WhiteSites Blog
WhiteSites Blog
Over the years my need to protect my data has risen in importance. Back in the day, burning off a few DVDs was enough, but today with the amount of data users have DVDs don't cut it. External hard drives are ok, but they are also prone to failure. So this leads us to moving everything to the cloud. Today I review 2 of the more popular options, BackBlaze, and CrashPlan. Where they excel, where they fail, and which one I am going to stick with.
I am a little more advanced than most users when it comes to protecting my data. My Primary C drive is an SSD drive. Then I have a 3 TB WD green drive that is used for daily backups of the C Drive. 3 x WD 3TB Red Drives configured in RAID 5 giving me 6 TB of storage ( used for video and photo archives ) with the ability to loose 1 drive. And Finally a WD 4TB Green Drive that serves as a backup to my RAID 5 Array.
The problem is all my data is local. If my house burned down, or someone was to steal my computer, I would be out of luck. So I was considering getting an LTO tape drive and backing up all my data to tape, then keeping the tape in a safety deposit box. The problem with this option is LTO6 drives cost about $1500, and the tapes cost about $30 each for 6.25 TB of capacity. Plus then I have to shuttle the tapes down to the bank every few days. For that price I could build a small SAN for less.
Cloud backup used to be restricted by drive capacity, cost, and the lack of upstream by most ISPs. Moving 4 TB of data over a 2 Mbit upstream would take about 16 days to backup all my data. Plus the cost of keeping 4TB of data in the cloud would cost over $100 / month. But that was back then. Today drive space is cheap, and ISPs have much more generous upstream plans. My Comcast connection can do a 20 Mbit upstream and about 105 Mbits down. At that rate I could backup my entire system in less than 2 days.
Like many users I am willing to try the cheap guys first when it comes to cloud backup. This lands me with CrashPlan and BackBlaze as 2 popular options. Both give their users unlimited storage, and cheap rates starting around $5 / month, or cheaper if you pay up front for the year. Both have their own software you install, which allow you to configure how often you want backups to run.
BackBlaze was the first Cloud Backup Service I tried. What I noticed was that it took their software several hours to scan all my drives to index my files. Then it started to shuttled them to the cloud. The disappointing part was how fast it moved the data to the cloud. It averaged about 1.3 Mbits, nowhere close to the 20 Mbits of upstream that is available to it. Backblaze also seemed to be rather memory hungry, using about 850 MB of RAM while it ran in the background. After seeing how long it was going to take to backup my data, I decided to try another cloud backup service.
After installing Crashplan their software indexed my drive similar to backblaze. However it did so much faster. Only took a little more than an hour to fully index the 4TB of data I wanted to backup. The software was a little nicer than backblaze. It allows you to backup your data to other locations such as another computer on your network, an external hard drive, or even another friend's computer. The Cloud Backup is the only serivce you have to pay for, however its free for the first 30 days. The software was configurable allowing you to set how much CPU its allowed to use while you are active on your computer, and when you are away. During the Indexing phase, the software only used about 15% of my CPU, and gradually climbed to 400 MB memory usage.
My biggest question was how fast would it backup my data? It would nice to find a backup solution that would be able to saturate my 20+ Mbits of upstream. To my surprise CrashPlan moved along at 30 Mbits. Which is technically faster than I though my internet could support. At times I even watched it spike up to 40 Mbits.
At this point I figured it was time to uninstall Backblaze, since I obviously had found the backup solution for me.
I will update this blog more as things evolve.
Update 8/24/2014 12:15 PM
I put my computer to sleep last night, and then started it back up around 10:30 AM today. Thus far CrashPlan has backed up 68 GB of data. I realized that part of the reason its so fast is due to it compressing the data before sending it to their servers. This is why the Upstream value at times seems rather over rated. Today I watched as CrashPlan said it was backing up my data at more than 200 Mbits, Keep in mind comcast only gives me about 20 Mbits Plus or minus. The fact they are able to compress my data like that is very impressive. I am now considering installing it on my Colocated Server. I am even wondering if the software could possibly be used to replicate the data on my server to a warm backup for in case My server was to go down.
Update 8/24/2014 1:07 PM
At this point CrashPlan has backed up 81 GB of data.
