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[Viral_Jim]

As I know there are a few technical bods on here I was hoping someone might be able to help me out. SWMBO and I have a laptop each (both win10 home) and I could do with a solution to backup essential documents on a regular basis (probably nightly).

What I'm after is a program running in the background that periodically copies the contents of a specific directory on each laptop to a local removable media so they can be easily grabbed if a HDD fails and also pushes the contents up to a secure cloud drive.

I'm happy to pay (at the very least I doubt the cloud storage will be free) but I don't need an enterprise grade tool and the kind of price tag that would attract. Also not interested in changing the OS on either machine, mine I CBA and SWMBO runs a number of tools for her business that would cost £'00s to change to a different OS.

Any ideas/experience greatly welcomed. 

[chrisio]

I use https://www.cloudberrylab.com/backup/windows.aspx
To backup my files and folders to Amazon s3 I use it as a realtime backup service so it is continually scanning the folders and uploading any changes.

It costs $29 for the software and Amazon s3 is about £8 per month for around 30gb of data.

It works for me.

Cheers

[Viral_Jim]

Cheers chrisio,

I will have a look at that solution and the price seems in the ballpark of what I was hoping to pay. 

[Strangechap]

Google Drive is excellent. I use that for my work stuff - I pay a couple of quid a month for 100gb. I've used it for years and never had any problems.

I use Crashplan for my archive stuff. It's $60 a year for unlimited storage. I'm currently uploading about 1gb to it.

[Viral_Jim]

Google Drive is excellent. I use that for my work stuff - I pay a couple of quid a month for 100gb. I've used it for years and never had any problems.

I use Crashplan for my archive stuff. It's $60 a year for unlimited storage. I'm currently uploading about 1gb to it.

The way I read google drive info, you have a folder on your desktop, and anything in that folder is synced between google and your machine automatically. Is that correct?

If so then it's just what I'm looking for . But, that being the case, what do you use crashplan for?

Sorry for all the questions. This is all new to me

[omega2018]

google drive is great and free for under 15GB (which is a lot of documents). not good for large outlook mail files. other than that if you have less than 15GB no need for anything fancy or expensive.  except google drive or at least the free version only seems to keep versions of each file going back 30 days

[omega2018]

correction google drive allows you to set individual files as 'keep forever'  this seems to mean every change is kept not just the last 30 days worth .  30 days is plenty mind.

plus https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/talkingtech/2017/06/14/google-backup-and-sync-could-bring-full-computer-backups-google-drive/397635001/

[chrisio]

The only thing I have found with the likes of google drive/one drive etc is that it only backs up what you put into that folder.  The other way to do it is to use another back up program which uses google drive as its backup location - that way you can keep all your normal file structure and it does the rest.

Cheers

[zirk]

Ive done loads of working and playing around with Cloud Storage and they all offer similar but different features depending on what you are trying to achieve. There are 2 main types System and Hardrive Back up and File Back Up, Sharing etc, the latter is what your after.

The Main Leaders for File Back Ups are OneDrive, Dropbox and Google Drive, OneDrive comes free with Windows (5Gb space) which can be upgraded up to 1TB of space either on its own with monthly subscription or gets bundled into newer Office Suits, both Dropbox and Google Drive can be upgraded by monthly subscription.

OneDrive offers a simple back up for Photos, Documents etc, and a simple sharing across Devices but starts to become painfully horrid to use when you start trying to sync different Files or Folders of your choice at any one time and its Web Only Interface is painfully slow, Google and Dropbox are similar in different respects.

If your looking at a free (10 to 20gb) or paid subscription (500mb to 2TB) I would highly recommend pCloud, it just works and is fast as its its Web access, and is more of a case of what it doesn't do in terms of features. You can download its PC App for simple Files and Folder Syncing and or you can use the Mapped Network Drive App, so the entire Cloud Storage appears as another Hard drive on your PC, you can Back Up your OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive into the pCloud storage so all your Clouds appear in the pCloud account, Remote Upload ie, Upload large files from a URL directly so you dont have to download a File and then upload to again to pCloud, Image and Video Conversations in the Cloud, ie upload a 1080p Video and then chose to download 720p or 480p for Mobile, it has a built in Office Viewer, Encryption etc, the feature list is endless. 

https://www.pcloud.com/

[omega2018]

have any suppliers cracked the problem of backing up a largish (9GB) outlook pst file to the cloud while it is in use? didn't work with google drive last time i looked

[Viral_Jim]

Thanks chaps 

One day in and so far I'm happy with google drive. Previously all my stuff used to live under My Documents somewhere, so just pointing everything to the google drive folder was no biggie for me.

I find being able to view documents on my phone more useful than I thought it would be so that's a bonus.

I dont really need an email or contacts backup solution as that all sits within Google or iCloud anyway. 

[TheBoy]

have any suppliers cracked the problem of backing up a largish (9GB) outlook pst file to the cloud while it is in use? didn't work with google drive last time i looked

Nope, and never will be.  The PST file format was never designed for that type of use, and was never designed for that size.  MS have been gradually increasing what its maximum recommendation is, from 20Mb a few years back to I believe 2Gb now.  In all cases, it was for fast storage only (ie, local or local LAN only). Anything else will corrupt regularly.


Outlook is designed for an Exchange backend, and you can have large storage on Exchange servers nowadays. Any other usage is not recommended, you are far better off with a lighter weight email client that can actually do IMAP properly (no version of Outlook can yet (without eventually corrupting itself)). Its usable with POP3, but nobody really should be using that in this day and age.

[omega2018]

The PST file format was never designed for that type of use, and was never designed for that size.  MS have been gradually increasing what its maximum recommendation is, from 20Mb a few years back to I believe 2Gb now. 

"In Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007, the maximum size of a Unicode pst-file has been limited to 20GB. In Outlook 2010, 2013 and 2016, this limit has been set to 50GB. You can increase (but also decrease) this limit via the Registry or via Group Policies."
https://www.msoutlook.info/question/increase-pst-file-size-limit

also https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/982577/the-file-size-limits-of-.pst-and-.ost-files-are-larger-in-outlook-2010

[Kevin Wood]

"In Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007, the maximum size of a Unicode pst-file has been limited to 20GB. In Outlook 2010, 2013 and 2016, this limit has been set to 50GB. You can increase (but also decrease) this limit via the Registry or via Group Policies."
https://www.msoutlook.info/question/increase-pst-file-size-limit

also https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/982577/the-file-size-limits-of-.pst-and-.ost-files-are-larger-in-outlook-2010

If it's fundamentally broken, making it bigger doesn't help.

As I found, back in the dark ages before I ditched outlook, even putting the PST file on a network drive ends in tears. It really is a product that belongs in the bin these days.

Besides, most people want to share emails among multiple devices these days, which Outlook doesn't support as the IMAP support is crippled. Get a decent IMAP service, put in place some means of backing up the folders on the server and then use a decent IMAP client on your device(s) of choice and never be away from your inbox.

[aaronjb]

and never be away from your inbox.

I am increasingly unsure that this is actually a good thing!