Backups

[WildWestDesigns]

i have seen "snapsots" (the name suggests generating it in a couple seconds) take 6 hours to generate and freeze vm's until certain files are processed

Thick or thin storage objects?

 

[CanuckSigns]

suggestion. Have 2 separate internal hard drives. the C drive is for programs only. The E drive is a separate hard drive that is where you keep your data. If your computer fails its probably the c drive.
Rebuild the c drive connect your e drive. Backup the c and e files to an external. Use something like carbonite.

I used carbonate in the past, in fact we had a massive fire at the shop and lost everything, but carbonate had our data MOSTLY backed up. Their desktop program sucks, it's constantly failing to backup and needs to be manually updated in order to proceed, but there are no warnings about this, so I needed to log in to the pc we were using as a server at the time and check the backup status every week or so.

Also, when you go to restore from carbonate, unless you are on their top tier plan, they throttle the download speed from their servers, it took me almost 3 days to download 300GB of data. They do have a service where they will put your data on a physical drive and ship it to you, but I doubt that would be any quicker unless you have a few TB of data.

I now use backblaze, I pay about $8 a month for 1.5 TB of data, but I feel much more secure that the data will be there when I need it.

 

[netsol]

we have crashplan setup at several clients.
no complaints yet, but, that is mostly because we have never needed to restore anything

 

[WildWestDesigns]

Their desktop program sucks, it's constantly failing to backup and needs to be manually updated in order to proceed, but there are no warnings about this, so I needed to log in to the pc we were using as a server at the time and check the backup status every week or so.

Imagine if their desktop app was actually used as a vector to corrupt your computer and since it came from the backup vendor, your backups were corrupted as well.

While I'm only aware of one instance of this happening (at least made the round with articles) it has happened.