“While Time Machine might be an excellent backup solution if you are physically near your Time Capsule, it doesn’t help at all once you’ve stepped out of your home and you begin traveling with your MacBook Pro. You could go hours, days, or even weeks without any backups at all… depending on how long you’re away from your home! If you go on a vacation for 2 weeks with your laptop, you just went 2 weeks without any backup at all! This is obviously not acceptable for anybody who cares about keeping their data safe,” Rose writes. “Sure, you could travel with a portable hard drive to backup onto, but (a) that will weigh you down a little bit more, and I like to travel as lightly as possible; and (b) that may not protect you in case of a theft.”
Rose writes, “Therefore, I have now turned to an online backup service in the cloud (in addition to my Time Machine backups), because this online backup service keeps my MacBook Pro backed up at ALL TIMES, even when I’m away from home. All I need is an Internet connection, and my data is backed up. Online backup services are wonderful because they are INEXPENSIVE (only $5 per month!) and they provide an UNLIMITED AMOUNT OF STORAGE SPACE (unlimited!) for your online backups. They even keep files that you’ve deleted off your Mac for up to 30 days, so you can still retrieve files that you accidentally deleted off your Mac.”
Rose reports, “I compared the 5 leading online backup services, and my #1 favorite online backup service is now backblaze.com, because it is totally Mac-like in its simplicity and ease-of-use.”
Read more about why Rose chose backblaze and which other services he looked at in the full article – recommended – here.
The best online backup would integrate with time capsule, letting one back up over the internet back to their time capsule. For this to work, BackToMyMac need to work better over a larger variety of routers.
Any other independent solution would have to scale somehow; I don’t even want to try to back up 500GB over the internet, that would take forever.
Dropbox is my weapon of choice, it’s a fantastically easy solution.
@ NCIceman you think 500GB is allot? I’d like to have my 6TB raid backed up
Any online backup service is a bad idea.
Don’t confuse convenience with safety and intelligence.
I’ll check it out!
What’s a “vacation?” And a two-week “vacation”? And if I could afford a two week vacation, would I really be taking my laptop? And if I did take my laptop “somewhere” for two weeks, couldn’t I just back up the two weeks of changes on a flash drive? Or on Dropbox or Mobile Me?
For me, the best online backup is an external hardrive. Two, actually, in different locations. Full scale, bootable backups. And yeah, I can recover incremental changes between backups from Dropbox, MobileMe and the flash drive that’s always in my accessory bag.
If only there was a free program the stored your files in permanent backup and you copied them to your Mac as you need them. Now what was that program called again?
” If you go on a vacation for 2 weeks with your laptop, you just went 2 weeks without any backup at all! This is obviously not acceptable for anybody who cares about keeping their data safe,” Rose writes.
So what’s wrong with this concept? Rose is suggesting that an online backup service is a good way to keep your data safe for one thing. Think about it. You are trusting someone to take care of your data that does not know you i.e., is not your mother or your best friend, but might find your data interesting to have a look at.
You are also on a 2-week vacation. What kind of a vacation is it that brings all of your work with it? Well, that’s your business I guess.
At any rate, you are leaving your valuable computer data laying around who knows where for anyone with the right cleverness to pick through and harvest whatever they might like. Don’t confuse that with “safe”. It is not.
Uh, Apple already offers this, and it’s been a core feature of MobileMe/.mac for eons! It’s called Backup. I’m kinda dumbfounded that this guy wrote an article whose premise is “Apple should really offer this thing that they already offer and have for years.” Research much? Apple hasn’t done anything with it in a generation, but it’s still there, and it still works.
Yes, tying it in with Time Machine in System Preferences would be a good idea. And yeah, it’s only 20 GB (last time I checked), but like NCIceman pointed, backing up more than that would take an eternity.
Portable hard drives really aren’t that weighty — Iomega’s eGo is only 8 oz. and holds up to 500GB of data. I use one to store my photos when on vacation, then I can transfer them easily to my desktop system where I do my Photoshop work.
@Mapping — A lot of people take their laptops on vacation, and not for work either; a laptop comes in very handy to look up information on activities (museum hours and such), check out restaurants (both menus and local reviews), or just to keep in touch with the family back home. And if you’re in a hotel room and nothing good’s on TV, you can always download a movie from iTunes.
