Article: Music Storage, New Music, Remote Access, and a Cool Streamer Project

[ednaz]

I'm using Carbon Copy for my 4TB music library.  Runs nicely in the background, appropriately alerts when things go wrong.  Weaknesses: took me two months to get backed up to them with my library size of the time (2.1TB) because for whatever bizarre reason, they throttle incoming backup. They also make a big deal out of their "restore acceleration" which is to ship you a 1TB disk of the initial 1TB... yeah, that first TB will really accelerate things...

 

Ended up staying with them because I couldn't find a cloud backup service near the price and ease of use. There's also a significant amount of gravity from any backup service because of the slow speed of the initial image.  Once you're on, the operational cost of switching is heinous.  I did realize I could probably buy a cloud URL and set up my own backup servers at roughly the same price, even a cloud web host, but the backup software (which does de-dupe, compression, etc) does have value.  I'd rather listen to music than code backup scripts.

 

All that said... I have four online backups, and three offline. Don't trust, constantly verify.

 

I'm a couple days of thinking away from building my own zfs cloud backup. one at home, with a backup to a couple disks that live off site at my wife's law offices. Haven't found a cloud where I could run zfs with scripts for backup. That's my fantasy... minus having to code the scripts.

[ednaz]

BTW, I mis-typed on my earlier post - I'm on CrashPlan and not Carbon Copy. When I did my earlier search that lead to CrashPlan, they were the ONLY source that was economically attractive for my library at the time, which was 2.5TB.  Now, at $120 per year, without the need for migration to another service, I'll probably stick with them on the small business plan, but use that year to figure out an alternative solution.

 

Their backup software was fantastic. You could back up to a friend's computer... so a few of us on here could have set up a mutual backup service. In their new plan, that capability is gone. It's their cloud or nothing.

[ednaz]

On 8/23/2017 at 9:37 PM, joelha said:

If you do that, Chris, please ask them why they throttle their upload speeds unannounced.

 

Unless I learn something new about their service, I feel I wasted my money.

 

The throttling took place after about 4TB's were uploaded.

 

Joel

They were throttled the whole time when I uploaded. Took me a couple months to get to "safe". Even now, if I buy 10 HD albums, it'll be a couple days before they're reported safe.  Honestly, it's about dial up speeds.

 

Their software also does this "deep analysis" thing, in the service of de-duplication, that can run for four or five days at my 3.5TB data level. During "deep analysis" nothing new gets backed up, and each time you add a significant amount of "new" then "deep analysis" starts over again. Punishing.

[ednaz]

On 8/24/2017 at 3:08 PM, The Computer Audiophile said:

I just got off the phone with Code 42 / CrashPlan. The person I spoke with said they absolutely don't throttle anyone's upload/download speed at any time. 

 

I'm going to contact the more technical team at Code 42 to try to get some answers about speeding up backup and NAS install and Windows shares etc...

I made that call too.  They probably don't run a throttle routine. They just allocate pitifully small bandwidth to each stream. Seriously, 10 new HD Tracks albums, and it's several days before they show all of them now backed up, and that's with six hours each night of activity. They also have this "deep analysis" routine that puts everything on hold for days while it counts down "% completed".  A few times I've seen it restart the entire process several times, effectively locking my backup down until it's done.

 

Really would be interesting to have a ZFS based "buddy system" for backups.  Each buy a box populated with disks, point to each other's backups, and off you go.  Would probably need to do some matching of buddies by library size.