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Online Storage Solutions for Home Users?
A not-so-anonymous Anonymous Coward asks: "Like many Slashdot readers, I have accumulated a lot of data over the years. Emails, documents, 'media' etc. Although I try to keep up with backups, I still feel I need some other place where I could dump my data without worrying about hard drive crashes and other problems. Googling reveals that there is a whole slew of online storage providers. But most are around $10 a month with a couple of gigs of space. So what does Slashdot recommend for sites that offer plenty of storage and fit the budget of a poor home user?"
You could just open a couple dozen Gmail accounts.
symetrix. We are building a religion, a limited edition.
It sounds like your main goal is offsite backup. Unless you have a very fast network connection, serious multi-gigabyte backups online just don't make sense. Buy a USB hard drive and periodically backup your data to it, then leave it at a friend's house. If you don't trust your friend, encrypt the data first. Do the above every month or two and you are set. Catastrophic failures don't occur that often so a low frequency offsite backup solution like this works well and is relatively inexpensive.
I got about 40GB of unused space that you can transfer all your pr0n to, i'm sure that's what you meant by 'media' eh?
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Backup to it every month and leave it at a friends place. Just make sure that you stay friend with him/her :) You don't want someone to take a peek at your personal love letters now do you.
I fought the corporate America, and the corporate America bought the law.
Service is just a tad bit spotty at times, but most of the time (I'd say like 95%) it's reliable. Transfer speed is good enough for my DSL connection too.
Find a few friends and try dibs. Should be one of the cheapest solutions (basically, you'll need about as much storage space as you want to backup yourself -- ideally a bit more), as long as you can find enough friends :-)
/* Steinar */
(This comment is of course GPLed.)
My friend divided his data into bit torrents and posted them to a forum and that is where he kept his information backed up.
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Make sure the online storage space provider that you choose, supports WebDAV . WebDAV will allow you to map these online storage space as drive letters on your Windows, or as mount points on your OS X/Linux.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
Check out FlashBackup. They offer 5GB of storage for only $10/mo, which is one of the cheapest deals I've found, and they support FTP, WebDAV and web-based transfers.
This would be a great application for a P2P network. Donate 100GB of storage space, and it gets you 20GB of 4X redundant space "out there" in the P2P ether. The remaining 20GB is for overhead and slack for system management. A subset of the 20GB could be encrypted, leaving the other files in plaintext so the service could detect duplicates in order to save space.
The problem with the current online services is the paltry amount of storage, and the cost. The problem with USB drives, CDs, DVDs, etc. is they 1) do not keep themselves up to date, and 2) go away if your house burns down. It's hard to solve both 1 and 2 with non-networked media.
These people:
..charge $0.50/gb. Pretty great.
http://www.tranxactglobal.com/
Here's a thought:
Get (or have, or mod) a job with decent bandwidth and that allows you to bring your own hardware. Build a cheap PC with a decent-sized hard drive and use that as your off-site storage.
Even the best job isn't likely to allow you to set up a server that's accessible to the world-at-large on their network, but it's easy enough to serve the files from your home PC and pull them from there when you're at the office.
Of course, you'll want to secure access to both the home-based server and the office-based backup and encrypt anything sensitive that you leave at the office.
Karma
OP, do you really consider $10/mo to be too much? Sounds incredibly cheap to me. I assume you're talking about gigabytes and gigabytes of data, because presumably you wouldn't even be worried about it if it was small enough to fit on a CD.
Although I try to keep up with backups, I still feel I need some other place where I could dump my data without worrying about hard drive crashes and other problems.
I don't quite follow the logic here. If you're backing up, what's the problem? If you're not backing up, why not?
Emails, documents, 'media' etc.
Huh? It would take a million e-mails to make a gigabyte worth of data. How can they even be significant? Same thing with documents, if you mean your own word-processor files.
If media is the big issue, where are you getting all the media? If you buy a DVD or a CD, why do you need a backup?
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Why don't you just put up a small server? If you go outside your own network it will get so much slower and less comfortable to work with... I've been there and dropped it after a while - between downtime of your PC, downtime of the network and your storage provider its not really all that useful...
I ended up getting a storage router that allows me access from the outside if needed USR Storage Router 8200 its so much easier...
Peter.
I'm using an online iDisk through my .Mac account, which cost me something like $135CDN per year (with e-mail and some software included). It's currently at its default 100MB, although Apple allows you to purchase more space as needed.
100MB isn't enough to backup my 60GB hard drive, but then again why would I do something like that? Uploading 60GB of data, even at cable modem speeds, even with compression, is going to take forever.
Instead, I have a backup strategy that encompasses multiple levels, including online and offline backup.
