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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?"
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.)
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
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