Mustachian Data Backup Help

[tj]

My external hard drive which was 5-10 years old has failed. Does anyone have any mustachian suggestions for a replacement?

This is primarily to back up an extensive MP3 music collection. I wonder if if a cloud service might make sense for this rather than an actual drive?

It's around 170 GB currently....

[tj]

To answer my own question, Amazon Music will back up 250,000 MP3 files for $24.99/year. This is probably more convenient than replacing an external hard drive every couple years. I can't imagine my collection would ever be greater than 250,000 files.

[johnny847]

I forget, do they match your mp3 files or do you have to upload them? Because depending on your upload speed, uploading 170gb could be an impractical solution.

[tj]

I forget, do they match your mp3 files or do you have to upload them? Because depending on your upload speed, uploading 170gb could be an impractical solution.

They match 'em if they have it, otherwise it's a upload.  I expect it will take a few weeks to upload what is not match-able. It would certainly take less time to buy another external drive and transfer it, but when that drive eventually fails, have to do it all over again. I like the cloud solution, plus I can access it from other devices with the Amazon Music app. On the other hand, when i eventually replace computers, I'd have to rely on the Cloud lasting indefinitely and being stuck with whatever Amazon chooses to charge, or do a computer-to-computer transfer.

[JLee]

You can upload up to 50,000 songs to Google Play for free.

[tj]

You can upload up to 50,000 songs to Google Play for free.

I don't know why I thought that wouldn't be enough storage. as I currently seem to be at 33,000 files. Of course, I probably won't even listen to all of these again throughout the course of my remaining lifespan, but that's a separate issue entirely.

[aFrugalFather]

170GB is not much at all.  A 2TB portable drive sells for $70 pretty regularly on sale.  Alternatively if you have  tech friend with a blu-ray burner you can back that up to a few discs that you can get for 30 cents each at 25GB each.  For the price I if you value your collection I'd def. suggest a local backup in addition to a cloud backup for redundancy. 

[TomTX]

Buy a couple of external hard drives. They're cheap. Put one in a media rated fire safe.

Hell, I got a 128GB flash drive for $25 at Costco on Black Friday. Next year that should be a 256 for the same price.

[tj]

Buy a couple of external hard drives. They're cheap. Put one in a media rated fire safe.

Hell, I got a 128GB flash drive for $25 at Costco on Black Friday. Next year that should be a 256 for the same price.

No kidding, I didn't realize flash drives had that much capacity...I think my current flash drive is like 256 MB!

[Scandium]

Local (only)  backup isn't backup. Where are your other important things backed up? Tax info, family photos etc? I use crash plan to back that up to the cloud, and it didn't cost any more to toss my mp3 collection there too. It's $60 per year. And I have my music on Google play as well, and my documents on Dropbox..

[tj]

Local (only)  backup isn't backup. Where are your other important things backed up? Tax info, family photos etc? I use crash plan to back that up to the cloud, and it didn't cost any more to toss my mp3 collection there too. It's $60 per year. And I have my music on Google play as well, and my documents on Dropbox..

do you password protect the important documents that you send to the cloud? (E.G. Do you have a password protected zip with all your tax info embedded within it?) All of my photos are on Facebook. My parents probably have photos of me that are pre-Facebook, but I don't. I admittedly only have local copies of the recent tax years that I filed electronically (hard copies of the rest). CrashPlan looks feasible. of course if they go bankrupt, your hard drive crashes, and you need access to the data, you're out of luck.

[JLee]

Local (only)  backup isn't backup. Where are your other important things backed up? Tax info, family photos etc? I use crash plan to back that up to the cloud, and it didn't cost any more to toss my mp3 collection there too. It's $60 per year. And I have my music on Google play as well, and my documents on Dropbox..

do you password protect the important documents that you send to the cloud? (E.G. Do you have a password protected zip with all your tax info embedded within it?) All of my photos are on Facebook. My parents probably have photos of me that are pre-Facebook, but I don't. I admittedly only have local copies of the recent tax years that I filed electronically (hard copies of the rest). CrashPlan looks feasible. of course if they go bankrupt, your hard drive crashes, and you need access to the data, you're out of luck.

