What is a good backup solution for local/cloud that offers good security and custom key encryption?

skylanepilot

Honorable
Apr 9, 2013
86
0
10,640
Hi everyone,

I've been using Crashplan for several years now, and I'm beginning to dislike their service. They aren't doing anything for account security, like 2-factor authentication, and their customer support has been terrible. I'm also not a fan of their horrendous upload speeds to the cloud. I average 2mbps up on a 50/50 connection that always gets 45+ up.

Does anyone have any good alternatives? The major players like backblaze, carbonite, and mozy all seem to be rather crappy.

Thanks in advance for your help!
 
Buy 2 hard drives. Backup everything to one of them, and then take that hard drive someplace you trust that it will be safe.

Then at whatever interval you are comfortable with, backup to the other drive, then take it to where the first drive is, and swap them.

Files move much quicker to a hard drive than they ever will going across the internet. And since the drives are removed from your system after a backup is made, and only attached again to make a new backup, they should never be "snooped on". You can also configure Windows to encrypt your data on that drive.
 
Cloud backup is immediately limited by your upload speed so unless you live in the few privileged areas that get 100mbps or more upload speed (in USA upload speed is often 10% of the download speed), then your upload of the data is going to take forever. While the service might have slow upload speed as well, remember that they can only take it as fast as you are sending it to them; so if your ISP only gives you 5mbps upload then its not the backup companies fault it is only going 5mbps.

Even if I had google fiber with 1000mbps upload speed I would not trust my data to any backup company. The large ones have big targets on them by sophisticated hackers (Apple Cloud), and the small companies cant afford top end security.

If you are just wanting a backup of your files and not worried about disaster recovery (house burning down) then the best thing to do is to use a second hard drive. If you have a Desktop then putting an extra hard drive in the desktop is the best route as it is safer inside the PC instead of an external that can droped and damaged; with a desktop you can also share the hard drive over network and have all computers be able to backup to it. If you don't have a desktop then you can use an external drive.
I use a program called syncback to do my file backups. I can set which folders I want to backup, and set a schedule. If you are going to use a external drive and want to schedule backups then you should go to disk management and change the drive letter to something much farther in the alphabet like O: or S:, this way every time you plug in the drive it will be assigned the same letter.

If you have to have to do an online backup and want your own security you can lease server space for around the same cost of your backup company, then you can setup your own encrypted ftps connection to the server. If you pay the one time charge of $35 for syncback se, it has ftps built into it and can schedule it. Now just like the other backup companies, the speed of this transfer is dependent on your internet connection upload speed.
 


Thanks for the reply, but I want to keep an option like this as an absolute last resort. I prefer a local backup on a weekly or monthly basis and an off-site, cloud back on (at most) an hourly basis with versioning.

 


While I'm backing up to Crashplan at a blazing 2mbps or 3mbps, I can still transfer files to my work servers at a sustained 30-40mbps. My upload is "claimed" to be 50mbps, and I almost get all of it.

I trust a cloud backup with a custom encryption key. Crashplan backs up the same files to a local drive, and they are just random files that are unreadable without Crashplan and your 448bit custom key. Crashplan even says that if you lose your key, you aren't getting your data. I know no solution is full proof, but it's pretty good.