Online Data Storage

[Huntn]

I've got a 5TB account with iDrive. First year it was cheap, now it's up to $95 a year. The thing is it is slow, at least it appears that way to me. I've got about 300GB I've designated to store online and it takes LIKE FOREVER to update 10-12+ hours. Is this normal? Recently I surfed looking for comparisons and Tech Radar rated iDrive number one as "inexpensive" and "fast". Really? I'd hate to see a service that was called slow, maybe only a week to store 300 GB online?

Please educate me.

 

[tobefirst]

What is the upload speed on your internet service?

 

[Huntn]

What is the upload speed on your internet service?

Uh, it's relatively slow as compared to the download speed which is 400mbits. I think I know what you are going to say next.

 

[SuperMatt]

Doesn‘t it support incremental backups? 300GBs on most residential cable connections is gonna take quite a long time to upload. Even at 400Mbps download, that’s 40 MB a second, and you’re moving 300,000 megabytes. That would be about 125 minutes. If it’s taking 12 hours, you probably have around 60-70Mbps upload.

 

[tobefirst]

Uh, it's relatively slow as compared to the download speed which is 400mbits. I think I know what you are going to say next.

Bingo.

We considered switching ISPs early this year because they were touting gigabit download speeds for the same cost we are paying for around 200Mbps. However, the upload speeds of the new provider were sloooooow, like 10-20Mbps, and both me and my wife were working from home with her video conferencing for 8 hours every day. There was no way we could make that work, and frankly, we rarely push the download speed of the current provider to the max as it is.

 

[Huntn]

Doesn‘t it support incremental backups? 300GBs on most residential cable connections is gonna take quite a long time to upload. Even at 400Mbps download, that’s 40 MB a second, and you’re moving 300,000 megabytes. That would be about 125 minutes. If it’s taking 12 hours, you probably have around 60-70Mbps upload.

Bingo.

We considered switching ISPs early this year because they were touting gigabit download speeds for the same cost we are paying for around 200Mbps. However, the upload speeds of the new provider were sloooooow, like 10-20Mbps, and both me and my wife were working from home with her video conferencing for 8 hours every day. There was no way we could make that work, and frankly, we rarely push the download speed of the current provider to the max as it is.

Ok, so this is when I selected several Windows restore images for cloud back up. My guess is there is incremental back up with iDrive and will look at that, but I‘ll be erasing 100-200gb at a time, and replacing it with the same amount making for long uploads.

Note: I have local backups spread across 2 hard drives seperate from my PC. And I have 2 external hard drives for my MBP too for backups, but there I use Time machine for primarily the OS. The external drives are for dual copies of data. But I thought a cloud backup of Windows restore images might be a good thing too.

This is what is annoying me, it starts out after a couple of hours showing: 2 hours lapse time, 2 hours estimated, then at 4 hours, it’s 4 hours total lapse time and 4 hours estimated then 12 hours lapse time, 3 hours estinated. I went to bed last night and it was estimating a total 14+ hours to upload. What I’m not sure about is if I stop it in the middle, I think it will pick up where it left off, just not sure about that.

 

[SuperMatt]

Ok, so this is when I selected several Windows restore images for cloud back up. My guess is there is incremental back up with iDrive and will look at that, but I‘ll be erasing 100-200gb at a time, and replacing it with the same amount making for long uploads.

This is what is annoying me, it starts out after a couple of hours showing: 2 hours lapse time, 2 hours estimated, then at 4 hours, it’s 4 hours total lapse time and 4 hours estimated then 12 hours lapse time, 3 hours estinated. I went to bed last night and it was estimating a total 14+ hours to upload. What I’m not sure about is if I stop it in the middle, I think it will pick up where it left off, just not sure about that.

Perhaps you have a unique situation in which you are creating 300GB of new content constantly. In that case, the only solution is to buy something with gigabit upload probably. But it sounds like your backup system is not incremental, or is not working properly. Why would that much stuff have to be deleted and re-uploaded?

When I work with Windows images on Mac, I do not store any actual data in the Windows image. It only holds the software, configurations, etc. Using something like Parallels or VMWare Fusion, you can host all the data on the Mac filesystem, and map it so Windows sees it. So once I have it setup, I make a one-time backup of that image, and only update the backup if I make a substantial change to it. Otherwise, it’s excluded from the “regular” backups.

Have you tried Backblaze?

Cloud Backup: Easy, Secure, Unlimited Online Backup

Never lose a photo, video, or file again. Cloud backup made easy and automatic. Backblaze unlimited online backup for $9 per month.

www.backblaze.com