Online Backup of Music and Pictures

[amitk777]

Guys,

In last 3 months, I lost two of my three computers.
a) A Laptop - Which I accidentally dropped, the hard disk crashed and multiple attempts to recover data have failed.
b) A NAS - Seagate Home, I bricked it accidentally by installing an update.
c) A Desktop - whose motherboard went out of service.

In the end, I lost almost my digital music and around 6 months of photos which were on laptop.

Having kept identical copies on all these machines, I have now become a staunch believer in online backup services. I believe that we need a continuous backup solution and also an unlimited one.

I am now using MS onedrive and thinking of buying 100 GB of storage at $2 / month.

However there are other services as described here :
Backing Up Photos to the Cloud / 2014

I would however like to know your experience as well. Please share.

Amit

 

[bobbyprajan]

Why not setup a dedicated NAS with RAID and an interface like owncloud to share / manage the media ? RAID will protect you against hardware failures.

You can keep a backup on your laptop / another portable hard drive for data integrity. You can use something like bittorrent sync to sync data across your primary and backup storage.

Btw, even if you brick the Seagate NAS, the data would be in the hard drive, right ? Similarly the motherboard failure doesn't cause a data loss, it should be safe in the hard disk.

Sure an online cloud storage has its advantages but here bandwidth is not exactly cheap.

 

[sam9s]

I was on the same boat a couple of years ago when I accidentally ran Norten ghost on one of my data drives ... that wiped everything out. Movies, Music, Photos. I was ok with movies and music coz that is something you can collect again over a time period. BUT you simply cannot have the same photos collected for a substantial time period. I using recover software was able to recover around 40% of snaps, rest were all gone.

I decided strongly at that moment that I will keep a multiple backup of atleast family n friends photo collection. So now I have three backup location for my most precious snaps. One is my NAS which any how is protected with RAID (SHR) so if a disk fails I can have a full recover with a new disk installed. An auto backup happens between my NAS and my desktop. For that I use an awesome application called All Way Sync. It has a number of fixed criterias upon which it auto backs up my Photo share on NAS to my Desktop. What I have done is that when ever I switch on my desktop or when ever a new file is copied on to my NAS photo share location All Way Sync copies the same over to my Desktop Drive. So I have a duplicate copy at two locations.

Third is online backup. For that I initially took services from CrashPlan for 6 USD a month you get unlimited storage, it auto backsup from your desired location (computer drive) to its online storage. Sends you periodic mail as to what backup was taken and what was backed up. But 6 USD was a bit expensive for me. I then ventured in to Google Drive, which is pretty cheap for 2 USD I get 125 GB of space. My total space for my most precious photos comes to around 50 GB, rest around 30 GB is all my office data that is backup on Google Drive. Then using my NAS Cloud Sync feature I also keep a backup on my NAS which syncs between Google drive (office share) and the office share on NAS, I am still left with around 45 GB, which I dont think will be filled for atleast a year or so. Then I might plan upgrading the GB for Google Drive.

 

[avink]

For photos, I would recommend you checkout the recently launched Google Photos. It gives you decent quality backup for unlimited photos. Unless you want to backup RAW images, in which case you get a fixed free quota and can buy more. I would say its the best out there. They real power is in its search and collections feature.

I had about 20,000 pics that I backed up recently. Lot of which I had forgotten about after clicking them. Its Auto-collection creates wonderful stories based on Trips/location etc. without any user intervention. Apart from doing a simple backup, it kind of un-locks the forgotten stories and memories for you. You can search for places, things, animals etc. and the results are impressive. It doesn't even need any pre-assigned tags or metadata to do the search.

Give it a try and I am sure you will love it. ..and no I don't work for Google

 

[Ghostrider]

Based on my experience, I would strongly recommend 1TB portable hdd with decent casing which has good thick cution, one can set to backup data on regular basis on this portable drive and becomes handy to carry along or to connect anywhere.

Online backup becomes
expensive at with data growing and moreover we in India don't have good bandwidth to sync it on regular basis also to retrieve what you want becomes bit difficult once data is huge.

