John reminded me that even with my Drobo, I’m still not really safe in terms of data loss. It handles two drive failures, but it still means things can get lost. For a while I was manually backing up to tongfamily.com which is unlimited data on bluehost.com, but it isn’t automatic. So onto reviews. He uses Backblaze for $5/month/computer. Macworld did reviews and had some great advice
- Don’t just select your entire 1TB drive and choose backup. This will take forever, instead, do your most critical files (in my case photos), then add some more and more. These services do incremental changes, so when one disk block changes, only that is updated.
- You have no idea where your data is going, although all promise that they keep it secret, nonetheless, remember, security does get breached (AT&T!) and that there is always the government. For me, this is mainly OK, the main stuff are photos not confidential stuff.
- CrashPlan, Backblaze, and Carbonite succeed best at hiding complexity behind a simple interface (although Backblaze and Carbonite have other significant limitations).
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Everyone encryptes before they send, so you have to crack the encryption online which his hard.
Backblaze, CrashPlan Central, Mozy, Jungle Disk, and SpiderOak all offer one additional level of paranoia: you can set your own password to encrypt files on your computer. The service then has no idea what your password is, and no cracker, government agent, or other party can decrypt your files. Lose this key and, just like an encryption key used with desktop password software, you’re hosed. (iDrive says it plans to add a password option to its Mac software.)
