Cloud Storage

Dunno if there's a thread on this, but I wanted to talk about since I have some ideas in my head.

I been using Google Apps for years, and just by having a Google Account you are granted 15 GB of free storage. The catch is on newer android devices if you take pics a lot, they will take up the 15 GB of free storage. Lately I discovered the Google Drive for Desktop application for Windows, and I was able to backup all of my important documents swiftly.

Long term I was thinking about backing up all of my other important files in another format. I have a few external hard drives, and I'm planning to get another hard drive to increase the storage that is on my PI2AES living room setup (moOde comes installed with Samba, and works best if using exFAT hard drive in it and boom, network storage). For data backup, I have one external hard drive in my apartment and another external hard drive in my safety deposit box at my credit union. I do manual backups every few months.

Seeing the prices for Google One Cloud Backup storage, I'm considering getting the 2 TB annual plan since that is enough to back up everything that I care about. However, I'm concerned about security and I'm not too 100% sure if Google or any cloud storage provider can remove files as they see it. Also, my Crapcast interest only put a data cap of 1.25 TB a month on my end, so I can only really back up everything after three or four months on the cloud.

Thoughts on this idea if this is a good idea or not? I would love to have another backup method besides the manual hard drive method that I been doing.

 

I like OneDrive. 1Tb storage plus the full MS Office suite for US$70/year.

If you buy the family plan at US$100/year you can make yourself 6 different logins and have 6Tb storage. It would be unwieldy, but unbeatable on price.

 

As an Apple user I’m using iCloud due to simplicity but I have used pCloud and IDrive in past and both are ok for the price.

 

Arguably, Google has some of the very best security of anyone in the business, and great for all of the basic consumer storage needs (photos, docs, ...) but it's not really designed for bulk backup. For a while I used my Google Drive as a backup for my Synology NAS using Synology's built-in cloud backup software, but it was rather clunky and not always reliable. In addition, giving Synology my Google login credentials made me a bit nervous. So, after some research I decided to add IDrive for backups, while still using Google for the normal consumer stuff. With IDrive, I can get automatic backups for my main personal Macbook as well as for my Linux music server (that requires some command-line mojo, though). One nice think with IDrive is that to start, they can send you a drive that you backup to and send back to them -- all encrypted with a separate key -- to avoid consuming your limited network upload budget. After that, incremental backups go over the net.

 

Yes, I'm a bit biased and I'd go with Google Cloud for business purposes, but AFAIK, Google Drive for consumer does not have good provision for efficient, easy-to-manage backups of bulk data from personal computers. That's why I use IDrive for that, besides a bunch of other replication.

 

I don't use any cloud for backup, but I use pCloud for sharing. I fell for the lifetime payment thing and signed up. I don't even have so much data that one of the as-yet-free services wouldn't be enough.

I never had enough bandwidth to do that initial the-lot backup. Now, having just got 250Mb/s fibre, perhaps I have, and might rethink it. pCloud, at least here, though, would be the bottleneck: it is slow. But I have photos of several-hundred concerts, and have shared each with the artists, and not hit their limits for the basic package yet.

Actually, I dried the pCloud-drive thing a couple of days ago. For Linux. It's dreadful. So I don't think I could use it for system backup at all.

 

Cloud storage is quite handy. The biggest decision is whether to manually or automatically sync your data. Downside to the latter the same as with any synchronized network storage, corruption in one place propagates to them all. Downside to the former is making it a routine (yes, you can make it automatically scheduled rather than real time, but the initial caveat still applies). Bottom line is follow the 3-2-1 backup rule (or better) and always have at least one offline, offsite copy of anything important.

https://www.veeam.com/blog/321-backup-rule.html

I use Veeam (free standalone agents for Linux and Windows) to backup my computers to my NAS, and regularly (every week or two) I copy those to a portable drive which I keep offline in another location. Along with those backup images are other important files, pictures, my ripped CD collection, etc.

While I use both Dropbox and Google Drive for the convenience of sharing data between people/devices/places, I don't consider it part of my backup strategy. If I did (say in place of my NAS), it would still be just as important to have copies that are kept offline. One thing I will say Google Drive is really handy for is syncing the files from my security cameras to the cloud in near-real-time - a burglar could take my NAS and my NVR, but I still have the footage.

 

Free Google Cloud storage for sharing things, OneDrive for personal files and memories (though I offloaded as much of that as I could to Google using High Quality before they started counting that towards storage limits), plus some local drives internal and external. I'm with @zerodeefex on this one, no such thing as too much redundancy when it comes to photos and videos of memories that cannot be revisited, particularly when it comes to people no longer around.

 

Thanks everyone. IDrive is really catching my eye, so I have some questions for @earnmyturns:

• Can I tell it when to backup files on a Network Drive (or local/USB storage only)?
• How easy to use their service?
• Does it allow the backup to be accessed as like a Hard Drive access in Windows or something like that?

IDrive prices are good, but I wanna see the catch.

 

It would be nice to know which services allow you to ship a hard drive to them. I gotta be honest, IDrive looks interesting to me since it's easier to give them a hard drive and boom.....

 

I only use it to backup my Macbook and one of my Linux music servers. For the Mac, I can set it up to backup regularly. I never tried to backup remote-mounted drives, but I see no reason it would not work. Usability is OK, but it requires reading docs and playing around with configuration. I don't think you can access backups as if they were remote drives, but I never looked for that.

Regarding security: I agree with @jexby that client-side encryption is in principle better. But to be honest, if you are targeted by a capable adversary, the first thing they'll do is to compromise your devices exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities, at which point you are hosed anyway. Knowing what I know professionally, I'd say that the chances that any consumer who does not work in security full time will be able to prevent that are about zero.

 

I have a 2TB Google drive subscription which is enough to store all my photos and music.

I run Roon on a Linux host at home and use rclone to mount the GDrive music folder as '/mnt/Music'. Roon is pointed to that directory and plays FLACs directly from the cloud. Works great, and I never have to worry about local hard drive failure. I ran a local NAS for a long time but I was very happy to see (and hear) it go; freaking thing was noisy.

 

I use Backblaze. Automatic backup of as many hard drives as I like (but you pay a license per computer), and it runs silently in the background and automatically updates when new files are added. If one of my drives ever goes down, I can either download the contents online to another drive, or Backblaze will send me a physical hard drive with the content on it for me to copy over. This is purely for whole drive backups though, I can’t remotely access and download individual files like I can with Google Drive or iCloud.

 

I tried IDrive. Super easy to use, Network Drive friendly, and super easy to do backups. I did the free 5 GB option to see how I would like it, and so far I like it. Thinking heavily of doing the two year plan and ask them to send me a hard drive so I don't have to waste my data cap with Crapcast. Thanks @earnmyturns!.

I did a test of music storage backup with my Google Drive, and it keep error me out. Simple files and simple backups it is for Google.

 

If you have Amazon prime, you get unlimited photo storage, and a windows or Mac app to back up. I have almost 700GB of raw photos in Amazon Photos. I don’t use Amazon photos at all, but acadio ally I access the photos via Amazon drive. A no brainer if you have prime.

for the rest of my files, I use google drive. Check with your alma mater, if you have one. Mine happens to offer google for red, with unlimited storage. It’s really unlimited (so far) as I have over 11 TB there. I use rclone and other local tools to move data around my local network, then into drive.

 

How can you tell your limit on Google drive through a college login? I can access my college email Google drive, and it says I’m using 1.32 GB, but I’m not seeing any place to see my drive limit.

 

Hey, thanks for that. Looks like it is limited only to photo storage, but still good to know.