So, years ago I subscribed to Carbonite. Never was really satisfied with the service and I wanted to cancel years ago but I had lots of stuff backed up and didn't want to lose the data so I kept it active. Part of the reason for this is just how damn painful it is to download your data. I always just gave up and renewed. Well, I'm almost done downloading pictures and videos backed up from mobile devices. Most of this stuff will be backed up on Google Photos although I'm going to have to get organized and figure my solution for original resolution photos from digital cameras as well as other data I don't want to lose.

How have you handled your backup needs?

I have 17 TB worth of storage space so I handle my backups locally.

As for free cloud storage I have:
53 GB with Tresorit
17 GB with Google Drive
10 GB with Dropbox

Perforce

I don't know if it's just Google's profile on me but when I search for Carbonite the top result is IDrive. Carbonite dropped Limbaugh years ago and IDrive picked him up.

OmG, it's fighting me to the end. I will come for you, Carbonite. I will find you. And I will kill you.

It's carbonite.com

yw

Ooh, thanks. Going much quicker now, tyvm.

I still haven't embraced cloud back-ups due to all the cloud hosting related leaks there's been since the invention of cloud hosting.

Sure, it'd also be easy for someone to break in to my house and steal all my backup CDs and DVDs, but still.

But man, dem backups. I have tons of TODOA + DXN backup CDs (maybe even DVDs) lying around because I was really afraid of losing all my "hard" work due to a hard drive crash or something (which actually did occur and resulted in the loss of the first 2003-2004 version of TODOA, so that now only a Dec 2003 build of the original thing (for MotS) exists in a backup CD somewhere). Ever since finishing DXN I haven't had a project that would have warranted regular and continuous backuping so I'm certain that my backup discs from 2013 onwards amount up to maybe 45% of the 2008-2013 ones.

Incidentally, these days my backup discs mostly consist of data like "I don't want to see this on my computer" whereas my large non-CD/DVD sized backups are stored in a somewhat old external HDD.

I rsync all irreplaceable data from my mobile phone to a server at home. And then rsync everything to my root-server. My emails, contacts and calenders also reside on said root-server and are in turn backed up again on my server at home.

I used to use Crash Plan. It's fine as long as you're not backing up an obnoxious amount of files (multiple TB with millions of files), as its Java backend chugs at that scale.

I currently use Backblaze, which although doesn't have the most fantastic recovery design, it DOES work and it has no problem backing up a ton of data.

My biggest problem with Carbonite's usability is it feels like they're holding my files hostage. To be clear, if I was restoring a PC they have recovery software that I have not tried yet. That's not the case for recovering mobile data. A few years ago, sort of as an afterthought, I realized that I didn't have to worry about all of the pictures on various devices because I could add them all to Carbonite and they'd be backed up. Unfortunately there were a couple I didn't add so we lost those pictures. We actually had a fair amount of fun looking at pictures and videos from old devices we forgot about. The problem is the web interface is slow and prone to fail downloading so you end up having to babysit the process and select files in bunches that then download as zips and it's just a pain which is why I avoided downloading this stuff for so long.

I'm actually installing the desktop software to download the 93 GB or so it has backed up from about 3 years ago just in case there's something hidden in there I care about. We'll see how the recovery software performs. So far I'm not impressed.

Good news everyone! It's only going to take a few days to get back 94.6 GB! Well, that's just what it says.

Well, whatever you do, don't back it up on microfilm.

Actually, the microfilm used in libraries tends to be fine but for technical drawings, nope...

</rambling>

We still put the microfilm arrows on new drawings, just in case...