Article: Amazon Offers Unlimited Cloud Storage For $59.99 Per Year

[jhwalker]

Am I doing something wrong?

 

Tried out the Amazon Unlimited Cloud. I have decently fast upload of about 6.33 Mbps.

 

But it took 1 full hour to upload 1.2 gb... So that's about 1000 hours for a terabyte, and 17,000 hours for the 17 tb of music... So that's almost 2 years running continuously just to upload the files.

 

Far better obviously to buy a couple 8tb Seagate drives for $300 each and do it in a few days.

 

Backing up massive file sets online is absolutely going to be slow

 

I've been using CrashPlan for several years now. My first upload took very close to a full year (only 1-2Mb upload speed at the time), but it was "set it and forget it". Now, only incremental updates are uploaded, and I have almost 10TB backed up.

 

To be sure, I also have all of this backed up to a local NAS, but I'm going to put another copy on Amazon, just in case.

[miguelito]

Am I doing something wrong?

Tried out the Amazon Unlimited Cloud. I have decently fast upload of about 6.33 Mbps.

But it took 1 full hour to upload 1.2 gb... So that's about 1000 hours for a terabyte, and 17,000 hours for the 17 tb of music... So that's almost 2 years running continuously just to upload the files.

I was refraining from commenting... But seriously... I understand "storing in the cloud" sounds cool and all that, but what's the use and purpose? Backup? Of something that will take, well, lets see, weeks/months to download back into your computer? This is completely impractical. Want safe backups? Make many, cycle them, put a few in a bank vault, etc...

[The Computer Audiophile]

I was refraining from commenting... But seriously... I understand "storing in the cloud" sounds cool and all that, but what's the use and purpose? Backup? Of something that will take, well, lets see, weeks/months to download back into your computer? This is completely impractical. Want safe backups? Make many, cycle them, put a few in a bank vault, etc...

One man's impractical is another man's easy-peasy solution.

 

The odds of me "[Making] many, cycle them, put a few in a bank vault" are slim to none. The odds of me kicking off a backup and letting it run while I live my life are 100%.

[miguelito]

One man's impractical is another man's easy-peasy solution.

 

The odds of me "[Making] many, cycle them, put a few in a bank vault" are slim to none. The odds of me kicking off a backup and letting it run while I live my life are 100%.

Understood... I do make cycle backups but do not at this time ship to a bank vault. The question is what are you going to do with that backup other that having the comfort that it's there and you will never use it, or frankly that it won't be there when you need it.

 

I have Google Apps for business, for which I pay. One time I accidentally erased ALL my email, all of it. Do you think Google helped to bring it back from backups? Think again. Illusions of safety is not something I delve in.

[The Computer Audiophile]

Understood... I do make cycle backups but do not at this time ship to a bank vault. The question is what are you going to do with that backup other that having the comfort that it's there and you will never use it, or frankly that it won't be there when you need it.

 

I have Google Apps for business, for which I pay. One time I accidentally erased ALL my email, all of it. Do you think Google helped to bring it back from backups? Think again. Illusions of safety is not something I delve in.

When it comes to my music my biggest fear is that I will erase it or I will get lazy and not replace a bad drive in a NAS, and lose everything. By backing up to the cloud I offload all the administration on to Amazon. I will never touch the copy in the cloud unless I need it. If I have to re-download all my content it will take awhile but not nearly as long as it would take to re-rip and re-tag everything.

[jtwrace]

Understood... I do make cycle backups but do not at this time ship to a bank vault. The question is what are you going to do with that backup other that having the comfort that it's there and you will never use it, or frankly that it won't be there when you need it.

 

I have Google Apps for business, for which I pay. One time I accidentally erased ALL my email, all of it. Do you think Google helped to bring it back from backups? Think again. Illusions of safety is not something I delve in.

 

I agree and think what you're saying is to make sure you take as much care as you can with backing up your data yourself. Use the cloud or other type as an emergency to your already backed up data.

[miguelito]

Understood... I do make cycle backups but do not at this time ship to a bank vault. The question is what are you going to do with that backup other that having the comfort that it's there and you will never use it, or frankly that it won't be there when you need it.

 

I have Google Apps for business, for which I pay. One time I accidentally erased ALL my email, all of it. Do you think Google helped to bring it back from backups? Think again. Illusions of safety is not something I delve in.