For online backup, I'm storing some important documents and some application-specific data I'd really like back if it were lost (Firefox bookmarks, iCal data, my Address book, etc.). I'm also storing my Open Source projects sources and asssociated files (which are all on SourceForge's CVS servers -- but multiple backups certainly doesn't hurt!). I even have an encrypted image file for my Palm's backup card stored there, just in case. However, I don't store any applications themselves, anything I can readily download off the Internet anyhow, or anything required to boot up the machine in the first place (ie: any part of the OS itself).
For multimedia, applications, and other backups, I'm burning to DVD. A stack of DVD-R's can hold a lot of data, is easy to store, and if stored properly has a decent lifetime. I can backup the entire system to roughly 15 DVDs if I wanted to (so far I haven't).
For some really important data, I'm also keeping copies on my iPod and some of the other systems on my network. Redundancy doesn't hurt.
However, for really important data offsite backups are best. For this I tend to trust family first -- leaving a small box of DVDs with my brother or someone else close gives me peace of mind that if my home were to be destroyed somehow, non-critical application data would be readily available to me as well.
I love my online storage, but it's not the be-all and end-all of backups. Online Storage Providers have been known to have failures, and unless you have a T3 coming into your home, bandwidth is going to be an issue. So have some other strategies in place as well. Use the online storage for data you want to be able to access from anywhere on the Internet, and for critical documents and such you may need immediate access to in case of catastrophic failure.
Brad BARCLAY
I was wondering about something like Freenet would work but with the rules all mixed up. In this mixed up version you would have a redundant encrypted network that stores everyones files only the files aren't public. They're private. You can download only your own stuff and your quota size is relative to the space that you make available to the network. You don't know where your stuff is held. You just know that it's safe.
If you are looking to backup data in the 5GB range a DVD burner is a good option. As required create and verify two discs. Store one disc locally and mail the second disc to your mother. You will gain the benefit of an offsite backup, and would it kill you to write a letter to your mother more often?
why not some giant P2P powered virtual raid striping setup in which each client gives the same as they receive. Bob has his files securely (using a cert) ripped apart and sriped redundantly over several machines, which also have a token system (if too many disconnect, that data gets restripped (they might have formatted thier drive)
On top of this, a nice partition on Bobs machine, about 150% the size of his required backup space, is used to stripe misc parts of peoples other data,
On red button call, and the parts are attempted to download by searching for them. (or index them).
Now, the net and P2P is basicallya huge backup and distribution chain now, everybody copying, but personal documents need a home. If you were worried about sec. you could compress, encrypt, XOR, then reencrypt as it went out onto the striping network.
This isn't like P2P, only *you* can get it back (or anyone else with passwords etc... it mustn't be tied to a mahcine, just a cert.)
I would put out 10mb of very imp. docu's onto such a network, knowing if the worst happened it is safe.
Why? No bandwidth cost for me. I pay my own connection, that is it. Distributed - even an isp could suffer from some problem.
Why doesnt the whole net work like this? why bother with fixed hosting sites, lets just all grid up!
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Use an external USB drive (not the flash drives, but a true HD - maybe 80GB). Many workplaces (mine included) have lockable cabinets in the cubes. Backup your files to your USB drive and lock it in your cube at work. Once a month (or week) take it home and refresh it. Simple and cheap.
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Don't know about you, but what I want to avoid losing is my work. Family snapshots on the HDD I can live with losing, but losing the software I've written over 5 years would be a big kick in the teeth.
SourceForge serves a double purpose for that, acting not only as a release mechanism for what I write, but also as an offsite backup system. Nice one SF!
If what you've got isn't code, then put it on your website instead. Free web space is easy to come by. Whatever you're looking to preserve, it'll likely be stuff you've put a lot of work into, and in that case making it available on the web is a Good Thing. And if your PC burns itself to pieces, you can retrieve the files from the website.
OK, I know website providers and SF say that they aren't to be relied on, and that you must always have your own backups. But unless both you and your website provider (or SF) have a major fire at the same time, in practical terms this is pretty safe.
Grab.
I figure you have a perfect free offsite storage if you have a G-mail account. Most data files are unber 10MB for most home users. Just e-mail your self the files. When you change them send them to your self again. Once your g-mail account is full, just go to the oldest e-mails with attachments of the same name and delete them.
Anything over 10MB should be put else where.
Further doesn't everyone have friends that they trust? You just have to all have a server running that can be ftp'd to and then backup your own data to your friends machine, and reverse. Done.
Anything over reasonable sizes, should be stored on DVD or CD anyways. Too much time to send with current home broadband.
Regards,
Ryan Pritchard
Fun Extends All Basic Life Expectancies
Alternatively, find out how long does your post-office keep stuff in poste-restante (6 months usually). Then backup everything on a few DVDs, (encrypt it first) and then mail it to yourself at poste-restante.
"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that ones work is terribly important." -BRussell