How to terminate your worst enemy's Dropbox account for only $795

Re:How to terminate your worst enemy's Dropbox account for o... by mikeash on Monday December 24, 2012 @01:28PM (#4963647)

I use Backblaze. I have restored a few small files from them. I've never had to do the whole system, but I expect it to work well from what I've heard. Maybe I should actually test it....

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Re:How to terminate your worst enemy's Dropbox account for o... by barking on Monday December 24, 2012 @01:41PM (#4963688)

Absolutely you need to test your restores, regularly!

I used to use Mozy but when I tried a trial restore it was taking forever and missing some files. Also it inserts these .PART files into your system that can almost double the size of the folders you're trying to back up.

I looked at backblaze but it doesn't work with server computers.

So I'm now trying crashplan. I'm really interested in the feature of crashplan which allows automated backups to other computers. Only problem is that I've not been able to get this to work so far. Backing up to the cloud is working well though. Also its very competitively priced. I've yet to try a restore.

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Re:How to terminate your worst enemy's Dropbox account for o... by mikeash on Monday December 24, 2012 @01:55PM (#4963728)

One trouble with testing restores is that my likely avenue in the event of a real catastrophic failure that required a real restore would be to have them send me the data on a hard disk, to the tune of about $200. Not something I want to try just to make sure it works. I could try a download restore, but this would entail downloading a couple hundred GB of data, and wouldn't really exercise the same path I'd use in a real scenario. Any thoughts on the right way to approach it? Doing occasional small restores (usually using Backblaze as a sort of really slow Dropbox, restoring to a different computer when I need a file I forgot to share) at least gives me some peace of mind that the system works at all, but you're right that it's not quite rigorous.

For servers, I've heard good things about Tarsnap, but never used it myself.

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Re:How to terminate your worst enemy's Dropbox account for o... by barking on Monday December 24, 2012 @03:52PM (#4964047)

Any thoughts on the right way to approach it?

No, that's a tough one, especially with a back up the size you're doing.

Everytime you do a restore that's just confirmation that a particular backup was/was not sound.

Wouldn't it be neat if the back up program had functionality that allowed you to restore a random sample of your files ( and maybe then compare these to the originals ) and give you a likelihood that your entire backup is sound? A sort of sampling quality control process.

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Re:How to terminate your worst enemy's Dropbox account for o... by Firehed on Monday December 24, 2012 @04:38PM (#4964188)

I'm ok[1] with them for "I accidentally deleted a file" type stuff, I would not suggest it for a full system backup. I'd suggest SuperDuper! for that if you're on a Mac; I don't have any useful suggestions for Windows or Linux users (sorry!). Of course, I use a full system disk image for "I need to be up and running at 95% capacity within an hour", and these offsite file services as, basically, long-distance undo, or for files I'd be unable to get back in some other form. Think tape storage: it doesn't need to available ultra-fast, but I need to have as many nines of certainty possible that there will be some way to get at those files again.

[1] though I'm switching off of them, not sure where to yet. There's some sort of issue in their client software that murders my home network, rendering the entire thing unusable while a backup is running. Their support was... less than helpful in trying to remedy the situation. For $5 a month and with the amount of stuff I was backing up, I can't blame them.

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Re:How to terminate your worst enemy's Dropbox account for o... by Adirael on Monday December 24, 2012 @08:09PM (#4964694)

About the Network issues: something similar happened to me yesterday. I just moved to a new flat and my Internet connection went from 50MB/10MB to 10MB/1MB and if Backblaze starts a backup with the Automatic Throttle option on it just takes the whole upload bandwidth killing every other connection and rendering the connection unusable for the rest of the network.

I don't have any QoS set up on my home network, I found two fixes: running the backup manually before going to sleep (maybe I can create an Apple Script and just cron this) or turning the Automatic Throttle off and giving it the minimum available (for me) 20kbps.

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