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throwaway_ab

I pay for 5 TB and planned to use the drive to store a copy of my data.

Things I store that have lots of files:

- The frames for my Timelapse videos = 400,000 files

- The files in my Eagle app photo database = 400,000 files

- Other image files, my programming repositories, documents, music, stable diffusion Deforum frames = 400,000 files

80% of these files I've accumulated in the last 12 months and can see myself easily hitting this 5,000,000 file limit well before I run out of TB's

So now I know I will never be able to use all the space I'm paying for, I'm going to stop uploading my files and instead search for a proper backup service, something I should of researched in the first place.

Anyone here have any recommendations for a backup service?

View on HN

https://rsync.net

https://backblaze.com

https://jottacloud.com

+1 for rsync. Have used them for a couple of years. I set up a script to backup my stuff there a couple of times a day. Their daily snapshots have also saved me from my own mistakes on several occasions.

This is the first time I hear about Jottacloud and I'm pleasantly surprised. Their combination of bucket-like storage + mobile app + web app + rclone support seems to tick all the boxes for a Google Drive replacement.

Dropbox’s omission is interesting. I’m using a large paid account to backup a few TB of data spanning many years. Is there something I should know? Losing it would be devastating.

I don't think Dropbox is a backup service per se.

Dropbox offers a backup[1] service and has since, I believe, last year.

[1]: https://dropbox.com/backup

Dropbox is an American company. Most hackers does not trust American hosting companies because of the NSA leaks confirming everyones paranoia. I wouldn't trust Dropbox with a ten foot pole.

https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box

This is europe, maybe from america it gets a bit slow though.

And a bit funky with legal things.

Can you expand on that?

There are laws and legal agreements in place that prevents certain sensitive data being stored in different legal jurisdictions.

Any gov or military contract data usually has specific requirements stating data storage requirements.

if you shoping in HN comment about where to backup your USA-GOV contracts, you might need to review your priorities

Some people here might have side gigs with private data, often without even knowing.

There are other data laws in other countries that are not USA gov that explicitly talk about customers data storage and it's handling.

I tried using this for a media streaming project, but I couldn’t get good enough bandwidth to stream high-bitrate media. I ended up paying more to stream files from a storage provider that caches on CDNs.

I do recommend it for other storage though: snapshots, SMB means you can mount it directly on Windows (and iOS!), cheap, and I personally like Hetzner.

Their Storage Share service (running on Nextcloud) is also good if you want managed syncing, a-la Dropbox. Same server as a Storage Box but with managed Nextcloud on top.

>Anyone here have any recommendations for a backup service?

Two or more NASes, rotated out on a regular basis to satisfy the 3-2-1 Backup Rule.

I was thinking the same thing but I tend to create a large compressed backup file and upload that instead. My backup file is currently under 100 gigs, the most critical files not my whole system's files. If I backed up my gaming account (I don't need to since I use Steam Cloud) and compressed it, it'd probably only be another 50 to 100 gigs. This way I should never hit the 5 million file limit.

Having said that, I feel 5 million files is too low for a lot of people.

Just email info@rsync.net.

We have a HN discount and we’ll get you up and running this weekend.

You can even direct transfer from google drive to your new account here - no reason to use your own bandwidth.

I've used Backblaze for years and never had a problem. There's no upload file/data limit, but downloading it back can be slow. There's an option for them to mail you a hard drive but I never tried it.

Backblaze is terrible, but you will likely only find out when you need to restore.

When backup excluded some files, they blamed antivirus software and recommended to go without.

They actively deleted their only backup because the client couldn't read the original files (which was due to disk error).

They admitted that there isn't any guarantee or even effort to make the backup consistent - after asking me to explain the concept.

The only reason I still have my data is because of the very expensive cleanroom disk rescue that they of course refused to pay for - because why try to do what you can to compensate for failing at your only job?

It sounds like these problems are related to their end-user backup solution - can't comment on that as I've never used it.

However, when referring to Backblaze, I think most people here refer to their nice (and cheap) S3-like cloud storage solution, which works perfectly with the likes of restic, rclone and friends. That's probably what you should use if you care about control.

At least 2-3 times per year Backblaze goes into a safety freeze, and the only way to unclog the works is reinstalling+inheriting the backup. Which involves re-uploading every single file.

Would not choose Backblaze if I was choosing today.

Due to the safety freezes and the high expense of Backblaze when backing up multiple machines, I have switched to iDrive. So far it seems to be working ok.

I’ve used backblaze for a decade on Mac and windows. I’ve done selective restores and also used their mail you a hard drive option.

I've used it for many years. About 18 months ago had a complete motherboard failure on a MBP and had to restore a bit over 2TB to a new computer. I used the "mail me a drive" option and it worked fine. Only challenge was that it took about 1 week for them to create the disk from their backups.

tarsnap!

Yes but read about restore time first - https://github.com/Tarsnap/tarsnap/issues/333

Could you just zip them?

Backblaze seems decent

But they're anything but. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35397752

Drive was decent until now.

I've had a good experience with Backblaze on MacOS. But I'd still consider it as a secondary backup (a backup-backup?) to use in addition to a local backup like Time Machine.

Just your files that is it.

Tar.

Why are you storing a video as 400,000 individual frames?

Time lapse videos are created from photos taken over a period of time. If you create a 30fps 10 minute video, that's already 18000 photos.

It's quite a pain in the ass to import, color grade, deflicker etc. So one would usually wait till there are a few projects are taken, and process them all at once. If this is your hobby, you can easily hit 5000000 photos in a couple of years. Especially if you're doing something like an ultra long time lapse of say, the construction of a building using two cameras.

If the question is "why don't you delete the photos after creating the time lapse video?" It's called photo hoarding haha.

Anyway that's irrelevant, because if I paid for a certain storage size to backup my hoarding habits, I expect to be able to use the capacity, and not have some random ass limits.

Backupsy beats all others I’ve tried including on price.

Why don't you look into AWS Glacier?

Anything Synology is pretty great IMO.

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