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kingjames1970

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Mar 18, 2008
312
600
Hampshire, UK
First of all apologies if this is in the wrong place and a bit long-winded.

Just looking for a bit of first hand advice, never quite sure with reviews etc.

I've always been diligent about backups - my main machine is a 2016 MBP with multiple backups including a Drobo and Time Capsule that I use with Time Machine and a 4TB portable I carry around with me. (I even keep a copy of current projects on a USB-A/USB-C keychain fob.)

My MBP had to go in for repair last week so everything did work but was a huge hassle so for the sake of due diligence, I thought I'd better sort it out.

The offsite back up is the flaw in all of this as it only happens when I remember to take an HD to my friend 20 miles away. Also, having to fall back on an older Mac this week has given me all sort of syncing problems - putting everything in the right place in my 'master' copy on my MBP, which is then backed up properly. (Files in Dropbox, Creative Cloud, different HD's.)

I'm just not sure what to do for the best. And I'd be grateful for any flaws in this or better suggestions, this makes my head hurt. I think the secret is to set something up that works in the background so I don't have to think about and if I ever have any issues that I can quickly adapt.

I've got a large media library but the truth is I'm only really worried about 600GB worth of files.

How about?
1. Crashplan for everything. I'm in the UK if that makes a difference. Does that just sit in the background like Time Machine, anything I need to be worried about? Or better alternatives?
and
2. Make the jump to Office 365. If I need to pay for extra cloud storage anyway, I guess this makes sense as I get the latest versions of the apps and they will work on my iPad Pro as well as 1TB space. I was thinking of just keeping my document folder in the Office 365 folder - is that ok or does that cause any problems? As an aside, I guess it is easy to share files with clients from there? (At the moment, I put in my free level Dropbox and send them a link.) And is there anything I need to worry about sending PowerPoints (which I do a lot of) to clients with older versions of Office on Windows?

Seems to have a shame that if I get 1TB free with Office 365 that I have to pay for more space. But if I understand this right, I'd have two two copies of everything on my MBP if I used it for backup too and that clearly won't work. I've got 200 down/15 up broadband so I don't think speed would be too much of an issue. I'm also probably going to go over my plan on iCloud because of photos soon and might need to up to 200GB if that's a consideration.

TL/DR I need an offsite backup solution for 600GB files and a way to keep documents in sync across MBP, iMac/iPad Pro (with a proper folder structure) can I just move my document folder to a cloud service and backup the local copies myself.

Again apologies for the long winded question, I'd be really grateful for any advice you can offer.
 
I used to use Crashplan but stopped using their service with my Macs due solely to their continued reliance on their Java client on the macOS platform, but the rest of their service is pretty solid - they've promised for years to get out from under the Java client on the Mac platform, but it's still there - and for now I'm done with them.

For my personal usage, I use OneDrive (with Office 365 Home to get 5 licenses, and take advantage of the 5TB of storage!) and Amazon S3. I use OneDrive and S3 with Arq Backup, although you could substitute S3 with Crashplan, with OneDrive being your file sync/share and S3/Crashplan (or even Amazon Cloud Services, which I used to use until recently) as your endpoint backup.

I wouldn't use OneDrive as my endpoint backup location, IMHO that service isn't really built for that purpose.

A very recent review of Arq is a good read, there's a few service comparisons on the second page:
http://www.macworld.com/article/318...machine-and-hosted-cloud-backup-services.html
 
I used to use Crashplan but stopped using their service with my Macs due solely to their continued reliance on their Java client on the macOS platform, but the rest of their service is pretty solid - they've promised for years to get out from under the Java client on the Mac platform, but it's still there - and for now I'm done with them.

For my personal usage, I use OneDrive (with Office 365 Home to get 5 licenses, and take advantage of the 5TB of storage!) and Amazon S3. I use OneDrive and S3 with Arq Backup, although you could substitute S3 with Crashplan, with OneDrive being your file sync/share and S3/Crashplan (or even Amazon Cloud Services, which I used to use until recently) as your endpoint backup.

I wouldn't use OneDrive as my endpoint backup location, IMHO that service isn't really built for that purpose.

A very recent review of Arq is a good read, there's a few service comparisons on the second page:
http://www.macworld.com/article/318...machine-and-hosted-cloud-backup-services.html

That seems to be pretty robust, will give this real consideration. Thanks for your time, appreciate it.
 
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