I use Macrium8 to image my C: drives (I run both XP and Win7) and put
the image on an external usb drive. When I screw up (usually it's me)
I boot the Macrium CD I made for this purpose, find the usb drive in
it's selection, choose which image I made and Restore it .

My external usb drive resides in the same computer desk that my
Windows computer sits on. It recently occurred to me that a fire or
something could wipe out everything. I could store the usb drive
off-site - somewhere? I don't have a place. OR maybe I could use the
cloud somehow? A quick search shows me that maybe I could store a
Macrium image on the cloud, BUT they all seem to want to use their own
program to do this and it looks quite invasive. Also how do I recover
and Restore if I should wipe out my system? They don't seem to talk
about a CD I could make to boot, and then reference my back-up file on
the cloud.

Is this worth considering? Anyone have an easy way?

John B. Smith wrote:

> I use Macrium8 to image my C: drives (I run both XP and Win7) and put
> the image on an external usb drive. When I screw up (usually it's me)
> I boot the Macrium CD I made for this purpose, find the usb drive in
> it's selection, choose which image I made and Restore it .
>
> My external usb drive resides in the same computer desk that my
> Windows computer sits on. It recently occurred to me that a fire or
> something could wipe out everything. I could store the usb drive
> off-site - somewhere? I don't have a place. OR maybe I could use the
> cloud somehow? A quick search shows me that maybe I could store a
> Macrium image on the cloud, BUT they all seem to want to use their own
> program to do this and it looks quite invasive. Also how do I recover
> and Restore if I should wipe out my system? They don't seem to talk
> about a CD I could make to boot, and then reference my back-up file on
> the cloud.
>
> Is this worth considering? Anyone have an easy way?

I don't back up everything to the cloud, just my data files. I have a
OneDrive account with 15 GB (5GB initial, 10GB loyalty reward - they
took away the 15GB quota they were doling out years ago unless you got
their warning e-mail, and logged in before the expiration which I
managed with just one MS account). They were competing against Google
Drive with its 15GB quota, but later decided to drop to 5GB for free. I
probably am not typical of users that accumulate tons of garbage files
(they keep everything) nor produce a lot of data files. Lots of my data
is reproducible. I don't backup any of the programs to the cloud as
those can be retrieved from other sources, like where I got them in the
first place. Since I have an MS account, the license for Windows 10 is
stored there, so I could get another install CD or ISO image download,
and reinstall Windows. I'd lose all my tweaks to the OS and programs,
but it'd be maybe all of 2 days to reinstall all the software, and
restore my data from the cloud.

No idea if you bought into Microsoft's 365 subscriptionware. I did for
a few years which gave me 1TB of cloud storage. I'm under 1GB of my
current 15GB quota at OneDrive, so I have no impetus to get more cloud
storage. However, if I decided to go back to using MS 365, consider
this: either you can buy more OneDrive quota and get MS 365 for free, or
buy MS 365 and get 1TB of OneDrive storage. Either way the cost is the
same. When I bought MS 365, it wasn't through MS that gives no
discounts. I got it off eBay from a seller that was willing to send me
the codes off the product cards before they arrived in the postal mail,
so I could verify with MS that they were valid.

Google Drive gives you 15GB for free. So, between MS and Google, you
could have 35GB of cloud storage for free. There's Dropbox, too, but
they only give 2GB for free. I do use Dropbox to put files there I want
to share and dole out a URL to the shared files, but that's usually
temporary as I later clean up my Dropbox account. Be aware that
OneDrive and Google Drive may not cooperate. I've encountered where
sync errors occured with Google Drive, because the files were in use
during a sync by OneDrive. You'd think they'd use shadow copying, but I
found files on Google Drive that didn't sync because they were locked by
OneDrive, and then discovered the errors when I investigated.

