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Best Online Remote Backup Service w/Linux Client?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the penguins-need-backups-too dept.

technocraft asks: "I've been searching for an online service to backup data from my Linux file server and have come up with nothing. For many users, Carbonite looks to be a great solution: Affordable, with 'unlimited' capacity. Unfortunately for me, you can only backup from Windows XP and explicitly NOT from external drives or network mapped drives (like my file server)." Is anyone aware of an online backup services without these restrictions?

70 comments

  1. This looks pretty good by dtfinch · · Score: 4, Informative

    They use rsync over ssh:
    http://www.rsync.net/
    Base rate: $1.80/gb/month
    Volume discounts:
    25-49GB - 10% Off
    50-99GB - 20% Off
    100-199GB - 30% Off
    200-399GB - 40% Off
    400-999GB - 50% Off
    1TB+ - 60% Off

    You get supposedly unlimited storage, and pay for only what you use.
    I haven't actually tried them though.

    1. Re:This looks pretty good by Bogtha · · Score: 4, Informative

      We're customers of the parent organisation, JohnCompanies, and I can't recommend them highly enough. The thing that makes them stand out in my opinion is the support, you don't get clueless newbies reading from an FAQ like you do with every other hosting provider I've ever encountered.

      I've been looking for an excuse to try out rsync.net, it seems like an interesting service, for example it offers WebDAV access, which is built into Windows, OS X and KDE.

      Yeah, I know I sound like a fanboy or astroturfer, but I don't care, it's really rare to find a company that actually gets it so right when there are so many incompetents around, especially in the hosting business.

      --
      Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
    2. Re:This looks pretty good by dgatwood · · Score: 1

      Wouldn't it be a lot cheaper just to just have one of your employees carry a DLT tape home every week? What's the obsession with backing up over the 'net? It isn't cost effective by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, this is seven times the cost per gig of making a DLT backup, and a DLT backup costs you that much -once-, not monthly.

      The best network backup, if you really have to have such a thing, is to set up a second site in another state.

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

    3. Re:This looks pretty good by archos · · Score: 1

      Having an employee take the tape home is the worst backup solution ever. There are far too many risks involved. What do you do if the employee loses the tape? Who then has your accounting data?

      What about the quality of the tape? Employee puts tape into her purse/bag/briefcase with all the other garbage in there, not a good place for a tape. How hard would it be to get the tape from an employee if someone wanted to? Employee takes tape, leaves it in car when they pick up groceries, opps, someone stole it. Being kind of simplistic here, I know, but really, if you are using tape, you better be using a security company to pick up and store the tapes.

    4. Re:This looks pretty good by swillden · · Score: 2, Interesting

      That sounds really cool, except I'm surprised at how high the price is. Between photos and home movies, I have about 100GB of data I'd really like to get backed up offsite, and it grows by about 2GB per month. I have some other stuff I want offsite as well, but it's very small.

      So, according to their pricing scheme, it would cost me $126 per month to store my data, and the price would increase by about $4 each month as my data grows. Storing my data for a year would cost me nearly $1,800. That probably makes sense for some people, but certainly not for me. It's much cheaper for me to buy a machine full of drives to put at my brother's house and then rsync the data there. Actually, that's exactly what I'm looking into doing -- most of my family has high-speed Internet connections, so we're taking inventory of who has how much data they'd like to back up and how much free space they can donate for others to back up to. After we figure that out, we'll buy additional storage where it makes sense and set up automatic over-the-net backups using rdiff-backup and some scripts.

      A commercial solution would be a lot simpler, but at ~$2/GB/month it's priced way too high. For me, anyway. At one-tenth the price, I'd consider it.

