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I've been using Backblaze to back up my photo collection. I've been happy with the system, but it has an annoyance that you have to connect any drive you want to back up at least once a month. That's OK if I'm at home but if I'm travelling for a long period it's a problem. (a related problem is that my useless Virgin connection drops from time to time requiring a reboot of the router). I had a look at cloud backup solutions that don't impose that constraint (Dropbox, Google Drive etc) but for large amounts of data (3-4 Tb) they're chuffing expensive. Does anyone have an idea of a good alternative - either an alternative strategy or an alternative provider?
Both Google and Amazon have pricing/storage schemes for backups: Amazon's is called Glacier but I can't remember what Google's is. Storage and upload is cheap as chips, the con is that retrieval is relatively expensive and has a long latency. For backups, this is ideal though.
I use Arq to backup my photo collection to Glacier and have no complaints.
I use Carbonite. I believe it does USB external drives too but haven't tested that. Think I pay about £60/year.
I'm looking into this at the moment for backup of my NAS - haven;t been able to find cheaper than Backblaze - everything else seems an order of magnitude more expensive
Some actual numbers of my setup: Arq for Mac/PC is free trial and $50 for a one-off license. My data is sent to Amazon Glacier, which charges $0.0045 per GB per month. If that's a little pricy (3TB works out at $162/year) then Deep Glacier has slower retrieval times but is $0.0018 per GB ($64/year for 3TB).
The con with Glacier is latency on retrieval (which for a backup, I'm fine with): minutes to hours for Glacier and 12-48 hours for Deep Glacier.
Google Archival Storage is similar (and Arq can talk to that too), just quoting from their site "Capacity pricing is 1 cent per GB / month for data at rest for Nearline and 0.4 cents per GB / month for data at rest for Coldline" so more expensive than Amazon.