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-- Your Data Storage Service of Choice?

Your Data Storage Service of Choice?

I thought asking which one is "the best" won't be really helpful, so I ask you which one you've chosen and why exactly.
In summary, what are the pros and cons of the various companies in the field: iCloud, GoogleDrive, DropBox etc.

I have around 50GB of data (music, productions, programs) in urgent need to be secured!

I use Dropbox.

Pros:

Best sync client around (supports LAN syncing between computers... yeah...)
Cost is good. I pay about $10 a month for 1TB of storage because I pay per year.
Good versioning support so if you accidentally delete / corrupt your files you can roll back.
Good client on Windows, OSX, and Linux (lol)

Cons:

All your stuff must be in the Dropbox folder, you can't add folders outside of dropbox for syncing without copying them and then symlinking. This can make preset syncing between computers a PITA.

EDIT:

Checked my bill and it was $100 upfront

+1 for Dropbox, it's pretty seamless.

quote:

Originally posted by tehlord +1 for Dropbox, it's pretty seamless.

It's quite pricey for just 50gb.

An interesting video.

quote:

Originally posted by TranceElevation It's quite pricey for just 50gb.

Its also the leader in cloud storage that has been around the longest with the most proven backend architecture (Amazon S3)

You can pretty much be sure that that video doesn't apply to them and they wont be pulling a "megaupload" either.

I dunno man, its your data but Dropbox is worth the $

Well Dropbox did lose customer data stored in their cloud a few months back due to some bug , but yeah. They're pretty much the standard for cloud storage.

quote:

Originally posted by Storyteller Well Dropbox did lose customer data stored in their cloud a few months back due to some bug , but yeah. They're pretty much the standard for cloud storage.

Of course it goes without saying "don't put all your eggs in one basket"

You should have a local backup solution too.

quote:

Originally posted by TranceElevation It's quite pricey for just 50gb.

I get 50GB free for a year or two (still don't know why) but the �8/month for 1TB seems like a pretty good deal to me as it offers more than just a space to store crap in.

For example, I'm doing a lot of collaborative work now and the ability to privately share a folder that automatically syncs up is very useful.

Saying that, I really didn't spend too much time looking for an alternative so YMMV a great deal.

I use crashplan - very cheap, encryptable and does everything. It takes a while to get everything uploaded, but the incrementals are great - it has a service that runs in the background and checks on files that are changed, this has a decent memory footprint, but shouldn't be an issue if you are running 8gb+ of ram 9or you could schedule it)

http://www.code42.com/crashplan/

T

If you want to consider the option of external HDs and memory sticks, they go for pretty cheap nowadays. This is what I use.

I have virtually everything backed up on an old 200gb external HD, and also have a couple of 8gb memory sticks that I use mostly for wav file backup, as well. So far, so good. Recently purchased an 8gb memory stick for about $10 on sale at a local Walgreens. Had my external HD for many years, still works fine.

quote:

Originally posted by AlphaStarred If you want to consider the option of external HDs and memory sticks, they go for pretty cheap nowadays. This is what I use. I have virtually everything backed up on an old 200gb external HD, and also have a couple of 8gb memory sticks that I use mostly for wav file backup, as well. So far, so good. Recently purchased an 8gb memory stick for about $10 on sale at a local Walgreens. Had my external HD for many years, still works fine.

Yep, this is the old way. Prolly also the most reliable, but it might be a pain in the ass having to deal with more and more stuff on and around your desk. I'm trying to keep things on the essential side. Call me crazy, but I'm thinking on abandoning completely the external drives for more practical methods such as the cloud storage.

quote:

Originally posted by optik http://www.code42.com/crashplan/T

CrashPlan is something I've looked at. Definitely that name doesn't help when choosing though. Associating the word "crash" with a service that should transmit a feeling of "safety" isn't really the most attractive option. Someone like Looney might enlighten us about these curious marketing choices. It's like when entering a site and you have tons of chaotic messages around, adverts left-right, bad site design etc., you just feel confused and discouraged. You're more likely to leave cause you can't bother reading through all that mess. But when you enter a nice polished looking page, with nice graphics, striking messages that go straight to the point, you really perceive and feel the care that company has for their product. You're somehow reassured seeing how serious they appear to be about what they do.

But of course that's just one part of the game. Is not enough to fall in their hands.
The thing is, we don't really know much about these companies. I was making some per-site comparisons earlier this day and noticed only a few of them had some internal info from the kitchen about who runs the craft. And that info was quite partial. We share with them our business and personal life but we know nothing about them. The video I posted earlier shows a potential victim of the good old cia technique of Problem-Reaction-Solution. One company creates 10 affiliates with different offers to fake market pluralism. 3 of them play the role of the "good boys", 7 are the "bad boys". The bad boys apparently have the most advantageous and seductive proposals. When the victim falls into the net, he's got some tolerance period. When it expires the game begins: they propose him to upgrade his subscription otherwise all his data will be deleted. If he accepts they increase profit, if he doesn't, he's prolly gonna knock at the door of the "good boys" -> increased profit again. At the end, he believes he's been saved, when he's been actually fucked twice by the same guy.

