Magento eCommerce Unofficial Blog

One of our computers recently had a power surge that fried both hard drives on its RAID-1 array simultaneously. Thankfully we were able to swap the fried logic board with one from an identical hard drive to retrieve the data but the incident has us looking seriously at how backups can be improved. It’s not good enough to just do an on-site backup – what if there is a fire? Let’s look at some various online backup services. I am only covering services that are designed to backup a system automatically in the background and that aren’t outrageously expensive. All these services also encrypt your files.

Mozy – Unlimited data for $4.95/month. Deals are out there for about $50/year.
Pros: Well liked by many people. Backed by EMC, a large company, so it is hopefully not likely that the company will just disappear. UNLIMITED DATA seems to really mean unlimited data, as there is nothing in the terms and conditions to indicate a limit, and I could not find any reports of Mozy limiting the amount of data backed up or performing throttling.
Cons: No versioning. Only partial support for USB drives. No support for network drives. If the computer hasn’t connected in 30 days they will delete the files, even for paying customers. No Linux support.

Carbonite – Unlimited data for $49.95/year.
Pros: Unlimited data seems to really mean unlimited data (see cons however)
Cons: No versioning. No support for network drives. People report that Carbonite limits initial backups to 2GB/day and once you hit 50GB in your backup set it limits the bandwidth to only 500MB/day. Many reports of questionable customer service. No Linux support.

IDrive – 150GB for $4.95/month
Pros: Supports versioning. Doesn’t delete user data from the backup if the user deletes it. Supports USB drives and network drives.
Cons: They claim unlimited data for backups but in the terms they define “unlimited” as 150GB. They claim that home users will rarely have more than 150GB but of course many people do. If you store more than 150GB they force you to upgrade to their “Pro” plan which costs $0.20 – $0.10 per GB, depending on how much data you store. No Linux support.

Xdrive – 50GB for $9.95/month
Cons: Doesn’t look like it supports backups properly.

Elephant Drive – Unlimited data for $9.95/month with “Home Edition” , 1TB for $34.95/month with “Pro Edition” (for small businesses)
Pros: Supports versioning. Supports network drives. Some data is stored on Amazon’s S3 network which may provide some assurance of reliability.
Cons: No Linux support. Home edition limits individual files to 1GB. Pro edition limits individual files to 2.5GB.

Jungle Disk – $20 one-time for the software (as many machines as you want), $0.15/GB/month for storage, $0.15/GB/month for transfer (charged by Amazon S3)
Pros: Supports versioning. Supports network drives. Data is stored on Amazon’s S3 network which may provide some assurance of reliability. Supports Linux. Allows archiving where data is stored even if it is not on the user’s computer’s hard drive.
Cons: $0.15/GB/month is more expensive than others.

CrashPlan – $20 one-time, $60 one-time for Pro for software, plus the cost of hard drives
Pros: Supports versioning with the Pro version. Supports USB drives and network drives. Supports Windows and Linux. No monthly fees – just the initial purchase price of the software and the hard drives. Can do the initial backup or restore across the local network, allowing it to be done much faster than over the internet.
Cons: User needs to spend more money purchasing hard drives up front. User needs to manage the hardware instead of having another company manage it. Probably want two redundant backup destinations for higher reliability in case one backup computer dies.

Duplicity – Free (Open Source), plus the cost of hard drives
Pros: Free. Open source so more assurance that you’ll be able to access your data.
Cons: Somewhat complicated to set up. Even more complicated for Windows. No commercial support.

BackupPC – Free (Open Source), plus the cost of hard drives
Pros: Free. Open source so more assurance that you’ll be able to access your data.
Cons: No support for saving files to Windows machines (only using Windows machine as clients). No commercial support.