[ale] Best Offsite Backup Solution for Home

[Ron Frazier (ALE)]

David,

I was going to say JungleDisk on Amazon S3 until you said 1 TB.  
JungleDisk is available for Linux and Windows.  It's probably on Mac 
too.  Carbonite says you can back up whatever is on your internal hard 
drive on one PC for $ 60? per year.  You might read the fine print to 
see if they'd balk at that large quantity of data.  I think Comcast's 
residential bandwidth limit is 250 GB / mo, so that might not be a 
problem if you're with them.  100 GB / yr is only about 8 GB / mo, 
assuming most of the initially stored data doesn't change much.  I 
remember Leo Laporte talking about some sort of peer to peer backup 
solution that is FLOSS.  Don't remember what it is.  You might look 
through the show archives at http://twit.tv/show/floss-weekly .  If I 
did my calculations right, it would take you 29 days to upload 1 TB at 4 
Mbps.  You'd have to break that up into 4 - 6 months if you're on 
Comcast.  If you're doing a peer to peer thing and you know the host of 
the data destination, you might be able to take your 1 TB of data to the 
site on an external HDD.

Sincerely,

Ron

On 2/1/2012 2:42 PM, David Tomaschik wrote:
> As many on the list know, I'm going to be relocating to California
> later this month, which has made me take a look at my backup
> procedures.
>
> While I have good software for backups (rdiff-backup is pretty
> awesome), finding a way to get the data truly offsite is easier said
> than done.  The problem with most backup procedures is that anything
> requiring manual intervention will eventually become an "I'll do that
> later" task.  For example, the idea of storing an external hard drive
> in a safe deposit box occurred to me, but that limits access to
> business hours and requires manual intervention.  I'm sure it would
> happen for the first few weeks, and then every now and then for a
> while, and then not at all until I need the data.
>
> I've also considered cloud storage providers, but between my wife and
> I, we have ~1TB of data to backup, and growing at ~100GB/yr.  This
> makes something like Amazon S3 rather expensive: even at reduced
> redundancy pricing of 9.3 cents/gigabyte, this is an annual bill of
> $1100 before the bandwidth used to ship it around.
>
> Another thought I've had is running my own "cloud storage" by coloing
> a 1U atom server with about 4 SATA drives crammed into it, but that
> seems like it's not going to pay off until I get to the ~4TB space
> range.
>
> Anyone have recommendations on a good offsite solution for home use?
>
>    

-- 

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Ron Frazier

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