to-end encrypted.

buzzy_hacker 7y ago

https://www.arqbackup.com/ https://www.arqbackup.com/ is great, you can choose your own backend store, like S3 or Backblaze B2. And there's https://www.arqbackup.com/arqcloudbackup/ https://www.arqbackup.com/arqcloudbackup/ if you don't want to have to manage that yourself, a more direct competitor to Backblaze.

hnaccount141 7y ago
Big fan of Arq! Been using it to backup to my NAS + Wasabi + Google Drive for the last year or so and it's been rock solid. https://www.duplicati.com/ https://www.duplicati.com/ is a solid FOSS option as well though I've found it to be a much less polished experience than Arq.
iudqnolq 7y ago
Important to know Arq only runs on mac/windows but has an open source client for mac/windows/linux that can do restores. So if they go out of business your data isn't lost (presuming you used a cloud backup that still exists). I left because Google's rate limiting makes them really slow. Also they mix together all errors including permission errors and "the file is being accessed by another program" so every run will have a few hundred errors (in fact, if I got zero errors that always a sign that the backup hadn't run correctly).

rsync 7y ago

"Who's still left in the home backup solution ring? Besides iCloud/Google Drive/Dropbox, I count...Backblaze? And that's it? " If you are a unix user and/or reasonably technical, I think rsync.net would be the best choice. You get an empty ZFS filesystem, possibly with snapshots enabled, that you can do whatever you like with (provided "whatever you like" is something that runs over SSH...). Pointing borg/rclone/restic/git-annex/etc. to rsync.net works exactly the way you'd think it would.

AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
Looking at rsync.net's pricing system, I calculate that backing up 1TB of data would run about $25/mth. Do you consider that competitive for a home user just trying to backup his photos? I have considerably more--4TB, to be exact, so that seems really untenable to me.
- tardo99 7y ago
  2TB of google drive is $9.99 a month. What am I missing?
  - secabeen 7y ago
    iDrive: $100/yr ($8.30/mo) for 5TB.
  - rikkus 7y ago
    Google Drive isn't a backup system.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- matwood 7y ago
  If it’s only photos and you’re a prime member, Amazon has unlimited space. I use them as a cold archive and copy my photos there each year.
michaelcampbell 7y ago

tiltrus 7y ago

The co-founders of Carbonite started a new storage service named Wasabi. I'm currently checking them out.

snuxoll 7y ago
You’ll have to let me know what you think. I’ve got 5TB of data on my FreeNAS box I would like to have a hot backup of, Wasabi is pretty much the only affordable solution on the market outside of shipping another box to my dad and using ZFS send/receive (which I’ll probably also do since he wants a media server in his house someday, it can just pull double duty as my offsite backup).

subhro 7y ago

SpiderOak, Tarsnap.

Chris_Newton 7y ago

Not a typical home user setup given the lack of pretty UI, but we sync our various individual devices to our server using scheduled jobs and then back up everything relevant from the server using Tarsnap. It’s not perfect given the lack of snapshot functionality of both the local devices and the server, and technically we’re vulnerable to corruption if we get something like a database or Git repo at exactly the wrong time, but in practice we run the important jobs at the end of a day when we’re not doing anything else anyway so it’s very unlikely to cause a problem in our situation.

magicalhippo 7y ago

After Crashplan decided they didn't want my money, I just stuck with Acronis TrueImage. I primarily keep my backups on my NAS, but they added cloud storage option not long ago. I've not had to test out a full rescue disk restore from the cloud yet, for file-level stuff it works fine. Nice thing is it can actually store disk images, so when your disk decides to die, like my OCZ SSD did, you can be back up and running within 30 minutes or less. Windows only though. Would like to be able to use some filebased solution ala Crashplan, but haven't found anything that has similar features.