But of course none of this matters cause Clooney is the incarnation of Super-Man.

quote:

just 50gb.

That makes me feel so old.

Long-term data storage is a non-negligible problem, especially from the point of view of historians and archivists. We can still decipher things left to us by Pharaonic Egypt, or graffiti left at Pompeii; two hundred years from now it'll be unlikely that anyone would be able to retrieve any information from e.g. this forum--and that's assuming the hard drives haven't been wiped!

Hard copy lasts longer, is what I'm saying, and electronic file storage is extremely fragile.

Company I used to work at, the IT guy was touting some sort of offsite data storage as part of disaster recovery/succession planning. Lowly me was literally the only person at the table saying "and what happens when that company goes bankrupt and shuts their doors overnight?"

Cloud services are good in the short term for things like collaboration. Long term, you need to have possession of your storage media. And for really critical/important stuff, you need hardcopy backup.

You're correct, but maybe...storing on more than one provider could be a solution.

I had a nightmare yesterday of an earthquake that decimated my house! That dream was so authentic I woke up all sweaty running around the house. Needed a minute or two to realize that was a actually a dream and not something that actually occurred. That's where this thread originates from.

But since L4C is homosexual, this doesn't really matter.

dropbox for current projects and backblaze for full system backup

Repeat after me:

There is no substitute for an offsite backup when my house burns down or gets robbed.

Yes, a local backup works until something goes horribly wrong where you keep it.

been a long time dropbox user, but splice is pretty intriguing . i believe it's in beta but has worked seamlessly so far for me - in both collaborative projects and just backing stuff up. also, it automatically saves every version you upload which is pretty sweet. has a cool community section thing too. worth looking into (and i believe it's free/unlimited storage)

http://splice.com

quote:

Originally posted by djnitride Repeat after me: There is no substitute for an offsite backup when my house burns down or gets robbed. Yes, a local backup works until something goes horribly wrong where you keep it.

Or until Dropbox gets done by the FBI for harbouring illegal data transfer, or Google decides to kill their cloud storage the way they keep killing off popular apps, or whatever.

Tried and true is still the safest: hard copy in a safety deposit box in an established bank. Even if the bank goes under, you're protected--there are no laws protecting the integrity of your data online.

quote:

Originally posted by deegee Or until Dropbox gets done by the FBI for harbouring illegal data transfer, or Google decides to kill their cloud storage the way they keep killing off popular apps, or whatever. Tried and true is still the safest: hard copy in a safety deposit box in an established bank. Even if the bank goes under, you're protected--there are no laws protecting the integrity of your data online.

Except your stuff is in 2 places instead of one with a cloud backup vs local backup, but I do get your point.

If you really care about never losing data you need offsite cold backups in secure locations.

There's a lot of nonsense in this thread.

I personally use dropbox. They have been around for years (sheeet, I've had my acount for over 6 years now), hardly ever had any problems their support is flawless (I had an issue recently with sharing folders and they got back to me within 12 hours and guided me through the settings), and I get 1tb of storage. The previous version and recovery options are really incredible.

All the other companies are just playing catchup and you have to realize they are not on a platform of the same size or have the tens of millions of dollars invested in to them as dropbox do.

As for dropbox somehow being closed down for illegal file sharing, stop being paranoid. Dropbox's model would easily negate any liability; it's not alike an anonymous torrent site or public download repository like megaupload was. You have to have an account. The liability is on the user, and dropbox does not makes it's base income from advertising, it's from user subscriptions so they're not looking to draw traffic to a site via popular downloads.

USB stick are also a terrible idea. I owned roughly about 50 over the last 10 years that were used regularly and from all differnt brands ranging from cheap chinese crap to premium Lacie and Kingston thumbdrives. Out of those 50, at least 6 or 7 have straight up died, become corrupted or completely unusable and to make matters worse, they are virtually impossible to recover once they die. That's a failure rate of over 10% over 10 years and that's not great odds.

sure, as a secondary or tertiary backup, fine, but not for daily/regular use backups. DVD's and CD degrade over the long term so that's not really a viable solution.

Banks are not a good idea either. Just speak to anyone that had safety deposits at one of the banks that got force mergered at part the financial crisis a couple of years ago. Most people were tied up in paperwork for months trying to access their boxes.

And guess what? If you forget to pay or say you're autopay stops going through, they auction the contents off, so unless you pay for 50 years upfront, you really don't have much security there either. And that's hoping the bank you gave it to is still around in 50 years lol.

If you're really serious, get a tape backup, otherwise, use dropbox, at least one dedicated backup drive that periodically gets cloned to another drive, and then out the really vital stuff on a portable drive and put it in a different location (like in a safe in your parents house).

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