Now don't get me wrong about backups: you'd be hard pressed to find someone more paranoid than me about it. I just don't see how this is practical.

 

I have one of those "toaster" devices and chronosync. I keep effectively 6 copies of my library, none more than a month old. Starting this weekend I will have another set in another location as well.

[miguelito]

When it comes to my music my biggest fear is that I will erase it or I will get lazy and not replace a bad drive in a NAS, and lose everything. By backing up to the cloud I offload all the administration on to Amazon. I will never touch the copy in the cloud unless I need it. If I have to re-download all my content it will take awhile but not nearly as long as it would take to re-rip and re-tag everything.

How can you be 100% certain Amazon will have your data intact? And yes, anything to avoid re-ripping and re-tagging... Can't imagine...

[jtwrace]

Now don't get me wrong about backups: you'd be hard pressed to find someone more paranoid than me about it. I just don't see how this is practical.

 

I have one of those "toaster" devices and chronosync. I keep effectively 6 copies of my library, none more than a month old. Starting this weekend I will have another set in another location as well.

Yeah, I'm with you. I'm nuts about it...the thought of re-ripping everything makes me sick. I keep many backups locally, in the safe and offsite. It's not bad but another offsite NAS is my next option unless Google Fiber and ISP rates come way down in my area which isn't happening.

[miguelito]

I agree and think what you're saying is to make sure you take as much care as you can with backing up your data yourself. Use the cloud or other type as an emergency to your already backed up data.

I'm just hard pressed to see how this particular application is practical. I definitely use something like this for my documents - I am an absolute freak about keeping all my documents electronic and encrypted. But that's a few hundred megs, a gig tops.

 

But you know... Anyone can do whatever they want... And there is indeed a few more decimal places of security by doing this...

[jhwalker]

One man's impractical is another man's easy-peasy solution.

 

The odds of me "[Making] many, cycle them, put a few in a bank vault" are slim to none. The odds of me kicking off a backup and letting it run while I live my life are 100%.

 

+1

 

I don't own a safety deposit box, I don't have an "alternate / vacation" home to store backups in, and I would never run manual backups on a scheduled basis. Set-it-and-forget-it is essential for me

[Paul R]

When it comes to my music my biggest fear is that I will erase it or I will get lazy and not replace a bad drive in a NAS, and lose everything. By backing up to the cloud I offload all the administration on to Amazon. I will never touch the copy in the cloud unless I need it. If I have to re-download all my content it will take awhile but not nearly as long as it would take to re-rip and re-tag everything.

 

Ye gods yes.

 

On the other hand, renting a safe deposit box is often cheap, a couple of dollars per month or even no cost at all from your local bank. Stuffing backup disks in there once a quarter or so means you can restore the majority of your backups fast, with or withoupt high speed internet support. You can always pick up the newest files from the Internet, like articles and other documents.

 

I have to admit, the best online backup I have seen so far is tarsnap - incremental, deduplicated, relatively fast, and not too expensive. More so than Amazon, but I gotta figure out how to make Amazon Drive work with some intelligent backup tools.

[Jud]

I'm just hard pressed to see how this particular application is practical. I definitely use something like this for my documents - I am an absolute freak about keeping all my documents electronic and encrypted. But that's a few hundred megs, a gig tops.

 

But you know... Anyone can do whatever they want... And there is indeed a few more decimal places of security by doing this...

 

That was one of the things that put me off CrashPlan (the major one being that it pretty well shut down my network while uploading, which eliminated the whole "set it and forget it" aspect): Your stuff is encrypted and compressed on their servers (good), so you can't access it in the form of a music file if you accidentally duplicate a corrupt album or two across all your backups and want to get a good copy (bad). To do that, you'd have to pay them a couple hundred bucks to do a one-time rescue download of all your stuff, if I understand correctly (super bad). However Amazon stores your stuff (I assume compressed, possibly encrypted), it's transparent to you - when you want to download your stuff, there it is in music file format, however much or little you want, at no extra cost (super good).

 

My ISP download/upload nominal numbers are 25/2 (Mbps). The download actually runs close to nominal; the upload is more like half nominal, which works out to about 11GB/day (24 hrs). That's approximately what I'm experiencing: in 3 1/2 days (with occasional downtime for other use of the laptop), I've uploaded about 42GB out of just short of 700GB total. At this rate it'll be about 2 months to upload all of it. Yes, that's quite a long time. But unlike uploading to CrashPlan, for some reason the Amazon upload is not bringing my network to a halt. In fact it really isn't noticeable at all, it's truly almost "set it and forget it" (I just have to remember to start it up again after each time I stop it).

