Wake-up Call: Off-Site Backups

[d2mini]

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I had a bit of a wake up call two days ago when my house was broken into.

The thieves attempted to remove our old 50" LCD tv but only got as far as the back yard which is where I found it. The only thing they actually got away with was my wife's Mac Powerbook. I'm guessing that since the house alarm was going off they wanted to scram before the cops showed up. My wife's office is closer to the house so she got to the scene first and found one of our dogs running down the street. Our pup was in his crate so he was still in the house. They kicked the back door in, busting the jam. My office is right next to that door and luckily nothing was touched. All my leica gear, nikon gear, computer gear... everything was still there.

 

Now the point of this thread is that even though i do nightly backups, those backups are to other internal and external drives. If they walked away with my computer, I would have lost EVERYTHING! Including some current jobs I'm working on where I'm the only one with copies of the pics. So yesterday I went out and bought a small 1tb external drive to do weekly offsite backups, and today I'm researching online backups. Crashplan is only $54/yr for unlimited storage and for an extra one-time fee of $125 including shipping both ways, they will send you a 1tb drive that you fill up and send back to speed up the initial backup. Without that, it will literally take me months to get everything uploaded at 6gb per day with my high-speed internet connection.

 

Anyway, just a friendly reminder to have a good backup plan in place with multiple backups... before disaster strikes. I really lucked out in this case.

[J_Thompson]

Thanks for the "Heads Up." I'm sorry for the unnerving intrusion into your home, but glad that your photo gear was left untouched. While I'm usually home during the day, I too feel the need for more backup for my photos and other material. Did you do any research before choosing Crashplan for your offsite backup?

 

The reason for my asking is that I keep hearing good things about Carbonite, another offsite backup service. The offer a three year plan for $129, which I consider to be pretty reasonable. Can anybody else, with more experience than I, weigh in on this topic?

 

I guess that's one good thing about shooting film... no thief ever steals boxes of negatives.

[d2mini]

The reason for my asking is that I keep hearing good things about Carbonite, another offsite backup service. The offer a three year plan for $129, which I consider to be pretty reasonable. Can anybody else, with more experience than I, weigh in on this topic?

 

I guess that's one good thing about shooting film... no thief ever steals boxes of negatives.

 

I downloaded the free trial to carbonite and it's currently uploading now at a little over 6gb per day, but i don't see an option to send in a drive to quicken this, like CrashPlan has. At this rate my free trial will run out long before i get my files uploaded. Plus, the CP software seems like it might be a bit better. Check out their website and let us know what you think... they have some comparisons against carbonite and a couple others.