The chances of Crashplan going down without plenty of prior notice while you have a simultaneous hard drive failure are so small, you're probably about as likely to win the lottery.

[csprof]

Buy a couple of external hard drives. They're cheap. Put one in a media rated fire safe.

Hell, I got a 128GB flash drive for $25 at Costco on Black Friday. Next year that should be a 256 for the same price.

But don't use flash for backups -- the long-term retention is poor.  Magnetic media will last longer, assuming the entire drive doesn't fail.  Which it will, of course. :)

You found a great choice for just music (it's cheap for Amazon to offer because so many people have the same stuff that they're not really storing all of the data multiple times).

For general backups, I like:

(a)  Amazon offers an unlimited cloud storage deal that's pretty intriguing if you really use it - $60/year.   Their terms make me a little twitchy, but I bet for most people it's fine.

(b)  Also in the $60/year range is Backblaze, which is a quite nice option.  I would opine that Backblaze is more likely to experience a catastrophic data center failure than Amazon is, but less likely to screw you over for some technical ToS violation, but that's a vague hunch, not a solid prediction.

(c)  Dropbox and Google are both $10/month for 1TB, without the ToS twitch that AWS unlimited gives me or the "you only have one datacenter" twitch that Backblaze does.

(d)  Crashplan's price is right;  I'm out of date on that one.

[Scandium]

Local (only)  backup isn't backup. Where are your other important things backed up? Tax info, family photos etc? I use crash plan to back that up to the cloud, and it didn't cost any more to toss my mp3 collection there too. It's $60 per year. And I have my music on Google play as well, and my documents on Dropbox..

do you password protect the important documents that you send to the cloud? (E.G. Do you have a password protected zip with all your tax info embedded within it?) All of my photos are on Facebook. My parents probably have photos of me that are pre-Facebook, but I don't. I admittedly only have local copies of the recent tax years that I filed electronically (hard copies of the rest). CrashPlan looks feasible. of course if they go bankrupt, your hard drive crashes, and you need access to the data, you're out of luck.

Yes I have all docs in an encrypted Truecrypt container (version pre shutdown. Still looking for an alternative app). Of course using a 15+ letter password stored in a KeePass database.

Facebook only store compressed, low-res versions of photos, I would not consider that backup.

[gGb164OwAY]

Local (only)  backup isn't backup. Where are your other important things backed up? Tax info, family photos etc? I use crash plan to back that up to the cloud, and it didn't cost any more to toss my mp3 collection there too. It's $60 per year. And I have my music on Google play as well, and my documents on Dropbox..

+1 for CrashPlan. Have been using it for 5 years now. Very satisfied with the service.

[tj]

Their terms make me a little twitchy, but I bet for most people it's fine.

What about their terms bothers you?

[zolotiyeruki]

Replying to subscribe.  I'm geeky, so I've set up BTSync across three computers with automatic incremental backups in one location.  Kinda my own personal cloud.

[Thegoblinchief]

With something like music or video that has tons of data but shouldn't need updating frequently, I'd do a sneakernet backup. Just store everything on a portable drive (or Blurays) and stash at local friend or family.

For low data but more frequently changed things like documents, use Drive or Drop box.

[Scandium]

With something like music or video that has tons of data but shouldn't need updating frequently, I'd do a sneakernet backup. Just store everything on a portable drive (or Blurays) and stash at local friend or family.

For low data but more frequently changed things like documents, use Drive or Drop box.

This is good advice. Also wanted to and that crashplan allow you to back up to a friend's pc for free. I'm unsure how it works exactly, but think it's basically what you said, except you don't have to remember to ferry HDDs back and forth.

 And for music there is really no reason not to upload everything to Google play (unless you have some Google hatred I guess). I thought it was 25k tracks, but someone here said it was 50k for free. And you can listen to them anywhere from your phone too. Not true archive since it's mp3, but hey its free backup..

[csprof]

Their terms make me a little twitchy, but I bet for most people it's fine.

What about their terms bothers you?

