Anyone use cloud backup?

Long story short, my company is breaking off from our larger corporate parent, so we are losing some perks such as data backup. We want to add off site (cloud) back up, but cost seems to be an issue. We run all data off a 12 TB NAS. We plan to purchase another NAS that matches so that we can mirror the drives in case one goes down. However, we would like to keep something offsite in case of major catastrophe. A fire/flood/theft would essentially shut the company down if we lost the drives.

We have looked at services such as carbonite and mozy, but it is absurdly expensive once you need to back up 8 TB of data. It looks like Google Nearline and Amazon Glacier may be a good option due to cost, but Im not sure if that will be able to set the NAS drives to auto-backup to these services. These also seem to be more geared toward software developers and IT professionals, so Im not 100% sure it would be best.

Does anyone have any other recommendations or experience in using these services?

Hi, I use cloud backup for a few clients. Back up to S3 glacier. Also used Carbonite for a few years. Things to consider (in no particular order):

  1. Pushing 1TB over a typical Internet connection will take … weeks, if not months. When I was using Carbonite, at best I got 1GB pushed up overnight. I was backing up 200GB so it took 6 or 7 months.
  2. Various open source tools to help with configuring the backup. In the end, I went with inexpensive commercial software. Cloudberry for Windows and ARQ for Mac. No affiliation.
  3. If you tend to have large binaries that get incrementally added to (like an email mailbox), I think you want to look at a block level backup method. You want to avoid having to push up a 2GB file if only 10MB got updated. Sometimes this is marketed as “deduplication”, although to me that means something different.
    Hope this helps!
    /Mike

I’m looking at similar products. We’ve got a 2T NAS that we’ll probably upgrade to 6T soon and I just want to have an offsite backup. Glacier seems like the best option so far, but the pricing structure is so nebulous that it’s hard to be sure. The fact that it’s an all or nothing affair as far as restores isn’t great either, but I suppose it’d really only be used for catastrophic failures anyway.

As far as setup, I’m using a synology NAS appliance that has built in scripts for glacier and some other products, so I guess I have it easy.

I’d be curious to hear what you end up going with.

We use Buffalo Terastation 5400’s for the storage. It has built in backup software that you can set the time, as well as incremental backup (only updates modified/new files). The initial backup is going to take a LONG time, but after that I will just have it run every friday night and it shouldnt take too much. It appears that someone has posted a tutorial on how to link the Buffalo NAS to Glacier, so I think that is going to be the way to do it. Easy choice to spend $60/month on the security of knowing it is off site.

One thing that Im not too sure of is how tolerant Glacier is when uploading a ton of individual files. How would it work as far as overwriting edited files? For example, if I start a project on Firday, it would upload to glacier that night. If I continue working on monday, would it then overwrite the file the next Friday, or would it add to the archive (leaving two files)? That could cause some major issues on our end of things.