Filed under: OS, Leopard, Beta Beat
Let's do the Time Warp again! Offsite Time Machine backups
However, there was one very big, hairy fly floating in the soup of backup contentment -- if your backup drive was destroyed or stolen, your backup was gone. Many of us who are paranoid about backups started doing a second level of backups to offsite services such as Mozy, Carbonite, or my personal favorite, BackBlaze.
There's a new kid on the block with a different approach to offsite backup -- Time Warp. This US$25 Mac application (free during the beta period) takes your Time Machine backups, compresses and encrypts them with 256-bit AES encryption, and then uploads them to your personal Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) account.
How does the cost of storage on Amazon S3 compare with the other services? The current costs are $0.15 per GB per month for storage, $0.10 per GB to backup data into S3, and $0.17 per GB to restore data from S3. The Jumping Bean Software team says that backup up 20 GB of personal data would cost about $1.50 per month, which is in line with costs for the other services. Time Warp does intelligent filtering to keep "dumb files" like cache, trash, and temporary files from being uploaded and costing you money.
If you take a glance at the sample screenshot at the top of this post, you'll notice that Time Warp does its best to give you a handle on your storage costs, so there's no guesswork involved. Leopard users who have been on the fence about whether or not to invest in an offsite backup solution might want to take advantage of the Time Warp beta.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Dan said 8:59AM on 7-20-2009
"The current costs are $0.15 per GB per month for storage, $0.10 per GB to backup data into S3, and $0.17 per GB to restore data from S3. The Jumping Bean Software team says that backup up 20 GB of personal data would cost about $1.50 per month"
$0.15/GB x 20GB = $3 for storage
$2 for transfer
$3.40 to retrieve
How does that add up to $1.50 per month again?
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Mike said 12:51PM on 7-20-2009
Creative accounting my friend. That is 20GB over a year. Haha.
support said 8:02AM on 7-21-2009
Hi Dan,
The storage cost example is after compression. But you make a very good point regarding the initial transfer cost. I considered including that but wanted to keep things simple. I'll change the wording to call out the cost associated with uploading the data in the first place, and make it clear that the storage cost is after compression.
tac12 said 9:01AM on 7-20-2009
I've been using a Cloud based backup, but certainly here in the UK there is a potential flaw in the strategy, I had a disk die, so wanted to restore about 75GB from S3 (via JungleDisk), all went well, until my ISP (Demon), started to threaten me with bandwidth capping because of breaking their FUP. Just goes to prove that unlimited ADSL doesnt mean that. I have even offered to ensure that I only restore overnight, Demon have yet to reply to any of my e-mails.
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Lachlan Hunt said 9:05AM on 7-20-2009
That's no good for me. I currently have 4TB of data. That's currently distributed across 8TB worth of available storage space. But at the cost of $0.15, that's $150 per TB per month, or a total of about $600 per month for my needs.
It's worth nothing that Mozy, Carbonite and BackBlaze all advertise "unlimited space", but it's not clear if they would complain about someone using several TB, especially given how low their prices are.
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Margaret Lukens said 12:40PM on 7-20-2009
Thanks for this useful post. I've seen too many clients who have suffered devastating data loss, such as three-quarters of a book. And I've heard too many stories of external drive failure, especially the usb port, making retrieval impossible. I'm convinced that having both onsite and offsite backup isn't paranoid -- it's just good business practice.
Margaret Lukens, http://www.newleafandcompany.com
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Mark Sieber said 9:50AM on 7-20-2009
This would be my first use of net storage, and could work for me depending on the time needed to upload. I'm still confused after looking at upload rates and conversion charts.
I have Comcast, 4500 kbps upload, 28000 kbps download (Speakeasy test http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/)
How long does a 20 gig upload take? I'm seeing at least overnight, but my math skill aren't the best...
Some guidelines for other upload/download speeds (DSL etc.) would also be helpful.
Thanks!
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Gleb Budman said 4:04PM on 7-20-2009
To see how much data you can actually upload or download over your Internet connection, simply visit:
https://www.backblaze.com/speedtest/
It's similar to one you mention, but translates it to actual MB uploaded per day.
