Permanent cloud storage- who do you use?

[blueschica]

I would be interested in what has worked for others here.  I have been digitizing/having digitized tons of stuff since selling my mom's house this fall- old movies, photos, etc.  I know it's going to cost something, but am more interested in what works well when you want to get stuff back out, and who is reputable. Not real interested in Microsoft One Drive since I have had trouble with it in the past. Thanks in advance!  

Edited November 27, 2023 by blueschica

[treeduck]

I use cumulus and stratus normally, but I sometimes change things up and go with cirrus, cirrostratus, mammatus, nimbus, fractus, altostratus and even stratocumulus now and again. And once in a blue moon I'll use a cumulonimbus capillatus or a cumulus mediocris or even an arcus.

[blueschica]

Ha! I took this seriously at the beginning and thought  "I'll have to look these up, I haven't heard of them!"  

[grep]

I don't bother with the cloud.  I've got a 3 tiered system of backups here in the home office. Meaning at least** 3 copies of everything important. All on hard drives, that only get turned on for backup related activity.

My thinking is that if there's a catastrophic event, while i'm grabbing my go-kit I'm also grabbing the 4 drives (copy 3) closest to the office door and storing them in the padded case ready to go.

 

I have jobs scheduled to do nightly backups from my working copies to level (1) weekly, level (1) is copied to level (2). Monthly (last calendar Friday) level (2) goes to level (3).  So the absolute worst thing that can happen is that I lose 1 month of work/stuff. 

Daily,  if I f**k up my working copy of something...I just restore from level (1) or (2), depending on the mistake. 

 

All 3 levels are sets of 4 separate physical 8TB drives each.   So 12 8TB drives.  Which has grown from a mix of much smaller drives when i started this all.

Is it perfect? No.  But reliability and redundancy is good enough.  Plus, I don't have to pay anyone for mind my data for me, and I'm in control.

The drives were expensive,  but they've been upgraded over time, and now I think I have enough room for 5 years of growth at least. Given that I'm already got probably 75%-80% of the stuff I ever want to preserve.

80% of what I'm storing is personal docs, the music collection, the photo/video collection, and historic/my own software.  All of which is either irreplaceable, or extremely difficult to recreate.

**At least means that for some stuff I also have an intraday copy, like a checkpoint a couple of times a day as a fail-safe. In case something goes boom before the nightly level (1) does it's thing.

Edited November 27, 2023 by grep

[blueschica]

1 hour ago, grep said:

I don't bother with the cloud.  I've got a 3 tiered system of backups here in the home office. Meaning at least** 3 copies of everything important. All on hard drives, that only get turned on for backup related activity.

My thinking is that if there's a catastrophic event, while i'm grabbing my go-kit I'm also grabbing the 4 drives (copy 3) closest to the office door and storing them in the padded case ready to go.

 

I have jobs scheduled to do nightly backups from my working copies to level (1) weekly, level (1) is copied to level (2). Monthly (last calendar Friday) level (2) goes to level (3).  So the absolute worst thing that can happen is that I lose 1 month of work/stuff. 

Daily,  if I f**k up my working copy of something...I just restore from level (1) or (2), depending on the mistake. 

 

All 3 levels are sets of 4 separate physical 8TB drives each.   So 12 8TB drives.  Which has grown from a mix of much smaller drives when i started this all.

Is it perfect? No.  But reliability and redundancy is good enough.  Plus, I don't have to pay anyone for mind my data for me, and I'm in control.

The drives were expensive,  but they've been upgraded over time, and now I think I have enough room for 5 years of growth at least. Given that I'm already got probably 75%-80% of the stuff I ever want to preserve.

80% of what I'm storing is personal docs, the music collection, the photo/video collection, and historic/my own software.  All of which is either irreplaceable, or extremely difficult to recreate.

**At least means that for some stuff I also have an intraday copy, like a checkpoint a couple of times a day as a fail-safe. In case something goes boom before the nightly level (1) does it's thing.

Thank you for the organizational plan! I have considered something like this as well. I like the different levels dependent on how frequently you work with them. Padded case for your drives, ready to go, is impressive! 

Edited November 27, 2023 by blueschica

[HemiBeers]

ahhhh backups. dealt with them in many forms over a 38 year IT career that I retired from last year. At first I a skeptical of cloud backup, but now I'm a convert. Too many years of carrying briefcases with backup tapes home every night to keep offsite. Doing backups at work to tape was just too slow and costly and we converted to Veeam shortly before I left. Can't beat em so join em. 

 

I just signed up with idrive for my personal laptop. while I haven't needed to restore any files, so far it seems to be backing up just fine. And it's cheap...like $3 a year, or more depending on your volume. A novel thought might be to sign up with 2 cloud services for redundancy. Or go with a cloud backup service and a NAS device,  which is a box of drives on your home network for about $400-500. Since you've had issues with one service, I'd recommend a redundant backup service or device to give you piece of mind. 

[blueschica]

1 hour ago, HemiBeers said:

ahhhh backups. dealt with them in many forms over a 38 year IT career that I retired from last year. At first I a skeptical of cloud backup, but now I'm a convert. Too many years of carrying briefcases with backup tapes home every night to keep offsite. Doing backups at work to tape was just too slow and costly and we converted to Veeam shortly before I left. Can't beat em so join em. 

 

I just signed up with idrive for my personal laptop. while I haven't needed to restore any files, so far it seems to be backing up just fine. And it's cheap...like $3 a year, or more depending on your volume. A novel thought might be to sign up with 2 cloud services for redundancy. Or go with a cloud backup service and a NAS device,  which is a box of drives on your home network for about $400-500. Since you've had issues with one service, I'd recommend a redundant backup service or device to give you piece of mind. 

Congratulations on retirement!  This is helpful to read; I have seen good reviews of I drive.    I knew I would get some good feedback from TRF!

[launchpad67a]

Are you just looking for offsite storage? Or are you looking for actual "offsite backup / disaster recovery"? Because they are different. If you just need to store files somewhere, it's super simple to pull that off without a service. If you want actual "backup / recovery" that's more complex and requires a service.

How much data are you talking about here?