Need a backup solution for personal use.

[Jeremiah123]

I am in need of a data backup service to host my personal data including photos and videos. I don't have much knowledge about online storage services. However I know that in my company the data backup service is provided by Storagepipe which is a Toronto based company. But our system administrator told me that Storagepipe offers backup service only for corporate applications. Is that true. When I visited their website I didn't find anything like this. What you guys think? Looking forward to your suggestions.

[laserlight]

However I know that in my company the data backup service is provided by Storagepipe which is a Toronto based company. But our system administrator told me that Storagepipe offers backup service only for corporate applications. Is that true. When I visited their website I didn't find anything like this. What you guys think?

I think that you should contact Storagepipe to ask.

I am in need of a data backup service to host my personal data including photos and videos. I don't have much knowledge about online storage services.

You could also go for alternatives, e.g., use Dropbox as your backup storage, or buy a network-attached storage system, or use a generic VPS along with unison, or even just periodically plug in an external hard disk and do a manual backup.

[Alpo]

It sort of depends on how much you need to backup, DropBox is a pretty common solution for storage in office environments. I believe it used to start at 5GB of free space, but the FAQ now says 2GB, expanding up to 16GB if certain parameters are met. Mega is another service that I've seen used, which starts at a huge 50GB of storage, but I'm not that familiar with it.

LaserLight's suggestion of using an on hand physical medium isn't a bad one at all too. If multiple people need to use the storage, it's pretty easy to set up a network share on Windows, increasing in difficulty slightly to set access rights for multiple people (It can all be done through the GUI sharing wizard, accessible through context menu). For multiple people you will probably want to segment the drive, which is done through the "disk manager".

You should try to get an idea of what exactly you want to backup as well. The way I prefer it is to have 2 full backups of the entire main drive, one that never changes, and one that I overwrite once a year or so, and then I make an incremental backup of the user files (C:/Users/[username] in Windows, or /home/[username] in Linux) several times a week. The idea is that if you nuke your boot-loader or something, you can do a full restore, and then restore your user folders after.

Also always make sure to make a recovery CD or live CD/USB so you have a platform to do the restoration with.

[whiteflags]

My suggestion would be just to buy an external drive if you were going to follow alpo's advice. You can always put it in a security deposit box so that it's not just sitting around your house. You can keep smaller-sized backups around you or your house for easy access.

[Epy]

-1 for Dropbox. They act on totally baseless/bogus DMCA requests and basically permanently disable your account after someone puts one in against you.

[Alpo]

-1 for Dropbox. They act on totally baseless/bogus DMCA requests and basically permanently disable your account after someone puts one in against you.

Woah, that's horrible. Do they give you a warning period at least, before disabling the account? Also I was wondering if this was for an account being shared, or do they have some sort of automated system that flags the content?

[Epy]

No warning period, this was for a normal free account with a public folder. I had a post on my blog that ........ed a particular software company off, so they sent a DMCA request to Dropbox for something totally unrelated I had in my Public folder. Could've fought it, but not worth the time.