 

Once that's done, any incremental updates should be very quick. And if I would need to download at around ~275GB/day it would take half a week for the entire thing; for an album or two, pretty much a finger snap.

 

I've currently got 3 duplicate sets of my music files - two on external hard drives, the third on a handful of 256GB SD cards (the latter is also what I take with me when I travel). Any time I do a new rip or download, I just drag and drop the new files to all three of these at once, so keeping everything in sync and updated is utterly simple. Once the initial backup is completely uploaded to Amazon, all I'll be doing is dragging and dropping to a fourth place. This feels to me personally like a lot less trouble than driving 15 minutes to my bank on a day off to rotate backup hard drives.

 

But this is all just the way my ISP and backup works. For other folks, especially those with multiple TB of music and ISPs as slow as mine, waiting for everything to upload to Amazon wouldn't be practical. Or you've got your way of doing backups and there's no reason to change. Cool.

[miguelito]

Or you've got your way of doing backups and there's no reason to change. Cool.

Right. I might be convinced at some point that cloud is the way... Not just yet (and I have actual 300/20 speeds...).

 

FWIW, I'll detail how I handle this:

* I have a 2010 macpro in the home office to which I download/rip/tag/etc everything. A local dedicated internal drive is used for music

* I transfer an identical copy of the music drive over the LAN to my music 2012 i7 mini - off of which I play music

* I have time machine running on the macpro - useful to retrieve stuff I deleted or screwed up somehow - saved me from re-ripping twice

* I have a toaster device on my macpro and cycle over two bare drives (WD red) every week or so

* Once a month I make yet another copy to an enclosure

 

So all in all I have 6 copies of the library: macpro+mini+timemachine+2*baredrive+enclosure. All copying is done with chronosync with setup profiles so it's a click plus fast copy (as only new/changed items are synced).

 

That's all folks!

[miguelito]

Question to users of the Amazon solution: What happens if you delete an album? Does the deletion get replicated? If so, is it possible to roll back? If there's permanent file history, now we are talking about an advantage over straight backups.

[miguelito]

Actually if you told me you could do an Amazon Cloud TimeMachine drive, I might just bite...

[skolis]

How can you be 100% certain Amazon will have your data intact? And yes, anything to avoid re-ripping and re-tagging... Can't imagine...

 

I hope this isn't beating a dead horse.... but...... you can't.....

 

I've been extensively testing amazon cloud: syntax errors ( won't load music with " marks in titles) drops file folder/file structure; to upload some files you need to download other software.

Amazon's service may be better than nothing.... but ...... it's clearly not

"end all and be all". And it is definitely not a "set and forget"

I'll continue to backup to my own external drives.

 

(Config is 2TB of data and music sourced from macbook pro and NAS)

[Jud]

I hope this isn't beating a dead horse.... but...... you can't.....

 

I've been extensively testing amazon cloud: syntax errors ( won't load music with " marks in titles) drops file folder/file structure; to upload some files you need to download other software.

Amazon's service may be better than nothing.... but ...... it's clearly not

"end all and be all". And it is definitely not a "set and forget"

I'll continue to backup to my own external drives.

 

(Config is 2TB of data and music sourced from macbook pro and NAS)

 

Interesting. I suppose experiences vary, as always. So far, with my ISP's glacial upload speed, I've got 5704 files (~555 of ~630GB) uploaded and errors on exactly two of them. If I'd ever need to restore, my download speed is about 25 times faster than upload. Not at all bad.

[translux]

How can it not affect the whole network while uploading?

Hello,longtime lurker...

 

With the bandwidth we have access to network saturation is a problem that is only going to increase.

Even the slow 100/50 we have in the states is causing issues. You should see what happens to a network when a 1000/1000 connection is being saturated.

But I digress.

 

QOS- quality of service by way of traffic shaping is what you're after to insure your network does not become flooded by upload/download services.

 

Think of traffic shaping as a LAN traffic cop. I mention LAN as once data exits your network and enters the interweb any and all control is out of your hands. Well unless your a network Ninja.

 

For this scenario we would want to limit the amount of bandwidth consumed by the up/down application.

The easiest way is to address this at the application level by limiting the amount of available traffic.

