My simple solution, for detachable external storage (i.e. it shouldn’t fry from the same power surge, if not cabled up in any way at the time of the electrical havoc . . .)
Some of these models require a port-multiplier eSata / e-sas type port, but usually include at least a software-raid sort of PciE card with the package – check to make sure, or you’ll only get one drive showing up instead of 4 or more . . .
If I were to go with the more expensive option (still relatively affordable, above – compared to a true NAS, etc.) I might consider some of the 1 terabyte or > “Green” SATA drives. This is due to me wanting to have a good backup locally (c.f. Acronis) as well as remotely (expect an article this coming week on more discoveries here). Yes, having been around the corporate world, I tend to back up like an OCD person washes hands – once you’ve been bitten, you understand the data is worth a lot more than the hardware.
Pretty interesting NAS device, for the starter market (like at home). That’s a lot of features; granted, their bottom level, one drive NAS is $300 but still, it’s always refreshing to see innovation like this. And the ability to hook up other drives externally to it is a plus’ you could get a backup rotation going there.
Sheesh, I remember when my computer didn’t have that much RAM
And naturally, I’m looking forward to USB3 – backwards compatibility is always nice, but we are sure due for some higher throughput, and not everyone has a handy esata port to hook up to one of the drives above. For my local backup solution, I tend to use those handy external cases, like the Macally G-S350SU Hi-Speed eSata/USB2.0 External Storage Enclosure for 3.5inch SATA HDD.
I’ve gotten a few inquiries about backups and storage since there’s been some focus here, so I’ll share my (not perfect, but seems reasonable) backup plan.
At home, I tend to copy off any new install CD, any new movie I’ve purchased, etc. to my main system, and then place the original on edge on one of the many bookshelves. This means it’ll both be locatable if I need it again, and pretty safe from scratching. Add to that the music collection I’ve carefully digitized to lossless, etc. as well as many high resolution digital pictures, and we have quite a bit of space taken up.
These reside on the primary system internally, across 4 1.5 terabyte drives running in Raid. 2 partitions in the raid manager, 400 gig of striped Raid-0 for speed, and 2.5t of Raid-5 for redundancy. Within Windows 7, the strip is split in half, C and D drives, with D being scratch / temp space. Drive E: is all of the raid5; all are set as primary and GPT partitions under Windows 7.
I backup to external drives, as above, and am paranoid enough about lightning etc. that even with a quality UPS per system I just know it’s hard for electricity to make it across that “air capacitance gap” when the external is unplugged from power and data, at the drive end for my convenience.
Multiple local drives for backup (reused a number of old .75t drives) as well as online backup via service as well as multiple Gladinet targets, for second tier. This keeps me from having to shuttle external disks between locations, in order to keep some of the backups “off site”. It’s not hard to tell who has experienced data loss, is it?
Acronis is very confident in their new product, and I have to agree; it looks even easier to use than before, and they’ve been steadily adding features instead of Bling. It’s always a good sign when they’re willing to let you try it out for free : Acronis True Image Home 2010 Free Trial Download.
For each picture below, clicking it should show an enlarged version in a new window.
I ran through a couple of Beta testing versions before this new launch, and Acronis looks like they made the minor changes needed. I was really glad to see the launch, as I’ve been relying on this for some time since I’m running the production Windows 7 on my (windows) machines.
Acronis says : “With Acronis True Image Home 2010, rest assured that all your important data including images, music, documents and applications are well protected and can easily be recovered in the event of any disaster. Also the newest Acronis True Image Home 2010 is the best solution for moving your system to Windows 7 and storing your backups online.”
The only portion I would add is that the online backup is optional; you can still use the conventional backup mode to practically any device (DVD, network, firewire or usb hard disk, etc.)
Since I prefer to have both a local copy (external hard disk, unplugged from electrical system when not in use) as well as an offsite backup copy (online is increasingly attractive, as long as it’s well encrypted, which True Image 2010 supports) this really fits my needs.
I’m quite happy with the dual destination backup feature as well; it’s refreshing to see this brought from their Enterprise market down to a much less expensive home / home office product.
Thanks for reading this launch information and review of Acronis True Image 2010. I hope you’ll be as satisfied as I am with the newest version of their flagship product. You can download a completely functional evaluation copy for free here, or you can order the full product for $49.99 directly from the picture link below.
More generational copies are better, when it comes to disaster recovery (even at the home machine level).