They reserve the right to cancel you if your use is "different" from normal use.  It's phrased in such a way that it's not even clear they have to give you time to get your data back.  Section 5.2 of the ToS:

We may terminate the Agreement or restrict, suspend or terminate your use of the Service at our discretion without notice at any time, including if we determine that your use violates the Agreement, is improper, substantially exceeds or differs from normal use by other users, or otherwise involves fraud or misuse of the Service or harms our interests or those of another user of the Service. If your Service Plan is restricted, suspended or terminated, you may be unable to access Your Files and you will not receive any refund of fees or any other compensation.

Most other places have similar weaselterms, but I feel better about using 1TB when I'm paying for 1TB, because it's hard to claim that I'm being weird by explicitly using what I've paid for.

[Tundra_Man]

Another Crashplan user here.

You can use Crashplan to back up to other computers for free. So I have all of my systems backing up to one central location, then use one paid Crashplan account to back all of that up to the cloud.

I also have an old portable USB drive that I'm using for redundant backups, but when it finally dies I probably won't replace it. The chances of both my local backup system and Crashplan going down are pretty darn slim.

[WSUCoug1994]

As a family we created a "cloud" between our four homes with Synology Devices.  Is this the cheapest option?  Likely no.  But we have a 20T cloud that will serve media and documents to anyone at any time on any device.  These are NAS devices and are cheap and easy to use.  They are particularly Mac friendly.  They have awesome mobile applications, can be used for security camera's or just about anything that you want.  Fast and simple.  Everything has two redundant locations for backup. 

For example, when you enter any of the homes wifi networks - it auto backs up your phone or laptop.  Just super cool technology that is easy to do and is distributed so failure is nearly impossible.

[FrugalKube]

Interesting topic. I used a 2 TB External but I also back most important docs/pics to Google Drive

[jeromedawg]

Last year I got a Netgear ReadyNAS 104 on sale at Newegg and picked up four 2TB hard drives. It was a few hundred bucks but I've consolidated all our data onto it and also went with Crashplan (I got 1 year free from the CP booth at a security conference I attended several years ago so that's how I was introduced). Aside from consolidating all our data (pictures, docs, mp3s, etc), I have our Macbook Air (time machine) and phones (syncme) backing up to it on a daily basis. And I have headless Crashplan running on it which does a daily sync to the CP servers. The initial backup took a really long time and I had a few hiccups and downtime backing up to CP for a while but got it resolved recently and all looks good now. I feel pretty secure about this setup. Frys had a sale on the ReadyNAS 204 and I picked up a couple (probably will resell at least one to turn a profit) - not sure if I'll replace the 104 with the 204 but either way I'll sell whichever I don't use. If I really wanted to go overboard, I would setup the second NAS at my in-laws' house and do offsite remote backups. If you have a lot of important data that you're worried about, this isn't a bad solution to go with. There's some up-front cost but I guess it comes down to how much the data is worth to you.

If you're into DIY and learning techie stuff, you could try building and configuring your own nas with FreeNAS. I started going down this route but decided it wasn't worth it with the system I had built because the power draw was insane. I'm sure the newer enclosures and drives are much more power efficient but the time to setup is really the bigger part of the investment here. In the end, you get a more powerful and flexible solution vs consumer-grade NASes, many of which are relatively "set in stone"

I also have many of our more recent pictures backing up to Google Photos in addition. What I haven't come up with yet is an efficient workflow for backing up the pictures off my camera (OMD EM10) - I'm so lazy about taking the memory card out and popping it in to do backups. I won't even do post-processing anyway. I uploaded a ton of mp3s to Google Music as well. But I think I still have the original copies of pictures and mp3s on my NAS. The problem with pics and mp3s on the NAS is more the accessibility - I'd rather load up Google Photos and Google Music if I want to view pics or listen to music. We probably rely on Google Photos more than anything, especially now with a kid.

[jeromedawg]

As a family we created a "cloud" between our four homes with Synology Devices.  Is this the cheapest option?  Likely no.  But we have a 20T cloud that will serve media and documents to anyone at any time on any device.  These are NAS devices and are cheap and easy to use.  They are particularly Mac friendly.  They have awesome mobile applications, can be used for security camera's or just about anything that you want.  Fast and simple.  Everything has two redundant locations for backup. 

