Loading...
 

backup

December 2010 (Hotfile).

OLS (below) was a dead loss. The service worked sometimes in the beginning and not at all in the end. My files were still on the server but I could not add any more.
Hotfile.com is set up as a file sharing site but it work reasonably well for backups. Server backups via FTP have been flawless as are my security camera uploads. It does not play well with filezilla. Some of the downers are the files on the hotfile site don't show properties such as creation date. Uploading a duplicate file(name) results in duplicated files with the same filenames and nothing to tell them apart. There is also no way to choose how the files are sorted or to split a big file list into multiple pages. Hotfile storage looks fairly bottomless from my point of view.
The free membership was of little use because several account backups are larger than 400meg. The premium membership is $55/year, this is typical of this type of site much and cheaper than filesyncing sites such as dropbox.

May 2010 (OLS).

Backup space for the VPS on the server is fairly expensive. I kept my old account at bluehost active as a ftp backup site but either they deliberately blocked my backups or their server was having problems.
At around $7 a month it brings my VPS+backup to almost $60/mth. A lot for a non-profit hobby site.
I looked around for online storage and http://www.onlinestoragesolution.com/ (OLS) were a fraction the price of all the rest and they offered unlimited storage. In practice there is no such thing as unlimited anything, I need maybe 20Gig.
To sweeten the deal they had a special running - $15/year instead of $19. I was prepared to risk $15 to give it a try.
Initially it seemed to work as advertised but then all sort of weird things happened. I would sometimes see a completely a different set of files depending on whether I looked via FTP or the web interface. Sometimes all the files would be missing. Emails to support were never answered (even now). I also lost access to the root account - this *may* have been my fault. Root is where the help files were, without help files or help from support it looked grim.
FTP would usually fail - the backups were getting quite old.

Are maybe 6 weeks later everything started to work again. They changed the login page and added video tutorials. There were also 4 snapshots of my account from different times. Clearly they have real servers with reasonable storage capacity and are actively working fixing problems.

Everything fell over again for maybe 3 weeks then it mostly came good. Some features still seem to be buggy but the important stuff (backup and restore of the VPS) has been fairly reliable for the last 3 weeks or so.

For my server OLS is good enough but if you need fast %100 reliable storage look somewhere else. I've also wondered how secure OLS is. Unless you can backup with strongly encrypted files who know where your data ends up.

My backups would contain enough data to reveal account passwords - even if the passwords are encrypted once someone has a copy of the account they are not hampered by the brute force protection which I normally have in place. Almost any time you have accounts or data on someone else's servers you have to hope they are both honest and competent to keep you data private.

Even OLS say not to put anything that must be kept secret onto online storage without encryption.

eddie





Created by eddie. Last Modification: Wednesday 08 of December, 2010 22:05:14 AEDT by eddie.

Main Index

Switch Theme

Shoutbox

eddie, 13:04 AEST, Thu 10 of Aug, 2023: Offline tiki 26 upgrade went badly. Waiting for 26.1. Will limp on.
System Administrator, 18:45 AEST, Wed 26 of Jul, 2023: Recovered from lockout but unable to upgrade to V24
eddie, 23:20 AEST, Sun 29 of Aug, 2021: moving to new server
System Administrator, 17:23 AEST, Thu 12 of Aug, 2021: Image thumbnails not working for gallery images. Problems with the GD extension.
System Administrator, 19:44 AEST, Mon 09 of Aug, 2021: uploaded wiki and database to main server. It didn't work but the old wiki and repaired database seem to mostly work.

Last-Visited Pages

Online Users

30 online users