      --
      Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
    5. Re:This looks pretty good by Radicode · · Score: 1

      I'm surprised nobody mentioned Mozy. Ok, they only support Windows for now but they have a MacOS X and probably a Linux client coming soon. Mozy offers 2GB free or 30GB for $5/month. Here is my shameless plug with my referral code: https://mozy.com/?code=KXYE5N. This will give you an extra 256MB of free space. If you don't want to use my link, just go to mozy.com.
      Radicode

    6. Re:This looks pretty good by dtfinch · · Score: 1

      Taking a quick look on Froogle, the tape drive alone will cost about $900, and 80gb tapes cost about $70 each. You can buy hard drives for less, and have an employee take a hard drive home each week. That's not cheap by any measure. Tapes aren't very reliable if you reuse them. They'll appear to backup ok, but most will be bad after several uses. If you have a terabyte to back up, you're going to need about a dozen tapes a night, no matter how little has changed. Tapes are old, expensive, dying technology. The only way tape backups can be cheaper is if you accept extreme unreliability, or you limit your backup frequency to weekly or monthly, and you already own a tape drive. Losing a week of important data will cost most businesses more than they'll ever spend on backups.

      With nightly rsync backups, you reduce hard disk activity by only copying parts of files that change, and you can restore files selectively. I have about 300gb on a file server that I can keep in sync with a backup server for only about 150-200mb of nightly traffic, with occasional spikes. I can restore files that were deleted a year ago.

    7. Re:This looks pretty good by dtfinch · · Score: 1

      Our company has about 200gb of important, frequently updated data that we need backed up nightly. $260 a month for peace of mind for a business sounds pretty cheap.

      I've checked out probably a dozen backup services, and most were around 5x as expensive. These guys for example, charge $65/month for only 10gb. Another called me to give a quote and when I told them that another company quoted $300/month (before I found rsync.net), they laughed a bit and said they couldn't go anywhere near that cheap. Granted, this was probably 7 months ago that I was scoping out our options, so prices may have gone down a bit.

    8. Re:This looks pretty good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      What do you do if the employee loses the tape? Who then has your accounting data?
      Same as when someone cracks the online backup store: the ones who can break the encryption -- you encrypt your data, right?!
    9. Re:This looks pretty good by jambarama · · Score: 1

      Our IT department actually found one through TIDF. They found the "best fit" for us for free, and quoted us a price that was slighly higher than the one found on the website. So out IT guys got the name from TIDF then went to the other firm, told them they were referred by TIDF and signed up. (It was net mass btw - it is pretty pricey, but the support is great and we don't back up much data).

      Me? I've only personally used mozy and while I liked it, it fails your requirement of linux compatibility (which is why I dumped it for my own little homebrew NAS). There is a lot of advice all over the internet listing online back up souces, but make sure you personally know the referrer before you trust them with your backup source (i.e. don't trust me).

    10. Re:This looks pretty good by bombshelter13 · · Score: 1

      Security company? What's wrong with a good old safety deposit box at the bank?

    11. Re:This looks pretty good by cerberusss · · Score: 2, Interesting

      What I like about these guys, is the use of their canary. When they are forced by the authorities to pass your data, they're probably also forced to keep silent about this.

      So what do they do? They send out a weekly 'canary' saying nothing happened. If something DOES happen, they don't send the canary.

      --
      8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
    12. Re:This looks pretty good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah they'd be even more impressive if it didn't require a WHOIS to figure out where they are located in the US... even teh name of a STATE might be a little helpful. damn.

      Hey John, where the hell are you? are you ashamed?

    13. Re:This looks pretty good by tzanger · · Score: 1

      While I agree that tapes are an old, dying technology, there is no need to resort to hyperbole.

      They'll appear to backup ok, but most will be bad after several uses. If you have a terabyte to back up, you're going to need about a dozen tapes a night, no matter how little has changed.

      If you don't verify your backups (even on disk or network backup) then you deserve to lose your data. And since when does anyone do a full nightly backup of terabytes of data? You do quarterly full backups with monthly, weekly and daily incrementals. You take home one tape or drive, and with a proper rotation schedule you can pull up any change of any file within the last quarter.

    14. Re:This looks pretty good by CopaceticOpus · · Score: 1

      I use Carbonite, and I've backed up over 100GB so far. My cost is $5 per month. The cost with rsync would be $126 per month. How can there be such a massive discrepancy? I'm sure the rsync service is probably more robust, but it costs 25 times as much? Something is not right here.