With OneDrive or Google Drive, you simply have a folder for those. Any
files copied there are sync'ed to cloud storage. Just put your data
files you want in the cloud in those local folders, and they get sync'ed
up to the cloud storage.

How much cloud storage you get depends on how much you're willing to
spend. You didn't mention cost criteria. Users often have gobs of free
space, so local storage is not a problem. However, how much you can
save to cloud storage depends on how much data you want to sync.
Everything in your MS or Google accounts count against your cloud quota:
e-mail, online docs, etc. At one time, uploading photos to Google
Photos did not count against your Google cloud quota, but Google Photos
got killed (Google kills lots of "experiments"). The uploaded photos
got downsized to a reasonable resolution. However, as of June 2021,
uploaded photos now count against your Google Drive quota (I think
photos uploaded prior to the change still did not count against your
Drive quota).

Note there are also limits to file size besides just the drive quota for
cloud storage. I'd have to research to find what those are. Cloud sync
is file backup, not image backup. You can back the sync'ed files, but
you will NOT restore your partitions back to a prior state.

Remember that your Internet connection is nowhere near as fast a local
bus speeds. Most users have asynchronous bandwidth: downstream
bandwidth is far greater than upstream bandwidth. That's why upload
sync is done in the background because it is far slower. Even if you
download to restore files or a drive, downstream bandwidth is much
slower than for local storage. You might get, say, 1Gbps downstream,
but USB3 is 6Gbps (those are theoretical limits that you rarely attain,
and never sustain since they are burst measures). You might want to
clone your backup drive, and store the clone drive elsewhere, like in
your detached garage, or tote it between your workplace and home. While
I have an internal SATA3 HDD to store backups, I clone it to an external
USB3 HDD, and I clone that to have another USB3 HDD sitting in my garage
(used to leave at work, but I'm retired now). I use Syncback to mirror
my internal HDD to the USB3 backup HDD, and mirror that when I bring in
the spare backup USB3 HDD. I only use cloud storage to keep some of my
data files in the cloud, but not for reimaging my partitions, only to
provide a convenient place to retrieve a data file, or a few, if for
some reason the internal HDD where backup images are stored goes bad.

You don't mention if the backups are for business purposes, or personal
data. A business should have a better recovery plan than for personal
use. Almost all personal files are reproducible, or not critical, but
business records are very important.

On 6/19/2022 11:02 AM, John B. Smith wrote:
> I use Macrium8 to image my C: drives (I run both XP and Win7) and put
> the image on an external usb drive. When I screw up (usually it's me)
> I boot the Macrium CD I made for this purpose, find the usb drive in
> it's selection, choose which image I made and Restore it .
>
> My external usb drive resides in the same computer desk that my
> Windows computer sits on. It recently occurred to me that a fire or
> something could wipe out everything. I could store the usb drive
> off-site - somewhere? I don't have a place. OR maybe I could use the
> cloud somehow? A quick search shows me that maybe I could store a
> Macrium image on the cloud, BUT they all seem to want to use their own
> program to do this and it looks quite invasive. Also how do I recover
> and Restore if I should wipe out my system? They don't seem to talk
> about a CD I could make to boot, and then reference my back-up file on
> the cloud.
>
> Is this worth considering? Anyone have an easy way?
>

The search term you want is "bare metal restore".

The cloud provider must have a CD for you, so you can
start restoring the image to a computer with a completely
new and bare, hard drive.

Cloud storage only makes sense if you have good Internet.
I have 15/1 Internet, which means my backup enters the
cloud at 125KB/sec (floppy speed). Imagine backing up a
1TB image to the cloud, at my floppy speed.

If you have full fiber (1000/1000), it's still slow, just not
unbearably slow.

