I had a play around with quite a few of the "free" cloud services after Sugarsynch started charging 80$ for their previously free entry level service. Some of them were targeted towards: Sharing documents and photos between devices. Sharing documents with your colleagues. Online editing of office documents. Not what I wanted at all, what I needed was a secure online cloud service that would shadow my important office documents in case of failure. I ended up with: 50GB free on Box,com 30GB free on OneDrive.com 50GB free on MEGA.nz 51.25 GB free on DropBox 15GB Google drive The only one that I use is the MEGA account, I have one folder (called "MyDocs"), current size 366 MB which holds all my office documents, no important documents on my desktop, a desktop shortcut points to a subfolder in MyDocs for frequently referenced documents such as daily accounts. Megasynch means that as soon as I finish editing a document it is shadowed to MEGA. If I needed a previous version of a document I could look in the online MEGA / RubbishBin / SynchDebris / YYYY-MM-DD folder where the replaced versions are stored, there can be several versions of a file saved in there for a specific date, each showing the creation time, never had to use this. Occasional I copy the online (shadow) folder to a new online folder named with the date. Seems secure, unless the authorities get involved as they did with Megaupload, but there is similar risk with any cloud service.
I use Office 365 for my email costs me about 40 quid a year, I like Outlook and I very much like Exchange Server which is why I am willing to pay that much, it comes with 1TB of storage on OneDrive which sound great but the OneDrive sync clients are terrible, the home version is a totally different technology from the Business version and both sync clients have a poor user interface. Mega I quite liked, I stored music and family videos, and some scans of very old family photos when I was a kid, total 47 GB so basically it is full, took forever to upload it all but then that is what most of these companies are relying on, that most people will to too lazy to ever upload very much stuff. Today SpiderOakOne is uploading at about 2GB an hour so it's going to be a few months before my 700 GB is fully uploaded or two weeks if I dedicate one PC to the job full time, at home it would be months 2.5 months approximately
Meanwhile manual mirroring to my new replacement drive which arrived today is going to take about 12 hours to mirror 2.2 TB.
Is that the full office package? We are just about to embark on O365 migration Complete office with 5oGB mailbox and 1TB of OneDrive
I get the real Office apps through my apps qualifying us for MSDN, so my private personal package is the basic email only package but that still includes the OneDrive Storage, it would be over 100quid a year if I rented the Office Applications as well. The business gets 25 full Office 365 accounts the top end ones (can't remember the name) but we also get rights to loads of internal use software for the business as well. Their licencing is a mess, to be honest, really hard to understand any of it these days, god knows how they make money.
Well one week into my subscription to SpiderOakOne and I've uploaded 149 GB, actually about 23 GB less than that as they de-duplicate items that you store and I had my daughters graduation DVD in there twice along with a few other large videos that I had stored in two places. So I am fairly happy, I think my entire set of Lightroom catalogs will be backed up about 3 or 4 weeks from now
uploaded my first 250mb on spideroak (took less than 10 mins) just now havnt worked out how to see whats backed up yet can see doc titles but dont know how to open
It's a backup service, you have to download back to your own hard drive in order to use the files, purely for backup mate so that you have offsite secure copy of anything that is important to you.
149 GIGA BYTE that's about 600 times (off the top of my head) more than your 0.25 GB Keith I'm stunned that it is even possible to contemplate uploading that much, I had thought about adapting my own encryption code and upload my stuff to Microsoft OneDrive as I have a Terrabyte of free space there too but SpiderOak is just rather elegant, which is why I forked out cash for it At that upload rate I can tell that either your files were compressible (documents and the likes) or you were close to maxing out over a fibre connection, if you do have fibre then it is actually capable of much greater upload speeds but SpiderOak is throttled to a maximum of about 4.5 Mb (mega bit) per second, it won't receive faster than that from any one client, I know that because our upload bandwidth is 3 or 4 times larger than that. At home it maxed out the upload capability of my old fashioned 1Mb (upload) broadband I get about 15Mb download speed at home which is fine for me.
