Last year, I wrote an article about using the cloud for backups and doing it securely. There have been some big changes in the area since then, and I wanted to return to it and update some of my recommendations and add some new tools to the mix as well. This is part 1 of a three part series on using Cloud Services. Part 1 will revisit backups, Part 2 will cover storing passwords securely in the cloud, and Part 3 will show you how to keep track of every thought that crosses your mind and make it available anywhere, all through the cloud.
The first thing I need to revisit, is that I had recommended Mozy as an online backup solution. At the time, I was using it myself and was very happy with it. In February though, Mozy changed their pricing plan to take away the $50 a year unlimited plan and moved to a tiered plan that was going to end up costing me over $100 a year and cap my backups at 125GB. I was really disappointed in this, especially since, with my slow network connection, it took a long time to get the backups done in the first place, and secondly because I felt betrayed. I was afraid this would start a trend among the online backup companies, but it didn’t, and several vowed never to “pull a Mozy”. I will say Mozy was good about letting me cancel when my contract was up, thank God for small favors.
So I looked for an alternative, and found a great solution that I had used before, but was now much improved. CrashPlan offers an unlimited backup option for around $50 a year, similar to what Mozy was offering before, and similar to what Carbonite and Backblaze, and several others offer. In addition, they have a novel feature that allows you to make backups to either a friend’s computer, or a local drive you have attached to your computer. Both of those features are free, and you can download the software and use them without paying anything to CrashPlan. For the friend feature, your friend has to install the software and give you a code found in their copy. After that, you can share space on your machine with your friend, they can share with you, or you can each share space for the other. You set the amount of space you want to share, and all of the backups are encrypted before they leave your computer, so you don’t have to worry about anyone snooping through your stuff, no matter how much you trust your friends. Using these features together gives you a really powerful solution. You can buy a external hard drive fairly inexpensively (Western Digital makes a nice 1TB model for $70 at Amazon). Send it to your friend and have them add it to their machine. At these prices, you should just each buy one, or make your backups stronger by getting a second friend in on the mix, and you each could end up with multiple off-site backups. You get their code and add their computer as a destination and start backing up. If you ever have a problem, you can recover your backup over the network, or they can send you the drive and you can attach it directly to your machine and recover the backups very quickly over USB. Using this friend share, or even backing up to a local drive is a good start, but I think it’s best combined with using their online backup server.
A service like this gives you true remote storage and professional backup storage. Your friend may be a nice guy and all, but he probably doesn’t have RAID 5 storage with backups of backups. He doesn’t have redundant power and internet and climate controlled server rooms. These are things you get with a paid service. They also store multiple versions of your files, and they promise to only remove the old backups of deleted files when you tell them to. Another plus for the CrashPlan software is that it allows backing up from attached drives, something that Carbonite doesn’t offer. Use them both and you have quick access to a friend’s computer, and bulletproof backups if things get worse.
Next week, in Part 2 I’ll discuss a free service that can not only remember all of your passwords securely, it will help you create more secure passwords and improve how you use them. Read on for LastPass.