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Backup program for use with iDisk? (1 Viewer)

DaveF

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My wife is annoyed with Apple's built-in Backup program and wants a new program that can do online backups to her iDisk (on her MobileMe account). Do you have any recommendations? (Doesn't have to be free.)

She wants to stay with iDisk, though I might persuade her to move to a different online system if that's necessary.
 

Brian W. Ralston

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Even though I subscribe to MobileMe and find a few of its features very useful, backup of my computer's data is not one of those features. You should seriously get her to try carbonite.com which is now for the MAC. Has been on the PC for a while.

The carbonite.com MAC client works in the background seemlessly. The amount you can back-up is unlimited. It is only about $50 a yer. And it simply works. I don't notice any hit on the CPU. The first back-up will of course take days to get all that data up there. (Mine is over 75GB at the moment and took over a week). But...once it is up there...the incremental back-ups with changes seem to happen almost instantly over a Wi-Fi connection.

There is also a code for two free months (Additional to your one year subscription) from the Leo Laporte computer radio show.

The code is: leo
 

DaveF

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I use the Mozy free service. If I can't find a good iDisk system, I'll consider Mozy, JungleDisk and Carbonite. (I hadn't really heard about Carbonite before...)

If she didn't pay for MobileMe I'd hook her up with one of these services pronto. But since she pays for and "knows" MobileMe, we're reluctant to pay for another, new service. Still a possibility, though.
 

Brian W. Ralston

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I used Mozy briefly when Mozy for MAC came out. I hated it. It would always stop uploading data for me after about 5GB. It would then start over from the beginning, ignoring what it had already uploaded. And the CPU hit on my machine was very noticeable. I got my money back from them. It may be better now, but they really left a bad taste in my mouth and I was reluctant to trust them any further on a machine that is at the heart of my business.

When Carbonite for MAC got released I was anxious to give it a try and true to their solid reputation for the PC...the MAC version works solidly as advertised and I highly recommend it over the other options.

I look at paying for Mobile Me as a great way to have online access to my contacts, calander, synch data between MACs...and now with the iPhone features like "Find my iPhone"...it is worth it to me. They also have a nice feature to share files with other individuals via an email link. Kind of like Share-it. And didn't they just lower the MobileMe price from $99 to $49 a year? I can understand wanting to make additional use of what you are already paying for. But I have found the MobileMe servers so slow in uploading data that to me, it is unreliable and virtually unusable for large amounts of back-ups. And the MobileMe cap is 25GB for the regular account. I have 3 times that in data. Paying for any more would be equal or even more expensive than other options like Carbonite which is unlimited for a single machine license.

JungleDisk (using Amazon.com server space) would be much more expensive in the long run. Not only do they charge per GB used...but the bandwidth (upload and download) they charge for separately in addition to the storage space would make uploading lots of data just a deal breaker to me. Something unlimited for a single machine is really the way to go.
 

DaveF

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Brian, thanks for the comments. I think when I was first looking into online options for myself two years ago, something about Mozy seemed better than Carbonite. Maybe because Mozy is free for a 2GB account? Or maybe Carbonite wasn't for Mac in 2007? Mozy's worked fine for me for the 2GB system.

JungleDisk is pricier but seems not unreasonable, about $5 / mo for 10 GB, comparable to the other services. I see Carbonite has pricing similar to Mozy.

Another $60/yr for an online backup is affordable, but if we can find an app to use the service we're already paying for, all the better. We've found Personal Backup 5 which will write to an iDisk. It seems solid, but I don't know much more about it as a backup app to use iDisk.
 

Sam Posten

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Why online? You are putting ALL your personal data in the cloud? Are you doing this in addition to regular USB drive backups or instead of?

Seems too slow to be of real value to me and way too easy for all my data to be compromised. Didn't Carbonite, the leading company, have a major breach/loss less than a year ago?
 

DaveF

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It's part of the plan, not the entirety. We each have an external USB drive split for Time Machine and SuperDuper! And we have an online backup service for critical files. We are well protected against likely problems and have some protection against catastrophe at home.

My wife has been using OS X's built in Backup app that saves data to iDisk. Apple's Backup app is (ironically) not the most user friendly program, is slow, and not especially stable. She wants to get a different backup program that can write to her iDisk storage.

As her CTO:) I'm tasked with sorting this out.
 

Brian W. Ralston

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Dave...yeah...Carbonite was not available for MAC in 2007. The MAC client is fairly new. Within the last 6 months. But they took their time and got it right...wheras I feel mozy rushed to deliver their product and still had some issues to deal with in regards to large back-ups to their servers, like 50GB, etc...

Sam...it is always a good idea to have a back-up of all your important data "off-site." This will protect you from a fire burning down your computer and taking your firewire drives with it, etc... Apple's Time Capsule is great and easy to use with MACs...but if a Fire takes out your house with your computer inside...your router is inside too and will likely be gone as well. Sure, one can back-up clones of your hard drives to other external drives...and then physically drive those over to your safety-deposit box at a bank on a regular/daily basis, but why? By having it with a service like Carbonite or Mozy, etc...it is not only off-site and secure from local disasters...but the data is encrypted (so only you can retrieve it) and Carbonite has multiple back-ups of that encrypted data (just like Apple does with MobileMe)...so it is about as safe as it is going to be.

On some of my film projects, I have even been contractually required to keep off-site daily back-ups of data. A service like Carbonite fulfills this requirement, makes this pretty easy to do in the background and is fairly full proof. This data is not being accessed or used other than for the purpose of restoring after a catastrophic failure or home disaster like Fire or Theft. So, it is not really cloud computing. Think of it as a really good insurance policy for protecting your data, documents, photos, music, etc...
 

Sam Posten

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I have monthly backups 3 miles away and am considering out of state physical hard disk storage as a yearly drop off in case of national emergencies.

As maudlin as it sounds, I cringe thinking about all the people who trusted the safe deposit boxes in the WTC for their heirlooms. A great many NYC photographers kept their negatives there. Nothing compared to the loss of life, but still some peoples lives work. Digital has solved the problem of single negatives, now we just need to be smart about multiple backups.
 

Srichaphan

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I am using Magic Backup online service & really it's great .Magic Backup is so easy to use, and so reliable. Unlike other backup products that perform "scheduled" backups during the middle of the night, Magic Backup is always on the lookout for new or changed files that need to be backed up. The minute you're done editing a document, (well, 10 minutes after actually), Magic Backup will silently prepare and transfer a secure copy of that file to your private location on our servers. You never have to worry about complicated configuration settings, marking files for backup, changing backup tapes, burning backup CDs, or any of that old-school backup mumbo-jumbo.
 

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