Update.  As of May 5,2010, I am a very happy Crashplan customer.  I haven’t had a chance to do recovery of many files yet, but for the few I have needed, it works just fine.  I now have about 360 GB of data backed up and the backup software itself runs painlessly in the back ground.

I have also moved to a new computer and by following a few steps, was able to migrate the license and external disks to the new computer without any problems.

We all accumulate many hard drives worth of data that has to be backed up.  As they say about hard disk drives, it is a matter of when they would fail and not if.

Like many other (serious) photographers, I worked my way up from software driven copies of data to an inexpensive NAS, nearly ran out of space on the Raid 1 setup there, flirted with the idea of buying more such NAS drives and ended up grabbing a Drobo that came up for a good deal.  My drobo now is my primary photo archival solution.  Since my primary photo editing computer is a puny MacBookPro which has a 120 GB hard drive, after processing, my NEFs are moved to the drobo.  So drobo inherently is where all my critical stuff lives.  Just to solve my paranoia, I also backup my critical photos to another external hard disk drive.

After having heard so many horror stories that involved theft, fire, lightning or other such stuff that can affect your photos, at some point all of us consider some form of offsite storage, ideally something on the cloud.  (Imagine some one like Daily dose of imagery losing two years of work).  Even for my humble amateur status, making sure I never ever lose the RAW file of this photo of my child, when she was 2 days old, back in 2004.  I have managed to save it for the past 5 years, I hope to save them for at least my lifetime.

sahana0280

In my local photo club, we started to discuss about online backup services.  Macworld also wrote a very detailed Online backup services review. This review is spot on with pretty much every thing you care about such a service.  However, there is one detail that the Macworld review misses, which is what this blog tries to address.

Online backup of data that resides on your external hard drive, which is immensely difficult for a lot of these services, which is baffling since there is no real reason for this to be so difficult.  I installed and tried three different services and also read about a few other services which had very similar problems.

Carbonite

They do not support external hard drives.  To quote Amit Varma, immense WTFness.  Really, in this year, where 63% of all computers sold are laptops, you have to be a genius to come out with a data backup solution which doesn’t support external drives.  (Yes, I am assuming that a lot of the laptop users have an external hard disk and they want to back it up the cloud, but I suspect it would be a fair assumption.) FAIL.

Backblaze

Backblaze did one better with the external drives.  They support it.  They even let you add another external hard drive after the initial upload.  But they take immense WTFness to another level.

A lot of these online backup services have this thing I call the “30 day sickness”.  If you delete a file in your computer and the file doesn’t reappear within the next 30 days, these services automatically delete it on their data center.  Yes, read that again.  Your backup, which you do in case you accidentally lose your primary data will be deleted in 30 days.

When you apply this to external drives, if your external drive is unplugged for more than 30 days, then they will delete all your data in the external drive.  While it is rare that I go for 30 days without plugging my drobo to my laptop, I have gone through 2-3 weeks in the past when I have done that.  The way I use my drobo is, after a photo shoot, I copy the NEFs to my laptop, work on them and once I am done with them and exported to JPGs, I ditto them over to drobo and delete the original in my laptop to free up space.  I fire up my drobo only during such times and during the rare times I want to go back in time and re-process my photos.

I don’t get it.  What is with the 30 day limit? (Mozy seems to follow the same 30 day thing as well.)  What is the point of backup if it is a mirror image of my hard disk at all times?  The one good thing about backblaze is their customer service is extremely good.  And they do not bull shit.  When I asked them about the 30 day sickness, they said:

Hello,

Thanks for checking out Backblaze. Backblaze mirrors your data, so if
you delete it of your computer, Backblaze deletes it from the backup
servers after 30 days. When a external drive is unplugged, Backblaze
no longer sees the files and thinks they have been deleted so that is
why a user needs to plug their external drive back in before 30 days.

If you leave your Drobo unplugged for longer then 30 days, then
Backblaze is probably not the best solution for you. There are other
backup services out there that will archive your data, but they
usually charge a per GB fee.  Jungle Disk is a good option.

Crashplan

Just like the macworld article said, Crashplan seems to be the best plan out there even without the family plan, particularly for external hard drives.

They not only support external hard drives, they also support network drives as well.  Their external hard disk policy is very clear:

If your drive is unmounted, CrashPlan is smart enough to know the drive is unavailable. CrashPlan does not treat the files as deleted.

They also have a very clean way to control when they remove files that are deleted in your computer:

Screen shot 2009-09-17 at 10.13.29 PM

How difficult was that?  There is no bullshit marketing speak about “mirroring” vs “backup” vs “archival”.  Backup just the way it should be.  Of course, the pricing of crashplan is the best out there when you go past 2 computers.

Screen shot 2009-09-17 at 10.18.20 PMI am uploading ~250 GB to CrashPlan as we speak.  If all checks out, I will be signing at least a 1 year plan with them.  Of this lot, there is only one sensible online backup service, CrashPlan FTW.

Update:

After a brief network outage, CrashPlan speeds hit 1Mbps during day and upto 4Mbps during nights for me.  I was able to upload 300GB of data in under 3 weeks.  I prepaid their 3 year plan as well.  If there is one thing I want them to change, it is the speed of their customer service response, which takes about a day right now.  Their desktop software is phenomenal – the thing just works right and eats NO CPU cycles.

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