The downside of this is that if your personal cloud is on a server in your home, and it's backing up data that is on a PC or laptop which is typically *also* in your home, you haven't really protected against theft or damage (flood, fire, vandalism after a breakin). So it depends what risks you want to cover.

For me, for most of the data I'm backing up I'm much more concerned about losing it altogether than about privacy. Offsite/cloud is by far a better backup than another local copy.

I just selected the option to backup the default music directory.

Never had an issue before with it showing anything other than accurate information. If you login to the website it will show exactly what folders/drives are being backed up so you can easily check.

​I've just backed up 70gb of photos and showing as 70gb used. Have you selected option to backup external hard drive, if that contains same 50gb music then you will reach free 100gb limit :wink:

interesting .. i appear to have filled up my storage space already when I know full well that I only have around 50gb of music on my PC ..

I'll stick with Microsoft One Drive and Google, neither of these are going anywhere. I use cloudhq.net/ to sync automatically between the two. Yes, it costs a couple of £ per month for the Tier 1 accounts but on the grand scale of things, IMHO, its money well spent.

It amazes me that people would use anyone other than a tier 1 vendor to store their photo's AND as people have said, never trust one Tier-1 vendor for everything.

I thought crash plan was no longer free. How much is the free storage data?

After looking at a few of these I opted to go with the free crash plan service, bought 2 portable hard drives and have one local to make a backup of my NaS onto and another on parents computer for remote backup.
The beauty of this is the initial backup is really fast, 1tb for me which took as long is it takes to copy 1tb from one of the drives to the other before driving over and plugging in.

Certainly a hell of a lot faster than trying to upload a massive amount of data over fibre or broadband.

Also pi is slow as hell.

No USB3. Even if it was, my RPI3 with a USB disk attached to it can't even do 10MB/sec...
Online cloud storage has eventual consistency, and is probably already redundant. If you hook up a disk to a pi and store all your stuff on it, what happens if it dies? what happens if your house burns down? you've lost it. A cloud provider isn't likely to loose your stuff because they will have backups, backup power, redundant data centres etc etc.

Build yourself a NAS sure, but don't use any one single method to store stuff. You need backups for your backups !

What do you do for off-site backup?

Grab a raspberry pi, some hard drives depending on your needs, whether you setup a RAID array with torrent sync and you have a back up service for life.

Why pay someone else a yearly fee for what you can accomplish for less than £200.


Example:

Raspi 3 - £35
External 1tb had X 2 for redundancy - £90ish

You are already up and running for £125. Buy a new drive if you see signs of failure every 5 years or so.

Equivalent Dropbox cost for 5 years is £395

Joined it thinking for mobile phones but nope

Any Android apps?

Heated OP!

I backup mine to Microsoft onedrive and google photos. Each time I take a photo it gets backed up to both automatically by the phone as soon as it has WiFi. Then I download and keep all the photos on a USB portable hard disk and a second portable disk.

A friend of mine lost all her baby photos when her phone was stolen, so I learned from her mistake...

The USB portable disks cost me about £80 each for 3TB of space which is more than enough for my photos and a bit extra for other stuff.

If you happen to have a Samsung phone, I managed to get two Microsoft onedrive accounts each with 100GB for 2 years for free. I wiped my phone and it asked me again if I wanted to sign up for free so using two different email accounts I got 2 x 100GB

Yep, had the same thing. I keep all my registration emails, and it seems they ran this offer around October 2014. Not sure if that was the last one, but that's when I signed up.

Doesn't look like it will work with Linux :disappointed:

Got caught with Microsoft previously ....gave 20gb free then dropped to 5gb or you had to pay £1.99 per month for 50gb !!!!!

Tried to register an account, found out I already have one. Seems like this deal has happened in the past, wonder if I went through HotUKDeals last time?

Looks like I am gonna give this a try....sounds too good to be true thoughoO

Yes your right, the moral of the story is never rely on one backup.