Storing hard drives in a fire-safe, only works if the fire department
puts out the house fire, before the time limit is reached. If a
fire-safe has a 1 hour rating, and the fire department roasts
hot dogs for 2 hours, you're screwed. For example, in the news
a couple days ago, a house was completely destroyed by a lightning hit.
Something the fire folks claim "does not normally happen".
Presumably there were lots of hot dog buns at the scene,
and a burnt-up fire safe :-/

Paul

On 6/19/2022 11:36 AM, Paul wrote:
> On 6/19/2022 11:02 AM, John B. Smith wrote:
>> I use Macrium8 to image my C: drives (I run both XP and Win7) and put
>> the image on an external usb drive. When I screw up (usually it's me)
>> I boot the Macrium CD I made for this purpose, find the usb drive in
>> it's selection, choose which image I made and Restore it .
>>
>> My external usb drive resides in the same computer desk that my
>> Windows computer sits on. It recently occurred to me that a fire or
>> something could wipe out everything. I could store the usb drive
>> off-site - somewhere? I don't have a place. OR maybe I could use the
>> cloud somehow? A quick search shows me that maybe I could store a
>> Macrium image on the cloud, BUT they all seem to want to use their own
>> program to do this and it looks quite invasive. Also how do I recover
>> and Restore if I should wipe out my system? They don't seem to talk
>> about a CD I could make to boot, and then reference my back-up file on
>> the cloud.
>>
>> Is this worth considering? Anyone have an easy way?
>>
>
> The search term you want is "bare metal restore".
>
> The cloud provider must have a CD for you, so you can
> start restoring the image to a computer with a completely
> new and bare, hard drive.
>
> Cloud storage only makes sense if you have good Internet.
> I have 15/1 Internet, which means my backup enters the
> cloud at 125KB/sec (floppy speed). Imagine backing up a
> 1TB image to the cloud, at my floppy speed.
>
> If you have full fiber (1000/1000), it's still slow, just not
> unbearably slow.
>
> Storing hard drives in a fire-safe, only works if the fire department
> puts out the house fire, before the time limit is reached. If a
> fire-safe has a 1 hour rating, and the fire department roasts
> hot dogs for 2 hours, you're screwed. For example, in the news
> a couple days ago, a house was completely destroyed by a lightning hit.
> Something the fire folks claim "does not normally happen".
> Presumably there were lots of hot dog buns at the scene,
> and a burnt-up fire safe :-/

I have a separate garage and have network cable strung there, so I could
easily attach my WD MyCloud drive or anything similar in the garage and
have coverage for fire or theft.

Another alternative would be a WiFi connected drive plugged into power
in a nearby friendly neighbor's house.

On Sunday, June 19, 2022 at 11:02:36 AM UTC-4, John B. Smith wrote:
> I use Macrium8 to image my C: drives (I run both XP and Win7) and put
> the image on an external usb drive. When I screw up (usually it's me)
> I boot the Macrium CD I made for this purpose, find the usb drive in
> it's selection, choose which image I made and Restore it .

If you can afford $70 a year, the iDrive company (not affiliated with Apple Computer) sells 5 TB cloud storage for $70 a year. Not bad. If you try and build this "at home" (or a friend's house if you think your house is going to burn down) it would cost roughly $500 or so, which is 500/70 = 7.14 = 7 years at iDrive prices. So iDrive is a very affordable option (and it's unlikely to burn down). They have a desktop app as well as a web app for backups and restores and it's very easy to use. You can and I have backup on iDrive a Macrium Reflect image file of several hundred gigabytes. But I'm in DC now and using Verizon FiOS, which is super fast. When I live overseas I sometimes get, like Paul says, dialup modem speeds in the countryside where we often live, so cloud storage is out of the question.

I myself am playing around with a NAS by Synology to do my own "home cloud" but frankly I also use Google One for my partner's photos (she likes taking lots of photos, and refuses btw to delete duplicate or nearly duplicate photos, aggh) and also I will backup to iDrive. As well as use an external HDD via USB.

As Paul said elsewhere, Murphy's Law kicks in, and I'm not 100% confident that any one system by itself is fail-safe.

RL