For example, when you enter any of the homes wifi networks - it auto backs up your phone or laptop.  Just super cool technology that is easy to do and is distributed so failure is nearly impossible.

Curious - are you using proprietary software from Synology or something to do all the automated backing up you refer to? Or have you setup up separate adhoc automated processes to do those things (e.g. backing up phone or laptop when connecting to wifi).

[Sid Hoffman]

Yes I have all docs in an encrypted Truecrypt container (version pre shutdown. Still looking for an alternative app).

You're looking for VeraCrypt which is regularly updated and can read/convert old TrueCrypt containers.  You're welcome.  :)

[Scandium]

The problem with pics and mp3s on the NAS is more the accessibility - I'd rather load up Google Photos and Google Music if I want to view pics or listen to music. We probably rely on Google Photos more than anything, especially now with a kid.

I'm sure there's an app to access your photos from your NAS. For music I use Subsonic on my server. http://www.subsonic.org
With the mobile app it'll let you access all your music (and videos too I think, but never tried it) anywhere from your server, and if you pay it'll also give you a dynamic DNS (or you can set up your own).
ps; I see lifetime subscription is now $100. A bit steep IMO. When I got it years ago it was $30. Still fantastic software though

[katsiki]

Another Crashplan user here.

You can use Crashplan to back up to other computers for free. So I have all of my systems backing up to one central location, then use one paid Crashplan account to back all of that up to the cloud.

I also have an old portable USB drive that I'm using for redundant backups, but when it finally dies I probably won't replace it. The chances of both my local backup system and Crashplan going down are pretty darn slim.

Hmm... I had never thought of using CrashPlan in this way.  Are you backing it up between computers as if you were backing up to a friend?  ie the free option.  If so, are these machines in the same location?

I'm on the family plan now so this could save me some bucks..  Thanks for mentioning it!

[jeromedawg]

Another Crashplan user here.

You can use Crashplan to back up to other computers for free. So I have all of my systems backing up to one central location, then use one paid Crashplan account to back all of that up to the cloud.

I also have an old portable USB drive that I'm using for redundant backups, but when it finally dies I probably won't replace it. The chances of both my local backup system and Crashplan going down are pretty darn slim.

Hmm... I had never thought of using CrashPlan in this way.  Are you backing it up between computers as if you were backing up to a friend?  ie the free option.  If so, are these machines in the same location?

I'm on the family plan now so this could save me some bucks..  Thanks for mentioning it!

Yea, I believe you just run the CP app on all computers and dedicate one of those computers as the destination which would have a license to back up to CP's servers. Then have all your other computers backing up to the destination that you designated. Doing it this way, I don't think you even need all the computers in the same physical location - my understanding of 'free' CP is that you can backup to other computers remotely without having to be on-site. That is definitely a cost-effective way to do things. If you want to get really fancy (especially if this is just for an onsite backup with many computers) you can just back everything up to a NAS and then back the NAS up to CP using headless CP (though, the setup for this might be a bit more technically involved)...

[WSUCoug1994]

As a family we created a "cloud" between our four homes with Synology Devices.  Is this the cheapest option?  Likely no.  But we have a 20T cloud that will serve media and documents to anyone at any time on any device.  These are NAS devices and are cheap and easy to use.  They are particularly Mac friendly.  They have awesome mobile applications, can be used for security camera's or just about anything that you want.  Fast and simple.  Everything has two redundant locations for backup. 

For example, when you enter any of the homes wifi networks - it auto backs up your phone or laptop.  Just super cool technology that is easy to do and is distributed so failure is nearly impossible.

Curious - are you using proprietary software from Synology or something to do all the automated backing up you refer to? Or have you setup up separate adhoc automated processes to do those things (e.g. backing up phone or laptop when connecting to wifi).

Synology has a ton of applications that are pre-installed for the back-up features.  They also have an "app store" where they have applications (their own and 3rd party) you can download to the device.  It is really impressive IMO.