I use Western Digital MyDrive / MyCloud which is a unit you keep at home. Allows you to access your files from anywhere on the planet (as long as the internet is working at home!). Very useful and great for PC formats as you can dump to it and then recover. Downside is it needs to go via the router and no direct access. Means that instead of getting 100/1000 connection direct your limited to your Router capabilities. Which if its with an ISP is normally the cheapest routers possible.
Agreed home routers are often a terrible limiting factor, the thing I have is an old device supplied by Sky, 1oo Megabit for wired connections, can't remember the speed of the wireless as I stopped caring some years ago. Biggest issue was the local 100 Megabit LAN the router provides it was extremely stupid even back then, but I stopped running a wired home network, still need to do something about that here and in the Phils, I would like a proper wired network at home over there. The MyDrive/Cloud thing is a good idea but for me my upload limits on broadband make it pointless as a server device and really I use the house as a store for one copy of my disks, the other copy is on me and SpiderOak will provide a third and offsite backup, I am now up to over 200 GB uploaded, my photography is my most precious data apart from my 30 years worth of code and in three weeks or so I will have a secure copy of my photography independent of my home and my own physical devices, after that I'll copy up my development work as well but I already have redundant cloud backup of all of my important code, would be nice to have all the old stuff up there too
MyDrive is very convenient but one should consider the security implications of these web-enabled devices. #justsayin
If building a device by hand, i.e. a small PC and an external drive and sharing it at least then you have some control, you could TrueCrypt the drive and put some good streaming software on the PC that had the drive as its source of data, then make sure you had a good firewall and secure passwords, all you need then is some remote access software onto the PC so you can mount and dismount the drive. I would also say that this is overkill for a personal movie collection or even my photo collection, with today's broadband for most people being only a little bit better than an old 10BASE-T wired connection we are still very limited in what we ourselves can serve to the internet from a home connection, it is changing and fibre makes a hell of a difference but even fibre is only just getting to 10BASE-T upload speeds today because the ISP's throttle it!
Even if the ISP assures us they don't throttle the connection I'd treat web-enabled storage with some caution but in the same way i treat my portable non web-enabled hard drive, that is, i'd encrypt what i deemed important enough for encryption. If it was ever nicked or lost my mind would be at rest despite the overall inconvenience. I think some of these devices have encryption but the actual mechanism of encrypting isn't always 100%.
I don't actually encrypt my laptops, and I have a lot of them, I don't do it because it would slow them down to a degree that would upset me. I have thought about it though, I only generally encrypt the drives that I travel with, so one half of my backup is encrypted and the other half is normal, the reason for that is that a corrupted encrypted drive can't be recovered but a normal native drive can be read by raw disk level recovery tools, so I make a 50/50 gamble that one of the drives will still work, with the bias that the unencrypted drive is more recoverable as long as the issue is not the click of death If I lost a normal drive, I would be very quickly buying another one and restoring to an unencrypted world the encrypted version and if I lost the encrypted drive I would restore it from the normal one, yes I could lose both, I hope that does not happen, but SpiderOak fixes that hopefully My point in going on about this is that encryption is a valuable tool for all of us, privacy matters, but my backup strategy while using some encrypted drives does not attempt to hide anything as I have open copies of everything. But I would never have anything really important on the web that was not encrypted, I have no fears about my content but storage outside MY personal borders must be secure!
Totally agree. So easy in this social media-centric world to divulge things without a second thought.
I am having problems with my hard drive.... I do have an external....... How do I go about backing stuff up, including all links in the bookmarks and stuff...??
You can simply copy and paste files as a bare minimum approach but externals generally come with backup software. You can export favs/links from your browser to a file and again copy and paste the file to the external drive. If you want Windows to manage a scheduled backup i can show you Dom.