Inversely you can also give specific applications, traffic and even HTTP destinations higher priority.

This is very useful for real-time streaming such as Remote Desktop, VOIP, Video Conference, Skype etc.

For a/v streaming we don't really care as these utilize local buffers and variable compression to smooth out performance.

 

Software based control is by far the easiest. Also provides real-time and historical data.

I have used Netlimiter in small environments with excellent results. NetLimiter Homepage

 

There is also a couple open source projects. I have not tired any but this looks promising.

https://seriousbit.com/netbalancer

 

Win7/8 has the native ability to limit bandwidth consumption by application.

Here is a article that walks through configuring a QOS Policy. It looks a lot more complicated than it actually is.

Boost Network Performance: Windows 7 QOS

 

You can accomplish even better results across your entire network using capable routers but is more complicated.

Using an advanced router and VLAN's I have granular control over what travels around my network and what enters and exits.

For instance when we're at work or sleeping upload/download services have access to all the bandwidth.

When we're home they have limited bandwidth with other more important services given priority.

I believe you can do something similar with Netlimiter but it's on a PC by PC basis.

 

Give netlimiter a shot.

 

Any questions or comments please ask.

 

TL

[Jud]

Uploading done! Yee-hah! The only "errors" were a few duplicate files caused by the times I had to stop and re-start the upload (due to, for example, OS updates).

 

I've also meanwhile taken shipment of the Amazon Echo, among the capabilities of which is to play the music you have on your Cloud Drive. I just say "play music" and get my library on shuffle. Nice. It's also nice for weather, as an alarm, and giving news briefings. I'm about to start playing around with its IFTTT ("if this, then that") capabilities.

 

But meanwhile - I've now got offsite backup I don't need to think about that'll auto-update each time I add to my main music drive. Very cool.

[jtwrace]

Uploading done! Yee-hah! The only "errors" were a few duplicate files caused by the times I had to stop and re-start the upload (due to, for example, OS updates).

 

I've also meanwhile taken shipment of the Amazon Echo, among the capabilities of which is to play the music you have on your Cloud Drive. I just say "play music" and get my library on shuffle. Nice. It's also nice for weather, as an alarm, and giving news briefings. I'm about to start playing around with its IFTTT ("if this, then that") capabilities.

 

But meanwhile - I've now got offsite backup I don't need to think about that'll auto-update each time I add to my main music drive. Very cool.

 

Now I would suggest you try to download the whole backup for testing. This way you can at least know that you can get your data.

[skolis]

Re: JustCloud: Just started playing with this after unsatisfactory results with AmazonCloud. Does anyone have any experience with JustCloud?

Seems to be way way faster than Amazon; much better online UI, and over 2 years, about $10.00 more expensive than Amazon. AND it has both a storage and sync feature - which I've had

difficulty in finding in other services. But my testing is in the early stages - anyone have long term experience?

[Jud]

Hi Jason. I'm not sufficiently concerned about whether I'd be able to do a huge download if the time comes to embark on a full test of that week-long process, particularly when there's no assurance that downloading won't mess with my network response. (In contrast to uploading, which didn't appear to affect it, to my surprise.) I've downloaded a couple of files here and there, and it worked fine, so at this point I'm inclined to leave it at that.

[EdmontonCanuck]

I've done something similar, but I'm using Google Drive instead of Amazon. Google offers unlimited cloud storage for it's Google Apps for Business users at $10/month. I've configured the CloudSync applet that comes with my Synology NAS to connect to that Google Drive account and perform a one-way sync of my Music folder on my Synology NAS to the cloud. Three weeks in, and I've backed up 1tb of approximately 6tb total. So far, no errors to report. I can monitor the progress easily enough by just logging into Google Drive on any browser and look at the progress.

 

I'm not sure if $10/month is cost competitive with other solutions, but for me, that $10/month is cheap for the peace of mind I get knowing that everything is backed up safely.

[The Computer Audiophile]

Hi Guys - Just following up. I'm now using a product called ExpanDrive that maps to Amazon Cloud Drive and presents the cloud storage drive as just another drive on your computer. This is awesome because I really hate the Amazon Cloud Drive software for uploading / downloading.

 

It's essentially an unlimited network drive with a connection as fast as your ISP allows.

 

Here is a link to ExpanDrive - ExpanDrive for Mac & Windows | SFTP, Dropbox, Google Drive, S3, OneDrive, Box.com, WebDAV, Swift and more