These days people keep photo's on digital media, simply having them on your pc and backed up onto your home NAS or server might seem like a good idea in normal circumstances but what happens when something catastrophic happens? Flood, Theft or heaven forbid a fire at home?
Personally the photo's that I've taken over the years are priceless to me, so it's natural I want to protect them. So far I've been backing them up from my home server and then sending the disk to a member of the family but is this enough, what if the drive gets dropped on the way or lost. All these worries for something priceless meant that I'd have to look for something a bit more resilient and automated.
So the saving them on the "Cloud" seems like a feasible solution, Getting them there is the next challenge, firstly you'll need to pick a provider. There's quite a few, some offer cheap prices to store but charge for restore. Some offer a flat fee per GB.
Some of the bigger providers are Azure, Amazon offer S3 or Glacier. Choosing the right provider will be down to your own requirements.
For me, Long term cheap storage coupled with a low risk of restore, I chose Amazon Glacier, It's basically $0.01 per GB, deletions and restores are charged extra though so this needs to be taken into consideration. I wont be deleting much on there as the data only grows slightly as more images are put on.
The next issue is the program you use you get your data there.
I have trialled some free, and although the free ones I've tried are OK and get the job done, I wanted to know that my data was safe. I searched for a more comprehensive solution, something that would be able to mail me when there was an issue.
Having tried Cloudberry back in the WHS1 days and remembering that it had many features I decided to see if they had something that would be sufficient for me today.
Welcome to Cloudberry Backup SBS - Which compliments Server 2012 Essentials.
Upon installing and re loading the Server Console I'm presented with an easy to understand interface.
When creating a new backup, you can see a Select Could Storage box, which offers the ability to pick from many common cloud providers and various other protocols such as FTP, SFTP or even a file system.
I filled in my Amazon Glacier details and let the backup run. It took all night to upload 42 GB, but that was the seeding done. Future backups will take significantly less time to complete if the job is run frequently.
There is an estimated cost feature for your data, there's also a cap if you have a financial limit you can set one.
I also get email alerts when a backup is fails or is successful. This is the key to a reliable backup solution, not having to check it daily, or weekly. If I don't get a mail, I know there's an issue.
Or head over to http://www.cloudberrylab.com/