@skeeter — Plus, if you’re backing up regularly at home, you don’t need to backup your entire HD, just the stuff that’s changed; things like photos you’ve downloaded from your camera, poems and stories you’ve written that you want to keep, etc. Unless you’re going on a world cruise, not likely you’ll hit that 20GB limit before you get home and can clear stuff out, and if you’re not in an area with good Internet access, you can bring along a portable HD as well.
Dropbox is great.
That must do wonders for data usage caps!
And what guarantee is there that backblaze.com or any other online backup service will still be in business in two, five, ten, etc. years?
This article may be helpful to some people, but the idea that any traveler who cares about backing up their data would feel “weighed down” by a 6 oz. bus-powered portable hard drive is ridiculous.
I am using Backblaze and I love it. I have tried Mozy, SugarSync and Spideroak. I agree, Backblaze is the best by far.
I auto-run Backup nightly to my MobileMe account, and run Disk Utility weekly to create a bare-metal backup image that gets stored off-site. Keeps me out of trouble
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Rose is a moron.
Backing up online?
GGs of data – speed to recover?
No thanks.
Portable FW HDD.
Fast, bootable, and back up in minutes.
Network backup?
Not.
Did I say Rose is a moron?
I use Backblaze also. I tried Mozy and Crashplan, but found Backblaze preferable because it’s simple, easy, and reliable (so far). And the price is affordable.
@justme2: Don’t get me wrong; I travel for work with a laptop lots (hence the “mapping”). I was just being semi-snaky. And yeah, if I were on “vacation,” (which–non-snark–I can’t afford) I’d just do all that on my iPhone.
Another reason for a service like Backblaze is protection against catastrophic and simultaneous loss of data from your computer and your backup media. As for speed, Backblaze will ship DVDs or a hard drive for a complete restoration.
For the price, I wouldn’t be without out. God forbid my house burns down, but if it does I do not want to worry about loss of critical financial and legal data.
Western Digital Passport. .5 TB. Hundred bucks. Weighs nothing. Wicked fast. Pack of cards size.
Dropbox. It’s seriously awesome.
I like DropBox very much, but I just keep select files there so that I have access to them from work, home, and on my iPod Touch. I can’t really get too comfortable with doing major backups to unknown entities.
Why not Carbonite?
@Mapping — Understood, but a bit tough to back up photos onto an iPhone. And I prefer the laptop for heavy duty Web surfing, especially with sharing things with my husband; I do use the iPhone in the car while he’s driving for quick searches (and come across a lot of limitations especially with some restaurant websites, as well as maps that are totally out of date).
I use Time Machine from my laptop. With mail and downloads excluded (I use IMAP mail), my hourly backups are usually 5 to 10 MB, which is fine for a remote backup.
Someone (Apple?) should act as a reliable intermediary, making remote Time Machine backups work better. Maybe just keep filesystem hashes in the cloud (to figure out what’s changed) and also cache the most recent hourly backup data there.
Going on a 2-week vacation, losing all my info? Give me a break! Seriously? If I’m away from home, my important stuff is at home, on my desktop. And on my wife’s desktop.
Some common sense might be of use here. You have a “local backup” in case your Hard Drive fails. Or your laptop is stolen. Or … whatever. What happens if your home gets cindered before you can rescue anything but your spouse, kids and cat (dog rescued YOU). Your computer AND your local backup are TOAST. Now what? Glad you have Backup now?
Everyone has some great points regarding on-line back ups. I thought I didn’t need them, but when my portable external hard drive was dropped, refused to mount and there fore no longer any good I knew I had to make changes. I started doing on-line back ups and have tried them all.
I am currently using iDrive for MAC and was pretty happy with it. Recently, I noticed things were not backing up as usual and found that it had not back up my Pictures Files for several months. I’m a Photographer and these files are a must have for my business to survive. iDrive continues to time me out and lengthens the time it is going to take to compete the back`up.
This article could not have come at a better time for me. I am currently using the 15 day free trial from backblaze.com and so far happy with the ease of use.
There is nothing wrong having a Back-Up to a Back-Up to a Back-Up. Does this sound crazy yes it does, but at least I know I’m safe. Of course there is the “possibility” that they could go out of business but until this happens I do not need to worry. Even then I don’t have to worry b/c I already have the files backed up to 2 external hard drives. Businesses going out of business is a fact of life~nothing is FOREVER!!
“keep files that you’ve deleted” I bet Tiger’s wife wishes she had this.
