Amazon S3, Carbonite, iCloud: any opinions?

[photog1107]

I am considering a cloud/offsite/online retrieval solution and wonder if anyone has experience with these three services as far as upload time, ease of retrieval, and customer service. Price is relative--not my main concern on choosing the most reliable and efficient solution.

I do already backup with a couple of externals; this is meant to serve as the third prong in my security/backup plan.

Thanks for any input!

[Matthias099]

I only have tried Carbonite so far (a free 30 day trial) and cancelled immediately after. I found out that Carbonite does not backup any of your external HDD's. Only the internal ones. So you would have to store all files you want to back up on your primary drive, which makes no sense to me.
For this reason I cannot recommend this service. I have researched others, but none of them is meeting my requirement or is affordable to me. So I just keep backing up stuff on externals and a couple DVD's as my backup, should the worst happen......

[thebeach]

Hi, if you have got more than one computer or if you have a friend, then you can use Buddybackup. It will backup external drives and also will backup over the internet or to a local USB device and is completely free. [URL removed] definately worth a look.

[NathanFranke]

Originally Posted by thebeach

Hi, if you have got more than one computer or if you have a friend, then you can use Buddybackup. It will backup external drives and also will backup over the internet or to a local USB device and is completely free. [URL removed] definately worth a look.

First post for the user? Free product? I smell canned luncheon meat...

[photog1107]

I hear ya, NathanFranke. Thanks. I actually have tried Carbonite before and found the same frustration with the external backups, so was curious if anyone had experience with iCloud or Amazon's product. Surely there is a good solution out there!

[jdepould]

I looked into S3 and Google, and they're not cheap. One of my friends recommended Backblaze, though I haven't used it.

[Nicole]

Not iCloud. Basically unless what you've got is stored in one of Apple's products, you're out of luck. And as much as I like Apple, I'm not to fond of how they've changed from iDisk where I could store any file from any program to iCloud where unless the program has done an update to allow cloud storage I'm out of luck.

Depending on how much you want to back up though, odds are it's not going to be cheap, as has already been said. In any case, I've been migrating over to Dropbox.

[SwissJon]

Dropbox is expensive but incredibly easy to use. I like it, but wish they'd drop their prices.. $19.99 a month for 100Gb is a lot for not much.

We use Amazon Web Services at work and so far have nor had any issues with them.

So far, my solution has been to have a network enabled hard disk, and backup to that. It's a pain though, because i can't get to it from work.

[photog1107]

Well, I have been refining my search a bit more and appreciate the input. I am now narrowing it down to Backblaze and Carbonite... tho i am annoyed Carbonite won't backup externals, and Backblaze will. Since photo files are so large, I am forced to pull about a year's worth of original files off my Mac once a year, just to manage the $500 GB hard drive I have, so I actually need a backup solution that includes external drive backup as well as my internal Mac HD. Maybe since i use a Mac, iCloud offers a similar solution, tho I haven't dug into their features yet.

[photog1107]

Ooops, nevermind. iCloud only offers up to 50GB of storage. Pshaw--I am looking for a solution for 10X that amount.

Anyone else have comments on using BackBlaze? I am leaning that way for a Mac solution, 400-500 GB of storage with restore capabilities, and ease of use running automatically in the background, with external drives included.