I currently have all data stored in a RAID5 NAS where my most important data gets backed up to a cloud service for offline backup and I also backup to an external USB drive just in case something happens to my NAS.

Lifetime my a@@e!

There's been at least 3 so-called "lifetime" free storage offers that I've used over the years.

They've all either collapsed (bit casa, copy), or have changed the terms of the offer so that "unlimited" storage is dropped to a tiny amount.

My conclusion? You get what you pay for.

100gb free is nice to have, but a total pain when, eventually you have to move it or lose it.

Sent you a PM with deal - not sure if you can post another HUKD on someone else's post.

I have all of our baby pics and videos stored with Google photos. I have a few physical printed copies but most is stored on the cloud. What would be the best way of backing this up in a second way to make sure I never lose them? Is it easy enough to do? X

Speak for yourself... It's a scary world that you live in!

Perfect

i like to keep local and cloud backups - you know just in case :smile:

It's hardly "scary" when there are so many options available to make a secondary backup ..

cant see that anywhere,

That's what I used to do before cloud and relied on phsycal hard drives. I moved everything to DropBox but had iCloud for photos.

Now everything sits in iCloud. I use 1.1TB this includes emails, photos, desktop old pictures that are archived. I mean everything! And I don't have a secondary backup. Should Apple ever delete my data I'm screwed. Scary world we live in.

I did the same but one of the drives in my NAS corrupted and this cascaded into the second mirrored drive and corrupted that too. Luckily I had a cloud backup! There is no absolutely guaranteed solution, though a combination of offline and cloud is probably the best.

i won't need the vault storage personally. the only time i'll ever need to restore these backups is if i've had some kind of catastrophic failure of all three of my other copies, so i won't be too fussed how long it takes :smile:

Arq Backup looks interesting and it will let me utilise my 1TB One Drive storage without having to sync the backup folder on any machines and it is also encrypted.

Its a shame Zoolz do not offer an API so you can upload encrypted data.

Yes Zoolz is cold storage so will take a few hours to retrieve files. I backup my home media files something that I do not access all the time.

If you take up the 2TB lifetime offer you get 1TB cold storage and 1TB vault storage which is instant access to files.

Actually Arq Backup is good as well if you want to opt for the Amazon Unlimited Drive offer. And it encrypted the data before uploading so all the storage provider will only see 10 MB chunk.

AFAIK Zoolz offer no encryption whatsoever so they can just do a easy search for *.mp3 / *.avi and found out you got possibly illegal downloaded music / movies and shut down your account without offering any refund. That I would not call a backup.

Got all my music and media on my NAS. Ideally i'll also get a portable HDD as well as a further redundancy but 3TB ones are quite expensive for me.

The more backups i have of my music, the better ..

Also, been doing some more reading and it appears that if you do want to restore your backups from Zoolz, it will apparently take 3 hours at a bare minimum to grab one file, so if, like me, you've got nearly 13k files, you might be a while ..

Thankyou, Google Takeout looks like the tool I need

best life time service nowadays is NAS with multiple WD drives (blue edition with 2M hours lifetime ~ 200 years) in it.

have a read of this :smile:

productforums.google.com/forum/!topic/photos/dc_fDhaFGqU

Once you've got them offline, then you can sign up for a service like Zoolz and then get them uploaded to that as well.

I suspect you can access it again, but only if you need to restore the backup. It's probably not a service like dropbox where you're constantly writing files to and from your cloud space.

Doesn't matter to me either way really. I've got three seperate backups of my music collection and this one will be the fourth, so if they don't let me access it i'll just remove the account.

Still got 3,500 files to upload though :grin:

There's an interesting article here from Torrenfreak from 2014 about a Zoolz user who had his entire account terminated because he'd seemingly uploaded some ".torrent" files without realising - no actual pirated content, just the .torrent file itself.

torrentfreak.com/bac…23/

Agreed - Backblaze/crasplan (or even carbonite) are generally what i recommend to people (or set up your own S3 if you're technically inclined). A lot of smaller outfits aren't as reliable.