Note that if you're paying for Amazon S3, 100 GB of data will cost $10 to upload, $15/month to store, and $17 to download. (Backblaze provides unlimited upload/storage/download for just $5/month.)
Gleb Budman
CEO, Backblaze
Greenie said 9:51AM on 7-20-2009
I send mine to a hosted Time Capsule. It's my hardware, so if I ever need to restore, they can just send the Time Capsule to me. Much faster than downloading 750GB over the web.
Time Capsule facility: http://tinyurl.com/maey37
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Rafe H. said 10:21AM on 7-20-2009
"...takes your Time Machine backups ... and then uploads them to your personal Amazon S3 account."
That's not what the screenshot suggests. Also contradicts the statement "Time Warp does intelligent filtering to keep "dumb files" like cache, trash, and temporary files from being uploaded," since Time Machine backups contain no such files either.
What's up?
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Greg at JumpingBeanSoftware said 8:14AM on 7-21-2009
Actually, while Time Machine does do some filtering it still include things like Trash and system files. Which is fine when you are backing up on the LAN, but Time Warp performs additional filtering to decrease the size of the backups stored offsite.
Rick said 10:38AM on 7-20-2009
Where do you live that someone will steal, not only your main machine, but your external HD as well? That's just cruel.
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Alex Brooks said 11:29AM on 7-20-2009
A fire could certainly destroy both.
Zimmie said 2:03PM on 7-20-2009
About a year ago, my apartment in Dallas was burglarized. We think a FedEx delivery interrupted them and scared them off. They got all of my computers and one external drive.
The day before, another apartment in the same building was burglarized in the same way, but this time with no interruptions. They took *everything*. Clothes. Furniture. Dishes. Everything was gone. If you ignored the broken door, it looked like the people had moved out.
So yeah. Burglars are dicks.
William said 11:28AM on 7-20-2009
I think the first problem for many people with cloud-based backup/storage is bandwidth, particularly the agonizingly slow upload speeds most people have at home. On my "elite" DSL from AT&T, my upload speed is capped at 768kbps, and I'm lucky if I come close to that advertised speed. For the 250GB of important data [music, pictures, home videos, etc...] I have, the initial upload would take 758.5 hours. And that's assuming I get full upload speed, 24 hours a day for 31 straight days. And that doesn't include the other 2TB of data I have that I would also like to back up. That would take another 258.9 days to upload.
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alansky said 11:48AM on 7-20-2009
@William:
You hit the nail on the head. Maybe someday online storage of large quantities of data will be practical. Right now, it's a painful proposition. Personally, I just keep a hard disk backup at another location. It's not a perfect solution, but it does protect me against catastrophic data loss.
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Wheels said 1:12PM on 7-20-2009
It's just a jump to the left!...
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brownrecluse said 1:47PM on 7-20-2009
Wow, great thread. I've been pondering this solution for months now. What I ended up doing was using Mozy for my daily work flow, being a web designer I usually have 10 gigs or so of stuff I need access to immediately in case of theft, fire etc.
For everything else that isn't as critical, I bought a 750 Gig drive that I keep at a friends house in a safe place and once every few months or so I'll get it and add any new movies, music, photos, etc.
Certainly not ideal but it works for now.
I do currently have 46 gigs backed up on mozy, I got paranoid and let my Iphoto library backup for 7 days straight while on vacation, so now it just does nightly backups of just the photos that I have added that day if any. It also nightly backups my critical work files, all my system info and a few other items.
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N1David said 2:54PM on 7-20-2009
Having looked at this I don't see the Time Machine integration at all. I have two Macs backing up to TM. I've installed TIme Warp and it appears that I have to load it and specify backup folders etc on both Macs. And my MacBook needs to be on before it will backup - so in what way is this different from any other backup solution?
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aaron said 3:32PM on 7-20-2009
If you're this concerned about data loss, why would you trust an application that's still in beta?
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