Online, offsite, encrypted backups for $5/mo?

[complacent]

So... To those of us who are rapidly approaching (or have surpassed) the TB mark for home data - What are you using for off-site backups? I like my RAID and all, but what happens when the errant glass of wine or water bottle ends up all in mah dataz?

I've been reading about some third-party providers and came across these folks: Backblaze

Anyone heard of them? The idea of all my 1's and 0's regardless of size for $50/yr sounds like cheap insurance to me. Their privacy policy looks pretty good too.

Thoughts? Recommendations?

[ElZorro]

I've been using JungleDisk, which stores data in the Amazon S3 cloud (after encrypting it first, of course). Works well. I think it may be a bit more expensive than you want, Amazon sets the prices for storage, upload and download, and it can get expensive quick.

[Libra Monkee]

There's also Mozy for 4.95/ month.

[complacent]

Holy crap Jungle Disk will get 'spensive quickly!

[complacent]

Have you used Mozy, Chuckensloven? I'm hoping to get opinions if possible.

[Libra Monkee]

Personally, no. Some guys I used to work with did (that's how I found out about it). They liked it for home use. You have to pay per computer but I figure if you back everything up to the RAID you can just back up the RAID to their server. Let them figure out why you're using 2TB on a home account.

[WRXWagon2112]

Recently I've been hearing about Carbonite.

No limits on storage and it's $55/year. They caution though that it's very slow to backup more than "a few dozen gigs". Not sure what that means. They're a sponsor of TWIT so try using promo code "TWiT" for ... I don't know, 10% off or something?

--Alan

[complacent]

Right on, thanks much. I'm curious to see how long the initial transfer is going to take... ugh. Guess I'll have to choose first though.

[HappyIdiot]

Recently I've been hearing about Carbonite.

No limits on storage and it's $55/year. They caution though that it's very slow to backup more than "a few dozen gigs". Not sure what that means. They're a sponsor of TWIT so try using promo code "TWiT" for ... I don't know, 10% off or something?

--Alan

IIRC, Leo was saying you can only backup data on your local drives, not external one.

[schvin]

i've been using truecrypt volumes in a file on dropbox with decent success for smaller, critical stuff that i want everywhere with me.

also been using rsync amazon ec2+ebs volumes w/ crypto in transit and on disk for backups of everything (more along the size you are talking about), which works well, but is not as cheap as mozy or something, but then i have my fingers in the crypto everywhere, etc.

just heard about tahoe after this year's codecon, which tragically, i didn't attend this year. i need to read up more on it, but it has some really interesting properties. http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk/docs/about.html

[schvin]

this is also appealing, but, just like the corporate options, you have to put some trust in others. since you generate the keys (as i recall), it definitely has more appeal from a privacy perspective over the corporate solutions w/ their vanilla lame ssl.

http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2008-11 ... -beta.html

[complacent]

this is also appealing, but, just like the corporate options, you have to put some trust in others. since you generate the keys (as i recall), it definitely has more appeal from a privacy perspective over the corporate solutions w/ their vanilla lame ssl.

http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2008-11 ... -beta.html

Very cool! I like the idea of generating your own keys. The $.30/GB is a real ball-buster at a shade over 1.5TB.

I may have to look into a lame ssl for pictures and media (who cares, go ahead and search it) and something like tarsnap (why do I keep wanting to type parsnip? ) for my sensitive data.

I was hoping to find a one-fits-all solution so I can implement it across machines and data locations without too much pain. It looks like it may very well being messier than I expected and cost prohibitive. balls. back to "the google" i guess...

Thanks for everyone's input, keep it coming!




(btw, talking in "picodollars" - *very* nerdy. lolz)

[Sabre]

Buy your friend a HD, have him hook it up to his home server and rsync to it every night

[schvin]

good call, sabre!

[complacent]

Buy your friend a HD, have him hook it up to his home server and rsync to it every night

That's still an awful big "favor" to ask of anyone... let alone the concerns about longevity. Personally I think I'd rather pay the money to make sure my dataz are resting happily in some stupid redundant data center with multiple ins/outs, off-site backups, etc.