So what do you do with it then? You just upload to the cloud and then you can't access it again unless you buy the service and then you can?

​I used it for my backup only. I understand your concern, it took me a while before I take the plunge so we will see. I backup my backup too so no worries :smile:

​there is an app to power down the unit

Thanks

is it just me or does anyone else feel the need to have stuff > back it up > back it up somewhere else > and back it up again

That seems very good! I must look into it.

Guys, Upon trying to signup it says this offer is not yet available in your country. WTH

thanks

Seems good so far (it's just a front end for Amazon Glacier after all), but is definitely not something I'd rely on as your only backup as others have said... A few stories about people being locked out of their data with no way to delete it unless they sign up to an inflated contract. I guess that shouldn't apply to lifetime free users, but who knows...
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/3835ag/goodbye_zoolz_old_news/

Make sure you go into preferences and use multithreaded upload if you've got a decent connection. Currently maxxing mine out.

The "faster backups and recovery" part is a bit of a swizz, too. Glacier storage takes HOURS to recover from, so don't get this expecting to be able to instantly recover stuff that you've backed up.

What about redundancy? You backup to something all located in one place?

Don't rely on this as your only backup, have an offsite backup on an external hard drive as well.

• Zoolz may go bust.
• your backup with the Zoolz backup software may become corrupt or not backup crucial files.

I used to use Zoolz and they were OK have not used them in a while, I think I will sign up to this and see how it fairs and if its OK will sign up for limetime deal.

I see the word refurbished and shudder.

Given how many of those fail just out of warranty, you might want to back up your back up!

Don't bother, Ive tried zoolz before, tried to upload around 60gb from a Hard Drive, very buggy and slow, got to about 3 months and it still hadn't uploaded completely, as for could I recover my Data at a later date, didn't stick around to find out.

Stick with the well known ones, and pay for what you get, most freebies will be gone tomorrow or end in tears.

​I did the same with a cheap 2tb. Not one I updated the firmware, there was no way to safely power down the unit! I only found out a few days before setting off to India, so I guess it's staying on for 5 months!
I went for the Canon irista promo on here for backing up my photos, but I've not used it yet. Worryingly, a lot of people who used the loophole to get 330gb free, had the extra storage removed

Ever since bitcasa i will never trust a storage provider so easily again, after 2 years they transfered everything to a cheaper provider and 50% of my data got corrupted

​If I were you, I'll setup my own personal cloud as you pay quite high.

I recently setup wd cloud 4tb for around £100 (refurbished) and it gives me my own cloud. it is not difficult to setup and maintain. I also notice that the encryption that these providers keep mentioning are the transmission encryption. but on my cloud, admin access can access all account files without any encryption. not sure whether the business cloud differs but if they are the same then they will have access to your data.

I might consider using it for my music collection in that case. I've already backed it up on my NAS and locally (as well as being on my iPhone) so maybe a 'cloud' solution won't be such a bad idea. Everything else i've got that needs backing up goes in to terabytes so wouldn't fit ..

See Comment #4 :).

Better to use something like Backblaze or Crashplan. They are established player and has been running for years. These smaller provider are not as reliable and as many are not profitable they might shut down without any notice which is bad if you are storing important Linux ISO.

Signed up, great as long as you understand it's not a cloud service like Dropbox or OneDrive (although that type of service can be bought as an optional extra) but an archival service.

‌ :face_with_monocle:

is anyone worried that "lifetime" can be anything from a month to years

do you back-up your back-ups on another "cloud" ?

Have just signed up and my data is backing up. So far so good. Heat added.

I've been using Zoolz for several years now - Recently upgraded from a 100GB account to a paid for a lifetime subscription with 2TB for about £40.

they use 256-aes encryption for your files apparently ..

Intruiging, thanks.

I've grabbed an account just in case they're limited, but i'll look in to it first before i think about uploading anything.

#edit

pretty good review here ..

cloudwards.net/rev…lz/