Cloud backup for everyone
The free 50GB cloud storage offered by Mega makes everyone run out excuses for not backing up personal files in the cloud.
Cloud backup cannot completely replace the traditional hard drive backup currently. If the primary hard drives goes, it may a few days to get all the files from the cloud. Traditional backup can restore a hard drive in a few hours. As of 2018-02-01,
The traditional HD backup has the following downsides:
- The backup hard drives can go. It would be a disaster if both the source and the backup are gone.
- To prevent a disaster such as a fire destroying the home housing both the source and the back, one is supposed to place the backup at a different location or in a safe with fire-protection which is what I do. This can be a hassle.
To protect privacy, it may be a good idea to encrypt the backup files before uploading them to the cloud.
As of 2013-03-22, Mega has been experiencing issues of uploading fils larger than 4GB with their proferred browser Chrome. Fortunately, their Firefox extension allows uploading large files with Firefox.
Backblaze is a great cloud backup service with an annual fee of $50 for unlimited files. However, its software has a severe flaw as of February 2018 - its index file under C:\ProgramData\Backblaze\bzdata will grow indefinitely and it will start cause all kinds of troubles when it gets big. Backblaze will stop once the size exceeds 8GB. The only remedy for this is reinstall Backblaze to start a backup from scratch as a trial, then transfer the license from the old backup to the new one. This entire process takes about 48 hours for a backup of 1 M files/350GB. It is extremely useful to save file bzinfo.xml that stores exclusions before reinstalling Backblaze which removes old version, and copy the contents to the new one after re-installation.
Carbonite is should be a good alternative.