From: Acronis Central<noreply@acronis.com>
Date: Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 12:07 AM
Subject: The Acronis True Image Home 2010 and Acronis Online Backup Beta program closure notification
To: John
Dear Acronis True Image Home 2010 Beta Participant,
Thank you for taking the time to be a part of the Acronis True Image Home 2010 and the Acronis Online Backup Beta program! We have used all the valuable feedback that you have given us to improve our latest product Acronis True Image Home 2010 which will launch in a few weeks.
We’re sending this email to inform you that the Acronis True Image Home and Acronis Online Backup Betas will end on Sep 7th, 2009.
You will be able to use the beta build of Acronis True Image Home till Oct 1st, 2009, but we encourage you to purchase the final release of the product to take advantage of all the new features.
After Sep 7th, 2009 your Acronis Online Backup accounts will be disabled and you will no longer be able to perform online backups. After Sep 14th, 2009 all your data will be permanently removed from our servers.
To prevent the loss of the backed up data you may need, please retrieve it from our servers before Sep 14th, 2009. We will permanently destroy the data on these servers after Sep 14th, 2009.
To ensure safety of your data, we recommend you to retrieve the data as soon as possible.
Once again, thank you for your patience and active participation in the beta program. We truly appreciate your time and your feedback is helping us make a better product for you!
If anyone has any great links to any detailed comparisons / reviews of online backup packages, I’d appreciate any comments / links to those. Heck, I’ll take direct recommendations.
While there are a bajillion articles / comparisons between the following (and more) :
I am looking for something that dives into the tech specs. http://www.onlinebackupsreview.com/compare.php is an awesome start, but it is geared towards folks like my mom (bless her, she just isn’t ready to do command line craziness; she’s one of possibly the smarter users who just wants her computer to simply work, hah!)
I have tested a few of these, but am looking for no cost per GB, understanding that backups will be relatively slow across an ADSL upload link.
Other desired features : you get to keep your own encryption key, at the risk of losing it, and thus losing access to your remote backup data.
I really wish there were an option between the ≈ $5 per month, and the “you’re about to pay fifty cents per gig” paths. Ahem. Thinking that one of these bright companies could sell a package along the lines of “more technical interface, less painful file selection, slightly faster speeds either way, $10 per month”. No idea how much market is here, but I’d buy that for sure, as I dreamily consider myself a “power user”. And Stuff™.
I’m perfectly willing to consider options other than those companies listed above. I’m one of those users that believes backups need to be done redundantly, even at home. Once you’ve been through the loss of family photos, etc. you usually end up on the “better safe than sorry” end of the equation.
I’ve been really impressed with Gladinet Cloud Desktop so far. I’ve been able to seamlessly push and pull things from a few different cloud objects, including from within programs. Being able to redundantly store that long letter locally, as well as remotely at the same time is pretty good tech.
My first test was with Google. While Gladinet supports Google Apps, it is not quite as mature there as it is for Picasa, and standard Google accounts (yourname@gmail.com type email addresses). I expect that will mature with continued releases.
Webdav and FTP were certainly no issue, and the plugins for those allowed anonymous mode as well. I appreciated the flexibility modes regarding bandwidth, as well as scheduling options – the Pro version includes scheduled backup options.
It can push to a cloud like Amazon S3 (that also worked well). I suspect as others become more prominent in this field (like Rackspace) there may be plugins added for those as well; the Gladinet code seems pretty modular, with one or more plugins per service (support for Adrive added, and they’ve supported others like Box.net for some time).
With the Premium Edition it looks like Gladinet has plans for a rather “feature enhanced” enterprise type version. That’s usually what I try to choose even for home “power” use, when I can.
While SkyDrive is not perfect yet (Microsoft still has the 50 meg file size limit per file, which is sure acceptable given they give you 25 gig for free) it has been easy to drag and drop things back and forth, create new folders, etc. all from the Windows side.
Gladinet screenshot
Due to their plugin architecture, I expect we’ll be seeing nice incremental upgrades to this technology. While it’s easy enough for some of my non-tech friends to use, it also will definitely find a home with many of the IT folks I know.
I have to admit, the free 30 day test drive of the full professional mode helped sway me to buy. I admired their product confidence in offering a full “free” mode for 30 days, yet still allows all of the core functionality for free after that time. They seem to know that once you experience this in action they’re more likely to close a sale. As well, they are taking care of their active beta testers. A business like this, I can deal with!
I haven’t tested this on anything but Windows 7 RTM (go go, final code!), 64 bit ultimate. Lots of applications don’t work smoothly (some not at all) under this, since it’s so new; Gladinet works fine. I suspect it’d be breezy on a standard Windows XP 32 bit installation, eh? You can download either the 32 bit or 64 bit version for free from their site.
For those that want the full scoop you can check out their complete version comparison chart; Gladinet also has their own blog, forums, and they tweet their version upgrades.
