Offsite Backups? Crashplan, Amazon Cloud Drive, Dropbox?

[RichTJ99]

Hi,

So i am looking for an offsite backup. I had been using crashplan for years but it expired & I am now looking for something else. I didnt like that with Crashplan if a directory moved Crashplan thought you deleted it & removed the data from the backup.

I started to look at Amazon cloud drive with some encryption software but i am not sure if that is a good plan (lots of complaints on reddit).

I looked at ARQ for the encryption but again a bunch of complaints.

Duplicati seemed to get good responses but i figured i would check here.

Encryption and knowing I have a secured cloud backup are important.

Any thoughts or just stick with Crashplan?

My plan is to have some sort of dedicated VM which only has the job of sending data to the cloud.

Thanks,
Rich

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

Any thoughts or just stick with Crashplan?

I like Arq Backup. What do you mean by "bunch of complaints"?

 

[RichTJ99]

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/search?q=arq&restrict_sr=on

A number of people discussing multiple issues. Enough I started looking into http://www.duplicati.com/home

 

[danb35]

To the best of my knowledge, CrashPlan gets you the most data cheapest ($50/year for unlimited data, and I've got about 4 TB backed up there right now), but if you want it to be reliable and update cleanly, you really want to run it in a Linux VM, not using the FreeNAS plugin. I was running it under Ubuntu in a VirtualBox jail for a while without issues, until I set up my Proxmox host and migrated most of my VMs to that.

 

[RichTJ99]

Dan - in terms of encryption & not having people see your files - do you feel crashplan is sufficient? I hear many comments about the slow speeds.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

A number of people discussing multiple issues.

My main takeaway from the thread you linked is that Amazon Cloud Drive as a destination for Arq with a multi-TB backup set may lead to performance issues. My experience is that Amazon Cloud Drive + Arq performs better than OneDrive + Arq, and both are 'fast enough', but our largest backup set in Arq is only around 300GB and the rest are smaller.

EDIT: I should probably also mention that our backup sets are all local to the clients.

 

[danb35]

in terms of encryption & not having people see your files - do you feel crashplan is sufficient?

I think so. CrashPlan offers the option of encrypting your backups with a locally-generated key, which you should use if you're concerned about that. Of course, if you do that, you'll need to make sure you protect that key, but that's the case with any encryption.

 

[RichTJ99]

Robert - thats an interesting point. Do you feel that ARQ is a large enough company to be around to help restore the data in the future (if need be)? I was looking at my options.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

I'm pretty sure Haystack Software is a very small company. However, they have an open source command-line restore utility: https://github.com/sreitshamer/arq_restore

 

[RichTJ99]

Im just trying to figure if its easier / safer to use crashplan (which i have read many horror stories) or going with ARQ & one of the other cloud services - dropbox, gdrive, or ACD.

In the end I just want to backup my freenas box offsite in a way that keeps my data private. Again for no other reason than i am paranoid.

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

I think CrashPlan is an excellent product for many use cases, but I don't believe they want your FreeNAS backup business. Any service that offers unlimited storage for a modest annual fee is hurt by multi-TB backup sets. Amazon Cloud Drive terms & conditions include riders about what 'unlimited' really means. With standalone software like Arq Backup or rclone or whatever floats your boat, sending data to storage that charges per GB, I think long-term* success is more likely.
* whatever that means in the tech world

 

[danb35]

I don't believe they want your FreeNAS backup business.

They've sure made it difficult enough on users of the FreeNAS plugin!

Another thought--if secure encryption is critical, you could look at Tarsnap.

 

[RichTJ99]

Its more of a question of is crashplan secure both with encryption & will your data be available when you need to restore it. I had been using it for years without needing a restore. I did try a test restore a few times & never had a problem - beyond it being slow.

 

[danb35]

It looks like CrashPlan uses AES-256 encryption. Assuming it's well-implemented, that should be very secure.