Use Time Machine? Move Your Mac’s Files To Las Vegas.

iggy pence said:

I don’t think there is an automated way to back up Time Machine over AWS. Time Machine get become hundreds of gigs very quickly, and backing up to AWS, though not expensive, is VERY slow; not recommended for the average Mac user.

Extra hard drives is a good thing.

QS said:

I was struck by Stwf’s approach of using AWS once a week to back up Time Machine. How do you go about doing this?

Eric said:

The remote backup is nice, but I just use iPodBackup to back up my data to my iPod.
Since the iPod is always with me, I protect it about as well as my own body (which may not be saying much).

Jim Kauffman said:

I use Crashplan and have never looked back. A one-time charge of 20 bucks for their software lets you automatically back up, with encryption, to an unlimited number of friends/family computers on your LAN (wired and wireless) or remotely over the internet. 

For a $60 one-time software purchase, you get a few more bells and whistles, like priority support and unlimited versioning—being able to go back to a particular version of a document.

I backup to another Mac in my household, a friend’s PC in Canada and Crashplan’s own servers. Crashplan’s servers cost $5/month.

Peace of mind without the limitations and quirks of Time Capsule.

I don’t have a business interest in Crashplan. I’m just a satisfied customer who has finally found an easy, flexible, automated way to back my stuff up.

I figured if it weren’t easy and automatic, it would never get done. Crashplan gets it done.

stwf said:

sorry, but I have to disagree about Mozy. I tried it and gave up due to the excessively slow upload times. I don’t know how much data you had, but I tried to back up 40GB of photos and music.
The backup would have taken over a year to complete!

This colocation thing is an interesting idea, are the computers backed up? As good as an offsite data center is, all hard drives fail. Will the colocation service keep a backup handy? If not you may need another backup service for when the Time Capsule fails.

I think I’ve settled on Time Machine (located locally), that is copied weekly to AWS (in the event of true disaster). The cost of using AWS is low and the backups are measured in hours!

Randy said:

I have been using Mozy for Mac for a few years now. I love it. Set it and forget it. For roughly five dollars a month for unlimited space, it’s a great deal. You can recover files pretty quickly. See the Mozy web site for more information.

Initial backups can take days, but after the initial backup is done, it’s simply a matter of doing incremental backups. This all occurs in the background so you are never aware of a backup occurring meaning that your workflow is never disrupted.

So far, this has been my remote backup of choice. Aside from Mozy, I use Superduper to perform nightly clones of my main drive just in case. Superduper is fantastic and works extremely well.