I’ve added this to my “must have” list this year. Even if I never get an Amazon S3 account on the European side, or my very own EMC Atmos . . .
More grist if you’re trying to choose an online backup service. I consider few of these reviews, etc. to be unbiased, due to monetary / partnership influence, but anyway :
Online Backup on Twitter certainly seeing this trend more; my own web hosting provider lists this as an alternate spot, if they are really down, to get status updates. I guess folks are banking on their stuff, and Twitter not going down at the same time.
Or at least, how to try. One of the home machine’s primary partitions, when backed up with Acronis and no compression or encryption, was 24.4 gig in size. Using 7zip, and making a nice solid archive, I ended up at 8.58 gig, spread out in (177, yep) 49.9 meg chunks to meet the 50 meg upload file size limit.
More experimentation, you actually can use a client such as Gladinet to push a backup over to Skydrive. You can use the “conserve bandwidth” option while actually using your computer, and crank it up before you leave
(edit – there’s been an upgrade to Gladinet, it’s actually even improved a bit more – was a good investment it seems)
windows live skydrive 25 gig free
I’m pretty confident in leaving things out there in public, as long as I got to choose the passphrase. I’ve verified that 7 zip really does care if one character is off in a 200 char password, and it does use AES-256. Luckily, my data doesn’t consist of anything important enough to expend that sort of resources in attempting to decode.
Reasonably good passwords / phrases can be generated by things such as https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm – as well, 7zip does have the option to encrypt the file headers as well. I remember a business case where someone thought that an old Winzip file was encrypted with their super-secret password (likely their dog’s name) and didn’t realize that anyone, without any password at all could read the name, size, etc. of each file within the archive. Oops, that caused him some issues with their employees.
More pith – 7zip can use the “63 random printable ASCII characters” portion of Steve Gibson’s GRC password page, which is significant, bits-of-entropy wise, because
1;s[&Exv3[-?=c*zX;sgdkHn.J’Y;CWC$.y9ScB*xl’+e9′(G$^Uk\A@loZdiPM is a little harder to try to brute-force than
82FCB457CDB17D9E08F7A1A62BB798046373F9D89EF4DDDAC47224385F7D489 – while both may be 63 characters long in this case, the second string is not quite as “strong”.
Since you put up with the tech, ending with a nice random song lyric for you : Bloodhound Gang, “I’m the root of all that’s evil, yeah, but you can call me Cookie . . .”
This is something I am certainly checking out. I have terabytes on the home NAS (I know, geek) so it’s not really feasible to back up all of my data this way (quick bunny trail : high speed @ home is generally not so high speed, on the upload side; 15 mbps DSL is only that under optimal conditions; good, but not that good – beats 110 baud though!)
I’m learning there’s more out there than “tech methods” like rsync over ssh, or using 7zip to split files up to store in email, or using GPG to encrypt and chunk things over to a 25 gig free Skydrive account. http://www.gnupg.org/ etc. to encrypt files and store them off-site at https://skydrive.live.com/
P.S. Plug for 7zip. Not only is it open source, it has been both quicker than winrar in my recent use, as well as compressing significantly better.
Boring background bits, unless you’re ready to nerd on. Pics at the bottom.
My buddy Mike told me about 7zip years ago; Open source, freeware.
Here’s an efficiency test I ran on an .iso file; want to get the smallest files for storing remotely, as it doesn’t take much time to compress things with 8 cores compared to uploading over DSL to Skydrive, etc. This below is the .iso for the beta version of Acronis I’m using (Win7 64 bit compatible, and it has a 50g online backup option of it’s own).
I used the “max compression / solid” options, turned up in both Winrar and 7zip, just as high as they’d go (as if it makes a diff, when either program is done in 10 seconds or less). The results were QUITE different.
Now, 7z is not quite as "geeky feature broad" as Winrar is, but there's little that I can't do with it I've found. Just FYI, as the differences are pretty startling. This becomes a lot more obvious in the charts, since it is chunking up my entire C: partition, and the 100 meg pre-partition from Windows 7, in preparation for a "skydrive fly-by" upload.
BTW, while it doesn’t take nearly as much memory to decompress (which is very good, since most desktops for the moment aren’t carrying 12g of ram) as the gallery pictures below show, if 7zip says it’s gonna take a lot of memory to compress, I’d listen to it
Yessir, so there you go! Charts below, you’ll need to click on each picture twice to get the full sized / potentially readable version.
I just know it’s hard for electricity to make it across that “air capacitance gap” when the external is unplugged from power and data, at the drive end for my convenience.