Save you files to your iDisk and let it sync over Internet whenever you have a connection. Want a bootable backup that can be incrementally backed up in minutes? Use SuperDuper! and a USB drive – problem solved.
I’ve signed up, thank you!!
@Me in LA:
You forgot to mention that Rose is a moron.
I use SuperDuper to make a bootable clone of my drive.
Should my house burn down tho’ I’m fscked, ‘cuz my iMac and my G-Drive will probably both croak.
Unless I want to take an external to my office… But how often to do that? Hmmm… every morning, M-W-F, every Monday… ? Nah, that’s a hassle.
The vacation thing is kind of idiotic. The point of services like this is *offsite* backup. It’s not as easy to restore as from my cloned drive, but if the worst should happen, my Mission Critical stuff (that would be my extensive pr0n collection, of course) would be safe.
I like the way Beyonce backs up.
This article is playing on people’s stupidity.
Online backups will be practical if i can get anywhere with a good Internet connection with more than 1Mbps. Not an easy feat in Malaysia. Some cafes offer up to 4Mbps. now, divide that by 8 and you’ll get an awful speed (approx. 524KBps) to back-up your 200GB HDD!
Julian @ http://no-spamming/
SPIDEROAK!!!!
No such thing
For all those here saying on-line backups are a stupid idea, why not tell us why?
I’m using Mozy at the moment and they’re okay but not great but it’s not a stupid idea. All of my sensitive information is in encrypted AES-XXX sparsebundles. The speed is not an issue because once things are up, it only backups files that have changed. Should I need all of it back in a hurry I have the option of paying for an overnight delivery.
So please explain why you think it is a bad idea?
Oh, on-line backup is just one of three solutions I use. I use Super Duper! for an image I can boot from and I also use Time Machine. On-line backups are a great idea, IF you know how to use them.
This article at least gave me some names to go checkout.
MozyHome works pretty well for me – on both Mac and PC. MozyPro needs a lot work, however – the interface is extremely convoluted and not user friendly at all.
Use the following link to get 20% more space on a free MozyHome 2 Gb account:
mozy.com/?code=D685JF
Since commercial use is prohibited in the backblaze agreement, I might assume that those backing up multiple TB’s of material (or even less) might be including some business materials and would, therefore, be prohibited from using the service. Perhaps they don’t mean that in all cases (after all, some small businesses just have a few MB’s of files), but, since it says that, it says that.
If you’re looking for more service, support, and security than the big boys offer, check out Data Knoxx (http://www.dataknoxx.com).
They also offer the ability to perform the initial backup on a hard drive that you can ship them. Conversely, if your computer crashes, they can send you a hard drive with the information on it (encrypted of course).
@skeeter,
You are an idiot who clearly and obviously didn’t read the article. Let me guess — you’re the type of guy that tried to lie and cheat your way through school exams too, right?
Your completely inane and uneducated comment was this: “Uh, Apple already offers this, and it’s been a core feature of MobileMe/.mac for eons! It’s called Backup. I’m kinda dumbfounded that this guy wrote an article whose premise is “Apple should really offer this thing that they already offer and have for years.” Research much?”
Meanwhile, Rose spends about half of his article talking specifically about Apple’s Backup program.
Maybe it’s best if you just keep your mouth shut from now on, and let others do the commenting around here.
@Me in LA, you’re a fool too and you are not welcome here either… you’re calling Rose an idiot for recommending having an off-site backup? Um, clearly all the other users completely disagree with you. Hope you lose all of your data someday!
Anyone looking for a Dropbox referral link (gives you & me free extra storage space), feel free to use mine here: https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTE4NjM0NDY5
Thanks!
MozyHome works pretty well for me – on both Mac and PC. MozyPro needs a lot work, however – the interface is extremely convoluted and not user friendly at all.
Use the following link to get 10% more space on a free Mozy Home 2 Gb account: https://mozy.com/free/?code=NN32HH
Anyone have any experience with Egnyte?
I think from my oppinion the best online backup service for Mac users is http://www.dmailer.com/dmailer-backup.html . I am using it for like 1 year or so and i didn had any problems and my files were allways safe. Their software is free so don’t worry about price, the only thing you pay if you want larger than 3gb online storage .
Other than that is a lot easy to use so i think nobody will have this problem.
I opt for Safecopy backup because it is so compatible with my mac computers.