Plus the $$ it would cost to put together a decent raid set to attach to said friends' home server would probably cost the same as a few years worth of commercial backups.

Dunno... I like the idea of cheap and keeping it "in the fam" as it were, but I fear it might not be as feasible as I'd like it to be. Seems like this is a very budding area of home computing/networking and isn't quite as robust as I'd like it to be (right now, anywho) without going "full retard" and having a rack in the basement of more than one home.

Still chewing on it...

[ElZorro]

Anyone have any updates on this topic? Dropbox?

[Sabre]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE
http://www.ntop.org/n2n/
http://www.lugato.net/gazzera/

All of the above +rsync

Would anyone want to write a distributed File system... think GFS? Not an easy task, I know...

[ElZorro]

I think I'm leaning towards LiveDrive. http://www.livedrive.com/in/?tid=2G7KN2JMP7DJDRZ3ENMS (yea, its an affiliate link, hate to see a referral bonus go to waste)

From what I can tell all of the other services are backup services - if you delete a file from our machine it is deleted from the online storage. LiveDrive (and JungleDisk) is an online storage drive, so if you have a machine with limited storage you can move things up and not worry about them going away. You can also access your files from nearly any device with a web browser, and some file types (movies, pictures, music) can be played/viewed. Only downside I see is they do not store the files encrypted, so I'll do a couple truecrypt volumes for financial data and other sensitive stuff.

[schvin]

I think I'm leaning towards LiveDrive. http://www.livedrive.com/in/?tid=2G7KN2JMP7DJDRZ3ENMS (yea, its an affiliate link, hate to see a referral bonus go to waste)

From what I can tell all of the other services are backup services - if you delete a file from our machine it is deleted from the online storage. LiveDrive (and JungleDisk) is an online storage drive, so if you have a machine with limited storage you can move things up and not worry about them going away. You can also access your files from nearly any device with a web browser, and some file types (movies, pictures, music) can be played/viewed. Only downside I see is they do not store the files encrypted, so I'll do a couple truecrypt volumes for financial data and other sensitive stuff.

nice find. i read the other day that s3 (backend of jungle) serves 80k hits/seconds. interesting.

i haven't tried this one - but i routinely use truecrypt volumes on dropbox (only mounted from one machine at a time, of course) with great success. it has a web interface and such also. worth comparing, i'll have to try this one out.

i use the dropbox for small stuff, still using ec2+ebs volumes for the serious stuff (encrypted and snapshotted all over everywhere).

[ElZorro]

Another online backup, this one focused on *nix/*BSD.

http://www.tarsnap.com/index.html

I love their pricing model:

Storage: 300 picodollars / byte-month
($0.30 / GB-month)
Bandwidth: 300 picodollars / byte
($0.30 / GB)

And yes, their accounting system actually does this!

Why is tarsnap pricing defined in picodollars?
There are three major reasons why tarsnap pricing is defined in terms of picodollars per byte rather than dollars per gigabyte:

- Tarsnap's author is a geek. Applying SI prefixes to non-SI units is a geeky thing to do.
If prices were listed in dollars per GB instead of picodollars per byte, it would be harder to avoid the what-is-a-GB confusion (a GB is 10^9 bytes, but some people don't understand SI prefixes). Picodollars are perfectly clear — nobody is going to think that a picodollar is 2^(-40) dollars.
- Specifying prices in picodollars reinforces the point that if you have very small backups, you can pay very small amounts. Unlike some people, I don't believe in rounding up to $0.01 — the tarsnap accounting code keeps track of everything in attodollars and when it internally converts storage prices from picodollars per month to attodollars per day it rounds the prices down.

[complacent]

psst - schvin posted about it and i commented on his post on teh 22nd of april.

[ElZorro]

Fine, be that way.

[complacent]

oops, i forgot to add the tongue -sticking-out smiley...



^ there. better?

[ElZorro]

No. Wow, twice in one week, I need to start using 'search' more