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I'm looking for an online backup provider in Europe (where I live), because those in USA are too slow.

Details:
My webhost allows me to upload large amounts of data for personal backup purposes, and this is great. Unfortunately, they're located in California, but I'm in Europe, so the upload rates are about 30 kbps... not so great for making backups of 30+ GB worth of photos.

I did a tracert and it takes 20 hops to get there -- the first 10 are in Europe and are fast (14ms) but then it goes up to ~180ms. Most other services I've found also use data centers in the USA, so there would be no point in trying those...

--> Can you recommend a suitable online file service for users in Europe?
(It must also be affordable but I will decide what is affordable later.)

HopelessN00b
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Torben Gundtofte-Bruun
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5 Answers5

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I have used Jungle Disk together with Amazon S3 with great success. Jungle Disk is an application that you install locally, which proxies cloud storage, and creates a virtual WebDAV disk-drive on your PC. It supports Amazon S3 US & EU and Rackspace Cloud Files as storage backends.

Additionally, Jungle Disk has a built-in backup function, with which you can tell it to automatically back up specific directories. The backup functionality isn't super slick, but it gets the job done.

Jungle Disk has a great feature on S3. They have deployed their own servers on Amazons EC2 compute grid, and use these servers as proxies to the S3 storage. The benefit is that uploads can be resumed, and uploads use more than one TCP/IP stream which gives much higher upload speeds. When I used this (more than a year ago), it was a separate subscription. Now I don't see it mentioned on their site; maybe it has been included in the standard Jungle Disk product, or maybe something else has happened. You might want to investigate the current status of this feature.

All in all I was very happy with Jungle Disk + S3, but eventually I left. S3 is priced well, but it's still too expensive for me, as I regularly back up 600 GB of data now. The price of S3 for larger amounts of data is the sole reason why I stopped using Jungle Disk + S3. For just 30 GB data it will be great.

I'm currently using Mozy, and I'm evaluating BackBlaze. I haven't found the ideal online backup yet, unfortunately. Mozy is cheap and nice, but upload is too slow (~0.75 Mbit/s effective from Scandinavia). BackBlaze is faster, but has certain file restrictions that I'm unhappy with (does not back up .ISO files, virtual machine disk images, or files larger than 4GB).

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    I looked at Mozy a while back and decided against it for only two reasons. 1, they support WinXP+Vista+Mac, but not Linux. 2, they charge per computer. I'd like a solution for my family but that would become costly -- S3 might be better but I seem to recall that Jungle Disk has a similar limitation. – Torben Gundtofte-Bruun Sep 08 '09 at 14:47
  • @torbengb: You may need to buy more than one Jungle Disk license, but they can use the same Amazon S3 account. Jungle Disk itself is fairly cheap. I think a Jungle Disk & S3, or another S3 based backup solution of your choice, sounds like a very good match for your needs. –  Sep 08 '09 at 15:00
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Amazon S3 let you choose between servers in the US or in Europe. Their prices are quite low ...

Guillaume
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OVH.com is very good for dedicated servers all accross Europe.

I'm based in France and have several servers I use for web hosting and other services. No problems with OVH, very good upload rates. However I don't think you can rent servers if you're not in France, or maybe the offers are different for some countries.

Julien
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Ping times have no real influence on the data transfer rate. They are only important for high speed interaction (aka Gaming). The problem with online data backups are always the minimal uploads you get with ADSL. Asynchron DSL means that you have around 10x more download as upload.

So your problem is that you need to contact your internet provider and request another line. Good luck with this. It can get pretty expensive and not worth if you don't have 30GB of new data per month.

Lothar
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  • In principle I believe you are correct. In reality though, I often get upload rates of several hundred kbps to local peers but only 30 kbps to my web host in USA, regardless of file size. – Torben Gundtofte-Bruun Sep 08 '09 at 14:42
  • @Lothar: That's not correct. TCP/IP uses a transmission window, and acknowledgment (ACK) of receipt of the windowed stream. The RTT (Round Trip Time) impacts the efficiency of the ACK mechanism. Modern TCP/IP implementations try many 'tricks' to improve speeds on high-RTT links, because it's needed. Research "bandwidth-delay product" and "TCP congestion avoidance" (a.ka. TCP congestion control) for more info. –  Sep 08 '09 at 14:56
  • Then tell us your country. Maybe your provider reduces speed to save some interconnect fee's. My fu**ing provider here in Thailand does this and reduces all europe traffic to 30KB. – Lothar Sep 08 '09 at 14:56
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Doesn't 1&1 host in both in the US and Germany? Might not be a data-backup thing, but it could work. Gandi.net is in France, they don't only do registrations now.

dlamblin
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  • I believe 1&1 doesn't allow customers to use their "web space" for personal data storage instead. DreamHost used to have a similar limitation -- after all, you're buying web hosting, which is a different thing. – Torben Gundtofte-Bruun Sep 09 '09 at 06:28