yon Leveron blog

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) :

• Mozy
• Carbonite
• Backblaze
• SugarSync
• IDrive
• SpiderOak
• IBackup
• Elephant Drive
• Box.net
• SafeCopyBackup
• MemoPal
• HP Upline [defunct]

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.

J.

P.S.  Random added value – for a ton of cool WordPress things, have a look at this site : http://perishablepress.com/press/2009/04/26/import-and-display-rss-feeds-in-wordpress/

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.

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 . . .

If you’d like to purchase Gladinet Cloud Desktop Professional Edition for Home Use or their Professional Edition (non home use) I’d appreciate it if you’d use these purchase links; fair disclosure is to tell you that while it won’t cost you anything additional, I would get a small commission should you purchase.  Thanks

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 Comparison.

Online Backups Review.

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.

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/

I’ve been trial (15 day) testing Carbonite a bit ; c.f. http://www.tomkirkham.com/node/109 as well as beta testing Acronis True Image home 2010, which has online backup as an option within the program.  Both of these programs seem to run just fine under Windows 7, the 64 bit variety.

One comparison is out there at http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/best-free-online-backup-sites.htm for free sites.  More to come on this topic, as I think storing things on the Cloud, encrypted by you before it heads that way, is going to be the next “wave of the future”.

It sure is a good idea to have your wordpress backed up fully. http://www.databasesandlife.com/regular-automated-backup-of-wordpress-blog/ I can tell you what happens when it breaks, and isn’t backed up properly in all areas (files and DB).

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.

D:\>dir AcronisTI-home-2010-beta-restoreMediaW*

Directory of D:\

54,486,602 AcronisTI-home-2010-beta-restoreMediaW.7z

100,663,296 AcronisTI-home-2010-beta-restoreMediaW.iso

91,355,044 AcronisTI-home-2010-beta-restoreMediaW.rar

3 File(s)    246,504,942 bytes

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.