Either you make nas, dedicated system, online system or any one needs to take care about basic configuration and not to do much R&D unless you have replica of your data on other source.

 

[rahuln]

My solution is quite close to Sam9s. A raided nas backing up to a USB drive.

But please understand the difference between sync and backup. There are pitfalls of sync. I was using Onedrive with nas cloud sync. It messed up my onedrive structure so deleted some folders from onedrive which where synced from nas. To my surprise these pics got deleted from my nas as well and the weekly backup removed them from the USB. Fortunately I also backup to one more external drive every month and had no changes since last backup so no data loss.

Bottom line, if you are looking for backup look for backup solution and not sync solution.

For online backup there are solution from all cloud vendors like Azure Backup. You can also use the NAS to backup to cloud storage directly from NAS. Amazon storage is just one cent per GB. Please consider these solutions.

 

[sam9s]

I agree you have to understand what exactly you want, coz sync and backup are a bit different. Infact in sync as well you have to be diligent, what kind of sync you want (two way A to B and B to A, one way from only A to B or one way from only B to A .. ) Like for example I wanted a back up for my Photos (no sync), but for my office files I want a backup and a sync as well. So I make sure that my photo folder on Gdrive is not synced with my NAS, or any device with GDrive installed, BUT for my office files, I want all sync to happen so that if I work on an excel sheet from my home laptop it should be updated and available on my office laptop automatically and vice versa ......

 

[Amarendra]

Hi Sam, is there an alternative to Synology? Synology seems very expendive - about 17 k for just the casing without HDD. If I decide to build a similar machine what is the starting point ?
Thanks

 

[sud98]

I can feel your pain having lost 3 hdd due to various failures.

My current setup is as follows.

For videos/music - just the NAS. Not really interested in long term backup.

For photos - first backup is to the NAS. Then I do a cloud sync with Google Drive. Google drive of 100 GB @ $2 per month works perfectly for me. The google drive sync seems to work better for me than dropbox or onedrive.

I occasionally take a backup ( maybe once in a few months ) in a USB 2 TB drive which became redundant after the NAS purchase.

 

[sam9s]

Hi Sam, is there an alternative to Synology? Synology seems very expendive - about 17 k for just the casing without HDD. If I decide to build a similar machine what is the starting point ?
Thanks

There is no alternative to Synology as such since synology is unique solid product, with truck load of options and very very stable and requires least configuration.

How ever NAS has lots of alternative other than opting synology. For a pre built nas Netgear RN102 looks good for 10800. HOwever I have not used it nor have I read any reviewes so make sure you do that before you decide.

Other options is going DIY way, with purchasing a second hand hardware, like any duel core proc with 4GB ram and compatible mobo will do the job. The entire hardware should not cross 7-8K (excluding HDD and Display ofcourse).
Then opting a NAS OS like FreeNAS, NAS4FREE, Openfiler, Open Media Vault, AMAHI, FLEXRaid, UNRAID, FreeBSD ........... Lots of options. Google to learn the pros and cons of each OS and choose. To cut short, FreeNAS, Open Media Vault and UNRAID are pretty good. Then AMAHI and lastly Openfiler and FLEXRaid comes if you ask me how would I rate.

Below are my threads on NAS projects I did, you can go through them and see what seems good enough for you....

http://www.hifivision.com/home-theater-pc-htpc-media-pc/20232-sam9s-nas-project-powered-unraid.html

http://www.hifivision.com/home-thea...part-ii-sam9s-nas-project-powered-unraid.html

http://www.hifivision.com/home-thea...next-nas-project-powered-synology-ds413j.html

 

[amitk777]

But please understand the difference between sync and backup.

Hi Rahul,

I had not thought of this. So it means that if I accidentally delete a folder from my onedrive folder it also gets deleted on the cloud.

I need to figure out this one.

-Amit

 

[sam9s]

^^ Depends on what kind of sync you have chosen, as I explained A=>B OR B=>A or Both that is both ways A to B AND B to A .....A=><=B