dsavitsk Posted September 21, 2011 Report Share Posted September 21, 2011 (edited) In this day and age, this should not be that hard. I am looking for some decent backup software. Here's how I'd like it to work. 1. I want real time backup -- I don't want to have to run it every night, or press a backup button. I want for the software to detect when I have changed a file, and back it up. 2. I want it to keep all version of the files it backs up. 3. I want the backup to be in the cloud -- I don't want to have to maintain a backup server, and I don't want to backup locally. 4. I want the software to sync several computers. I use about 5 different computers, and I want for a change on one to be replicated to the others. I have been using a piece of software called SpiderOak which, in theory, does all of this. But, S.O. has three major failings. One, the interface is awful. Two, the sync feature is a little spotty, and there is no button to force a sync (see point 1) and the only way I have found to do so is to reboot the computer (stopping and starting the software does not do it). Those failings would be, perhaps, forgivable, were it not for problem 3 which is that it sometimes randomly deletes files. And, it does this quietly, behind the scenes, so it is sometimes weeks before I notice something missing and have to go digging through the archives to find it. I am sure there are things I have not happened upon that are missing somewhere. Does anyone have a good suggestion for backup? This is Windows only for now. Edited September 21, 2011 by dsavitsk Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
penger Posted September 21, 2011 Report Share Posted September 21, 2011 I think Crashplan+ may do what you want? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tkam Posted September 22, 2011 Report Share Posted September 22, 2011 I highly recommend BackBlaze for cloud storage backup. Your requirements are pretty difficult to hit with one piece of software - especially #2 and #4. I'm not sure you can find one solution that will totally meet your needs. You might want to try using something like dropbox with a service like backblaze. Use backblaze for backing up to the cloud and use dropbox for revision history + keeping files in sync across 5 computers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dsavitsk Posted September 23, 2011 Author Report Share Posted September 23, 2011 As I say, I'm surprised that this is so difficult. Spideroak really does everything I want, it just doesn't always do it all that well. And, the panic of finding that papers have disappeared, or reverted to an earlier state before I started editing leaving a big mess to clean up is pretty frustrating. The upside is that when it deletes something, it is just moved to a deleted folder. The downside is that each computer has it's own deleted folder, so it is not always easy to find what I am looking for. But, I may be stuck with it until something better comes along. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HDen Posted September 23, 2011 Report Share Posted September 23, 2011 Based on what you're saying, why not create a local SVN repository? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jvlgato Posted September 23, 2011 Report Share Posted September 23, 2011 Yeah, I've pretty much given up on finding what you're looking for in Windows. I back up important files I'm actively using with Dropbox, have photos, music and such on a RAID of some sort on a NAS, contacts and calendar are on the Google server, but also downloaded into Dropbox regularly, and I just accept that I'll have to reinstall everything else if my computer dies. I agree with you that something should be out there that does what you want, and does it well. I haven't found it, yet. I've been watching this thread hoping someone else will enlighten me! I will say that Dropbox has been extremely useful for most of what I want for file backup and access across multiple platforms. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
grawk Posted September 23, 2011 Report Share Posted September 23, 2011 version management across multiple computers isn't a trivial problem. At this point, the safe thing to do with that is to do it manually. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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