Update 8/24/2014 3:16 PM
At this point CrashPlan has backed up 86.8 GB of data (41,522 Files). It would seem that when dealing with large files Crashplan is very fast, but it lags greatly with smaller files under 500 KB. Currently my Backup speed is at 2 Mbits.
Update 8/24/2014 9:35 PM
Currently sitting at 98.4GB of data backed up (94,193 Files). The speed has increased again to about 35 Mbits, though the software is moving thorugh some larger files which might explain this. Even though its going well, Ebay just alerted me to an LTO5 Tape drive package for $650, which I have to admit is tempting.
Update 8/26/2014 1:09 AM
At this point CrashPlan has backed up 117.8 GB of data (448,055 Files). The speed is currently at 8.7 Mbits. At this point I feel CrashPlan is excellent for larger files ( think DSLR RAW files ), but smaller files of just a few KB really drag it down. Keep in mind I am not letting my computer run all night, which would move things along.
Update 8/28/2014 2:05 AM
Another update on my backup progress. 304.7 GB of data (901,928 Files). The spped is currently at 10.5 Mbits. Considering I am backing up 4.5 TB of data, I am starting to wonder if Comcast has any data caps for customers on their 105 Mbit / 20 Mbit Internet plans ( What I am running ).
Update 8/29/2014 12:33 PM
ok now I am confused. I let my system run all night, and all yesterday, yet its telling me I have completed 228.3 GB of data (233,969 Files). The speed is currently at 24.7 Mbits. How did I suddenly loose data that was already backed up? I may have to reach out to CrashPlan for an explanation.
Update 8/29/2014 1:40PM
I used the Live Chat feature to contact CrashPlan about my previous update. Everything was fine. The difference was a result of how CrashPlan works. When Crash Plan notices a file has been updated its now considered (NOT BACKED UP ) and it is removed the list of completed files. Also CrashPlan only updates the parts of the files that have changed and not the entire file, this is why some extreme backups speeds can be seen. Part of my issue was I had setup CrashPlan to backup my entire C drive. Not a good idea, as the system files on the OS are constantly changing. Their Tech recommended I only backup user files, and not try to use it for a bare metal recovery. I agreed. I will be making this change to my backup scheme. So far I am impressed, not just by the efficiency of their software, but they communication skills of their support techs. He even said I could run Crash Plan on my colocated server which runs Server 2012 R2. This is not something BackBlaze would allow.
Update 8/29/2014 4:31 PM
After changing my backup settings to only my user folder on the C drive crashplan rescanned all files to verify which ones to backup. This updated my backup plan to the following
When Crash Plan resumed backing up my data it showed.230.8 GB (269,504 Files) backed up, and was transferring at 50.1 Mbit.
Update 8/29/2014 11:10 PM
Currently at 375.7 GB (1,052,118 Files) backed up and transferring at 12.5 Mbits
Update 8/30/2014 3:00 AM
Currently at 454.3 GB (1,159,794 Files )
Update 9/1/2014 10:52 AM
Currently at 405.5 GB (1,166,178 Files ) Transferring at 9.8 Mbits
Update 9/3/2014 8:52 PM
Currently at 969.4 GB (1,848,017 Files ) Transferring at 6 Mbits Keep in mind my computer has been off for most of the past 2 days, so don't take these figures as an 24/7 performance report. On the other hand a LTO5 autoloader tape drive just popped up on Ebay, and the price is really attractive to me. I still like Crash Plan as a cloud backup solution, but I am starting to realize that if I ever needed to restore massive amounts of data ( like entire drives ), the linear read speed of LTO 5 tapes is still way better than any cloud solution.
Update 10/14/2014
My 30 day trial of Crashplan expired. Overall the idea of cloud backup is nice, but if you need to quickly get a crashed system back up, local backups are still the way to go. After hearing about DropBox having an issue where it lost some users data, I am very hesitant to use any cloud backup service. Unfortunately LTO 5 tape drives are still expensive. If you are lucky you can land one off ebay for about $500. I keep trying to hold off for the price of LTO 6 drives to drop, but ever since the report of dropbox having issues, the prices of LTO6 drives seem to be going up, not down.