I'd like to back up my laptop to the cloud. I tried the Carbonite 15 day trial, and after 14 days, it only backed up 13 GB — about 34% of my hard drive and that doesn't include music files in the trial. I've got a 500 GB hard drive and run about 75% full, a part of which is program files which I wouldn't back up. I searched online and saw SpiderOak and Mozy — but both of those seem a lot more expensive.
Anyone have any advice?
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+Scott Cramer
If you are trying to back-up your entire hard drive, you will never be satisfied with a cloud based solution.
The problems you are encountering are not those of the product per se'.
The small amount of data you see actually making it to the cloud is due to a combination of things but largely it is because of the bandwidth you have available.
Services like those you have mentioned will do a great job of backing up specific drive locations (folders) – provided you leave the computer on during the initial back-up and the machine is left on long enough for subsequent back-ups to complete. If you have a ton of data to move… It will take a long time. 500 GB of cloud storage is also rather expensive. Not very cost effective for a home user.
Rather than backing up your entire hard drive, put all of the stuff you want to back-up in one or two folders… See how big they are and back those up to the cloud… And also to an external drive (or, if possible, an extra internal drive – they are easy to install on most desktop computers)
SyncToy can be used to automate back-ups and the command line version can be used to create scheduled tasks. Of course you can also run the Windows back-up utility to help with the process too – it will compress data in to a nice neat package that can speed some things up.
There is absolutely no reason to back up an operating system, because it is not possible to simply copy it to a new drive and expect it to just work…
If you need additional info – I'm more than happy
+Rich LaDuca Thanks for taking the time to type all that. 😉 My laptop is pretty much on and abused 24/7 and in hibernation on the trip to and from the office. I've got cable broadband at office and at home, but you are correct, it does not appear to be very fast backing things up — at least with the initial Carbonite backup. I've had mediocre luck with external hard drives failing on me; Western Digital has become sort of a four letter word here. I like your multifaceted approach. I'm going to think about working that into the picture. SpiderOak does 2 GB of data for free. I might back up Word and text files there, at least, depending on what my final solution is.
Try this too…
http://speedtest.net/
Start Test…
The math is sobering…
You are seeing transfer rates measured in MegaBits per second
Convert that into to the Gigabytes you want to get through.
I'm a little over the top..
I run a RAID 5 on this machine. Scheduled tasks that compress the book I am working on to an additional internal drive and also to an external drive… And I send the uncompressed data to Mozy.
That's only 650 MB
don't trust flash drives.
There's no "over the top" if you've ever felt the terrible pang in your stomach when you've lost data.
CrashPlan… and spend the money to get the Seed Drive, so they can send you a USB drive, you do an initial backup to that, fedex it back to them, and then you're only doing incrementals from that point forward.
(Edit: Oh, and if you do the family plan, the seed drive can carry multiple machines' initial backups back to the mothership)