Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Online, Inexpensive and Secure Data Storage?

Posted by Cliff on from the tired-of-digital-media dept.

ThePolkapunk asks: "After years of suffering through floppy demagnetizations, hard drive crashes, CDR bit rot and the click of death, I've become fed up with having to take care of my own backups. Does anyone know of a reasonably inexpensive, secure data storage facility accessible online that can store all of my important files with enough redundancy for me to feel safe?"

4 of 87 comments (clear)

  1. Simple... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Compress everything, encrypt it, and share it on emule as "OSX_X86.iso.

    For extra redundancy, post an obscure blog about it, and then submit that blog to /.

  2. As usual.. by rylin · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As usual, someone thinks they can have all three.
    Here's a hint: Pick two.

  3. EVault.com by gothzilla · · Score: 4, Informative

    Check out http://www.evault.com/
    Very reasonably priced and they maintain offsite backups of their backups.
    One thing to keep in mind is transfer speed. I would have used them but I have 40gigs of data to back up and it would take too long to send daily.

  4. Re:USB/Firewire drives by gregmac · · Score: 4, Informative

    I've recently switched from DLT to external USB drives. They're cheaper, more reliable and easier to restore from than tape.

    I've been doing backups this way for a few months now. It's also easier to backup. Plug in the usb drive, run rsync, unplug and take offsite. I have a script I run in cron (or manually) that tries to mount it first, and only if it suceeds, runs rsync.

    I've been meaning to install another drive at my house to backup a couple servers (just haven't gotten around to it yet), but that'll be similar.. rsync over ssl, run in cron every night.

    The one thing this doesn't address that tapes usually do is keeping multiple backups. I was doing this for a while - where I had a directory for I think monday, wednesday and friday - but then our storage space increased and I couldn't fit this on my backup drive anymore. It would just be a matter of buying a bigger drive, or getting another couple enclosures and drives, but I haven't done it yet.

    I was playing with using rdiff-backup to make differential backups of just our file shares, but due to lack of a usable web interface I haven't bothered (I don't want to spend time selectively restoring backups for people.. if they can't do it themselves I want no part ;) ). I did start working on one, but there are too many things higher on my priority list.

    --
    Speak before you think