Mozy/Carbonite vs flash -- with new questions

[ohgillian]

I'm assigned with researching how to back up my and DH's files. This after our external harddrive died.

I have read the threads on here about carbonite and mozy (and drop box, icloud, etc), but DH thinks we should just get a ginormous flashdrive and back up onto that once a month.

I have a sense that this is a bad idea, but I don't actually know. Any thoughts?



ETA: New questions are:
So carbonite's pricing is "per computer". DH and I would still use our external harddrive as our "network" and save all of our files there, then we would back up the external hard drive onto the carbonite. Yes? So technically we would only be paying for one "computer", which wouldn't even be an actual computer, it would be the harddrive?

Related: the Moxy website asks if I want to back up computers, servers, or both. Is my external hard drive a server?

I am so out of my league.

[evans]

Online back ups are good in the event of a disaster (flood, fire, ect).

I personally think external HD back ups are enough for me. We have it setup to auto back up all computers to our Time Machine. I love it because I never have to think about doing it. In the event of a fire or flood we would grab it with our fire proof safe on the way out the door.

[dexteroni]

I like having both a local backup and an online one, in case our house burns down or the storage website gets hacked. We have both a local external hard drive that sits on our desk, and online backup. All of the sites you listed are fine (I'm not familiar with mozy though). There's also the Amazon cloud although I don't know how much space they provide.

But if you go with local, buy a local hard drive that has an automated backup function. Using a giant flash drive for this purpose seems silly.

[ohgillian]

Thanks. I agree that using a flash seems silly. I think that our biggest issue would be that doing so is no more reliable than using an external hard drive. And as mentioned, I'm researching this b/c our hard drive just failed and we were very lucky to be able to get any files off of it.

More questions: So carbonite's pricing is "per computer". DH and I would still use our external harddrive as our "network" and save all of our files there, then we would back up the external hard drive onto the carbonite. Yes? So technically we would only be paying for one "computer", which wouldn't even be an actual computer, it would be the harddrive?

[ohgillian]

Oct 17, 2012 11:32:20 GMT -5 @fivedogs said:

We have a server that has two huge drives and mirrors the backups onto them (so if one fails, we have the other one). I still want to do something online. Right now I put all pictures on Shutterfly, but I'm looking at some of the backup services that let you do it for free if you pair up with a friend (so basically you back up to friend's computer and they back up to yours).

That's what we had, too....it didn't end up really helping when the whole thing just died. Just FYI. Moreover, our computer person never did believe me and DH when we said we were sure that we weren't the ones deleting the files from it. So that made me pissy.