copy.com ?

[drwex]

Anyone familiar with or use this backup service? I'm considering switching off Dropbox and looking for similar functionality for a personal computer.

Comments

[drwex]

Having just spent $1500 to retrieve data off my external hard drive I can say they offer a level of reliability far beyond personal hardware.

In addition, they offer the ability to synchronize back-ups across multiple sites far more conveniently than transporting a piece of hardware around.

They offer the added security of off-site back-ups. Fortunately, few of us ever need disaster recovery at that scale but it's insurance against many forms of catastrophic physical site events.

If your back-ups are small enough to fit conveniently on a thumb drive many of these concerns go away. Mine are not that small and as my photo archive grows I don't anticipate they will.

Finally, they offer a level of automation (without having to write and maintain scripts) that protects against my fallible memory. When I was doing my own back-ups in the pre-cloud days I found that I forgot to back up more often that I remembered. Now I have a pop-up that greets me each morning telling me whether or not last night's back-ups happened successfully.

The cost of my time to create and maintain the scripts alone would exceed the monthly fees I pay.

[wotw]

For what it's worth, here's what I do for backup:

I have four external hard drives, One is always attached to my machine and used for automated daily backups of anything that has changed in the past 24 hours.

The other three are bootable clones of what's in the machine. I clone every two weeks or so and rotate through the hard drives, so I always have Clone A which is less than two weeks old, Clone B which is two weeks older than Clone A and Clone C which is two weeks older than Clone B. Clones A stays in the basement, Clone B stays in the bedroom and Clone C stays in the outbuilding (pretty far from the house).

This makes me feel pretty protected, though if you think I'm fooling myself I hope you'll tell me so.

One of the several reasons I prefer this to offline backups is that if anything goes wrong with my hard drive, I can pop in the most recent clone and I'm instantly up and running again. Then I restore the most recent stuff from the daily backups and it's as if nothing ever happened. This procedure has saved my butt on a number of occasions (sometimes involving viruses and sometimes hardware failures) over the years. It takes no more than a couple of minutes. I can't imagine that the recovery procedure would be nearly so fast, smooth and painless if my backups were stored remotely.

[drwex]

That seems like quite a high level of protection, much more than I have. And yes, you've got a situation where your recovery would be faster. I'd have to get new hardware and do an install on that new hardware. However, the number of scenarios where I can see needing to do that is very small. For example, in the case of a virus I'd tend to assume that my clone had also been infected, so setting back up with that clone would not resolve the problem (in my estimation). A clean install would presumably not have the problem.

The cases where clone hardware wins (I think) are cases of hardware failure. I've certainly seen in-case hardware fail, but I would be concerned that an in-case disk failure was not a primary cause but might be due to something else like a bad power supply that would subsequently ruin any replacement disk. I would not feel comfortable myself doing a 1:1 disk replacement without first understanding risks.

I suspect that you've spent more (in the value of your time) setting up and maintaining this system than I spend paying someone else to do it. That's not to say you're wrong, just that I can see how it makes logical sense (in what I think of as the economists' sense of logic) to pay money for a service like this.