Home Forums LogMeIn's Cubby

LogMeIn has a new cloud storage product called Cubby. It looks interesting. It is still considered Beta. They give you 5 GB for FREE, and you can earn 1 GB per referral up to total of 25 GB.

It is 256 AES Encrypted, but in a FAQ they state that they are only in the process of evaluating whether it meets HIPPA compliance.

Probably the biggest thing is that they are offering 100 GB for 3.99/mo (with a 1 year purchase). If they follow the usual LMI convention this price will be fixed as long as you maintain the contract. It also allows a direct remote sync between computers similar to crashplan. You can earn free space

Look at www.cubby.com

I have no financial interest in LMI or Cubby.com. I am not looking to earn additional storage.

Cubby seems more like a cloud storage solution like Dropbox with features like synchronization and sharing. Cloud backup is usually in a different category.

True, it is storage, but large amounts for small money and may be useful for backing up to if it is secure enough.

"a direct remote sync between computers similar to crashplan"

So how would that work for imported items?

There's another service similar to Cubby except they don 't charge yet, it's called Wuala. I have been using it, works fine and you get the same 5g for free.

http://www.wuala.com/

MS also has skydrive which works like the old live mesh. You can install the program and database there and keep it continually backed up similar to carbonite.

OK, I hope I don't stir up a hive of bees. But, I just don't see why everyone is fascinated by online backups. They cost money, your data simply isn't secure and you have to use their hard drive shipping service if your need your data quickly.
Plus, just use Rsync and back up to a server at home. It can be difficult using a command prompt if you aren't capable, but there are a lot of backup programs which include Rsync. And, they are much more efficient.

Local backups are much better. If you use an NAS at the farthest reaches of your office, you get almost the same effect anyway. The old, back up to a hard drive and take it home has fallen by the wayside. Even three times a week will get you most of your data.

You also have to be careful of continuous backups. They are OK as long as you are backing up static backups seven or so deep. You back up mainly for three reasons: data loss, corrupted data and viruses. The latter two will be instantly backed up and now your only hope is to remove the virus. And, if you catch Cryptolocker, you're screwed without a clean backup.

Just my humble opinion.

Bert, thanks for your input. For those of us who would like a more in-depth discussion on back up options, can you direct us to a post or some other source of information on the types of back ups? I know it is taking 5 hours to back up to AC offsite now. How would backing up to a server at home be quicker?

I would be happy to over the weekend. First, though, I would make sure that you are either backing up using incremental backups or better, deduplication.

Using Rsync is a more efficient way to move packets over the Internet. Plus, backing up to a home computer is definitely better than a server you have never seen.

I back up to AC in the cloud, a portable disk drive and a HDD on my server. I do not know if these are incremental backups. I think they are full back ups because I have to go into AC backups on the main drive, periodically, and delete the old ones because of the space that they take.

Currently, I use a server and multiple best option the office. I have a laptop that I use as my main work computer. It has plenty of room that I could use to back up the Amazing Charts information. I also have a laptop at home that I use remotely. It has room for storage as well.

Here you are talking about a few things. Your .enc AC backups are simply a complete, encrypted and compressed backup of everything AC. It is what you can restore AC from. But, those are always full backups.

There are three major types of backups and another fourth that is rather new technology.

Say you do a full backup of everything on the computer or drive on Monday. On Tuesday you would make a differential backup (everything that has changed since Monday). On Wednesday, you would make another differential backup of everything that has changed since Monday's full backup. So, each day, you would continue to have one backup that contained everything since the full backup. As you can see the first differential would be very small and fast. The next day it would be a little larger and slower.

With an incremental backup it is similar except you continue to make single backups, e.g. Monday is full, Tues is of everything changed since Monday, Wednesday would be everything changed since TUESDAY. So, if you needed to do a restore on Saturday, you would need the Monday backup (full) plus Tuesdays', plus Wednesday's, etc.

With the differential backup, you would need Monday (full), plus Friday's.

So, if you did fulls everyday, you would take longer, take more space, but have safer backups. Differential and incremental are much faster.

Your full backup may be 56GBs. Your incremental may be 128Mbs.

The hard drive on your server would be the quickest to restore but is the weakest backup you can have since it will likely crash along with the hard drive it is on unless it is a separate drive. Many backup programs like Backup Assist will backup the system drive or entire hard drive to a drive on the server and then copy that to an external drive.

Basically, the best backup as far as integrity is the full backup to a non-portable, external drive. Even better if it is Raided but that isn't necessary.

Utilizing any drive space that isn't on the server is fine, but it isn't optimal. In the situations you are describing, you would have to remember to make sure those computers were ready to accept a backup, e.g. connected, turned on, etc. The best media that is at the office would be external drives that are connected either via USB 3.0 (if possible) or SATA. (You would want multiple drives (two to five), each containing multiple backups.

As to online backups, I think of these as an "in addition to" kind of backup, not an "instead of". It all depends on your level of paranoia.
We have an in-office backup (actually a fail-over complete server). This is for a failure of the primary server, and very fast to get online.

Off site at home is fine, as long as there is not a Katrina or Sandy level event. Unlikely, but possible. This is where I think the online backup comes in to play. If I really need it, the fact that it takes 36 hrs to retrieve all of my data won't be an issue. Lots of other things will need fixing first.

We have a backup service for Amazing Charts that gets around a lot of these issues.


We do a complete backup of the database and a differential backup of the Imported Items (II). Some of our providers have been in practice for 10 years with AC and it only takes an hour or so to backup the database and II nightly. Some providers also have a full backup of all desktops and servers but that one is only available to people who buy their servers from us. Most people have very slow upload speeds (384K/512K) and the service was designed to accommodate that. Free seeding too.

Email reports to keep track of the backups, and file access is available to see the files.


We also got around this with our failover plan where we will host your Amazing Charts remotely until you get your server fixed. So you can be back online in less than an hour if your server fails or something else happens at the office.

Sandeep, your services sound amazing. The only issue I see is that an office using only your service still has a single point failure problem; what if something happens to you? I still feel backing up to several different sites is optimum.

Of course, I wouldn't rely entirely on one source of backup. We also do the 3 below except can be quite difficult given the amount of data we have. I always recommend the 3 Level Backup.

1) Onsite Local - External Hard Drive or NAS in the office
2) Offsite Local - Backup to Home/Other Nearby location or Rotating Encrypted Drive(s)
3) Offsite Remote - Cloud Service e.g. AC's backup or Ours or Carbonite

I always setup all 3 when doing an office. So we also help with your disaster recovery plan.

Thank you for the information as far. I am wondering how to back up the Amazing Charts imports separately. What is the benefit of using a nonportable external hard drive versus an external portable hard drive?

In order to exclude Imported Items, you go to the AC Backup, and select Admininstration. On the next window, you select Exclude Imported Items.

You then need to make sure that you back up II separately.

As far as non-portable vs portable, non-portable tends to be more stable, tends to come in larger sizes such as up to 4TBs, usually can be SATA or USB 3.0. Also, portable tend to be portable and much easier to take.

That, obviously, is the reason to use portable. It depends on what you want to do. To be fair, portable can use 3.0 as well.


When I say portable, I am referring to something like a Seagate 4 inch by six inch 1GB drive, not a flash drive.