Looking for Good Backup Software

[dsavitsk]

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

[penger]

I think Crashplan+ may do what you want?

[tkam]

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.

[dsavitsk]

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.

[HDen]

Based on what you're saying, why not create a local SVN repository?

[jvlgato]

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.

[grawk]

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.