Digitalquill

Following my recent post about media and backup, Andy from Cloudberry contacted me about his companies product asking me to try it out. It has been some time since I got the software, but last night I finally got the time to give it a try.

If you remember I was discussing the media that we kept, digital video of our Daughter growing up, priceless material and the problems I had of backing up the large amounts of data that this had become. My preferred option is Amazon S3, yes there is a small cost involved, but I currently backup all my digital photographs, web servers, email servers, project files, accounts and more to Amazon S3. I would like to keep all my backups in the same place, so that if the worse comes to the worse I can always recover those priceless memories.

Cloudberry online backup as its name suggests is a Windows application that runs backups. It supports Amazon S3, Dunkel and Walrun backup services. I am of course only interested in the Amazon S3 part, but i do intend to checkout the other two as I have never heard of them. Cloudberry online backup costs $29.99 (about £15 ish) so not costly at all if it makes life a little easier and makes me able to secure all my data.

The install process works exactly as you would expect, a simple wizard takes you through the install process, and the download of the application was fairly small, just a couple of megabytes from memory, so even on my poor Internet connection no problems there.

I installed it on my Windows 7 Media centre, which is where all my media is kept and within 2  minutes I had a backup running, so very simple to use.

When you first open Cloudberry online backup, it shows you a welcome screen, which asks you what you want to do, backup wizard or recovery wizard. After adding in your security credentials for Amazon S3, as described above, creating a backup plan is as simple as following the wizard.  Once you have plans created, you can click on the tabbed interface to manage those backups and check their status. A history panel tells you the details of what has been going on, and on the welcome page it shows the progress of any active backups or when the next one is scheduled to run.

The backup wizard takes you through a series of questions asking you what you want to backup, you simply tick the folders and then choose some more options for if you want to compress the files or not, and in the case of Amazon S3 how many versions of each file do you want to keep. This means that you can recover past versions of changed files if you like. As my Media generally stays the same, I have saved cost on the backup storage and chosen to only keep one copy of each file which should be good enough for my needs, however if I start to use this application for other uses, backup of project files for example I may choose to keep many versions of files.

My First backup plan was for digital media, I chose some videos from our latest holidays, a folder of about 3.3Gb and Apart from the speed, which is my poor broadband (I live in Hull where the only broadband supplier is Karoo who are about 2 or 3 years behind the rest of the country, I get 6Mbs down and 200k up, and at peak times it just grinds to a halt) it seems to be working file, it is still backing up as we speak! It is going to take some time to backup the 100Gb+ that I have!

The system has a built in alerts system, you can choose an email address to have it send alerts to, these alerts can be simply if it encounters a problem, or if you are like me, you will want emails when it completes backups as well so you can monitor the progress.

As I say it has not completed its backup plan yet simply because of the size and the speed of my broadband, however, the files it has backed up to Amazon seem to be fine.

The software also optionally allows you to encrypt your files. I am not sure what type of encryption it uses and would think that this would mean that you have to use the cloudberry software to recover from any disaster, not that this is a problem, it has recovery wizards built into the software so that you can recover files as easily as you back them up. I chose not to encrypt as I like to have access to those files from other Amazon S3 clients such as the Firefox plugin and S3Sync.

A very useful feature is that you can choose to filter what files are backed up, so once you have chosen the folders you want to backup you can further refine that backup by either including or excluding files of a particular type, so in my case I have some log files which I do not want backing up as these just take up space so I exclude log files.

There were a couple of features that I would have liked to see.

Firstly you cant define where to back it up to in your S3 buckets, it just creates folders of the computer name, and then replicates the folder structure on your drive. This is perfectly ok for most scenarios and exactly what you want as a home user, just tick the boxes against what you want backing up and leave the software to it. However it would be nice to have an advanced option so that you can define where the files will be backed up to, so if like me you like to keep your Amazon S3 organized to suit you then the software could follow your choice.

Just to reiterate, the way it works now is fine for 99% of people, I always like that extra little bit of control.

The only other issue I found was that you cant schedule a backup plan that has items from networked drives in it, I run a NAS drive which I currently backup via S3Sync on Linux Command line, however this is difficult to maintain, I would have liked to move all my backups across to Cloudberry, and have the one machine (my media centre) running all the backups to Amazon S3. The software will do the backups but strangely you cant schedule regular backups if you have a networked drive included in the plan.

As a software designer and developer myself I understand the logic here, a network drive may not always exist, and as such it a backup tried to run where the drive was not there this would cause problems, however, perhaps this could be handled with a check to see if the drive was available before the backup started and email the alerts email address if it was not.

I have not yet tried the recovery wizard, but I expect that it is very much like the backup wizard. Recovery will be quicker as the way broadband works you have a far greater download bandwidth than upload bandwidth.

Would I recommend Cloudberry online backup? In a word Yes. Very simple to use, some great features even taking into account that I always want more! If it could do scheduled backups from network drives and also let you choose where in your Amazon Bucket you wanted it to backup to I would not be able to fault it, but as I say for most users these features would not be a necessity.

I have also noticed that on their website they have a coming soon section and they plan to add FTP support, I assume this means that you will be able to backup via FTP. They also have planned Storage cost estimates, which will be good when you select a folder with 100Gb of Data in it like I am about to do, to be able to know how much it will cost you before you start would be perfect.

You can get Cloudberry online backup by clicking here

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Tags: amazon, amazon s3, backup, cloudberry online backup, digital photographs, hd video, media, Media Centre, s3

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 1st, 2010 at 6:01 pm and is filed under Amazon S3, Media Centre. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.