      If a Pizza Hut pizza costs you $10, a quality pizza from a local place might cost you $15. But if rsync was running the local place, you'd have to pay $250 for that pizza. Momma mia!

      Newegg.com is selling a 320G hard drive for $95. Assuming a RAID-1 setup with the average HD lasting 3 years, the cost of storage is 1.7 cents per GB per month. Yes, cents! Now, of course they have other expenses besides hard drives, but rsync's prices look way out of proportion.

    15. Re:This looks pretty good by dheltzel · · Score: 1

      I think the pricing on this is way too high if you have more then a couple of GB to store. Consider that for $60/month you could get 160 GB here, and you get to use a full fledged server for anything else you want. It could be a "hot site" for a lot of the services you run on your home server, or more likely, you'd let it be the primary site and let your home server be the backup.

    16. Re:This looks pretty good by skyrytow · · Score: 1

      Pretty safe bet he was joking

      --
      Rasputiin
    17. Re:This looks pretty good by igb · · Score: 2, Informative
      Taking a quick look on Froogle, the tape drive alone will cost about $900, and 80gb tapes cost about $70 each.
      If you have serious backup requirements, LTO-3 tape drives are about $6000, the tapes are about $80 each, and they hold (in our experience) close to 1TB with compression turned on. You'll need a fast machine to prevent shoe-shining the tape, as you want to drive ~40MBytes/sec into them for best performance. The tapes last for practical purposes indefinitely --- it's a close cousin of DLT, and I think we lost one tape (and that to a mechanical, rather than tape surface, failure) out of a cycle of about a thousand over five years. Many of those had been recycled (ie scratched and re-written) in excess of thirty times. With LTO the most used tape we have is 8 recyclings, but we've had no failures so far.

      The casual claim that tapes are old, expensive technology is simply nonsense if you've got 20TBytes of data and you want to keep a weekly copy for three months and a monthly copy for several years. 20-odd tapes times perhaps 30 sets in circulation is 600 tapes, which might cost about $60000. That's $0.10 per gigabyte, at very conservative media costs. A decent six-drive, 72-slot robot might cost you $60000, so that's a further $0.10 per gigabyte amortised over the whole estate.

      You can easily split those tapes between multiple firesafes in multiple locations, too.

      It's also about 600TBytes: disk is indeed cheap, but if you can build 600TB on multiple arrays for $0.20/GByte you're doing pretty well, and absent some very funky power management that's going run rather hot (assuming that RAID5 is the bare minimum and you can tolerate say 6+1 raidgroups it's still well in excess of 100 spindles). A six drive robot will easily sink 250MBytes/sec, which is at the bleeding edge of very fast disk arrays (that's saturating multiple FC links, unless you're using 4G FC).

      What's the benefit of tape? The marginal media costs are low, tapes don't break while they're quiescent, they don't consume power while they're quiescent and they're astoundingly fast.

  2. VaultLogix by Wizy · · Score: 1

    Simply the best. Windows and linux clients. One computer on your network runs it and can backup all the network shares you want it to. It's even HIPAA compliant.

    VaultLogix is a little expensive compared to other services though. But there are reasons for that. I use it on a couple servers.

  3. Get a cheap hosting site by Gothmolly · · Score: 1

    Get a cheap hosted site from some place like 1and1.com, and just use it as a fileserver. 100GB + MySQL + PHP is only $10 a month, and there's a cheaper plan available w/o MySQL.

    --
    I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
    1. Re:Get a cheap hosting site by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Considering the pretty dismal security of most bargain hosting service, I am not quite sure I want to trust them with my sensitive business data.

    2. Re:Get a cheap hosting site by Gothmolly · · Score: 1

      Considering your AC status, lack of any sources cited, and a positive personal experience with 1and1, I am not quite sure I want to trust your opinion of what to do with my sensitive data.

      PS, you added the 'business' part in yourself, its not from smitty, further weakening your case.

      --
      I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
  4. blacksun by illuminatedwax · · Score: 2, Informative

    I use Blacksun which doesn't have the "unlimited" storage you had before, but they are very affordable and offer rsync, ssh, sftp, and the regular linux services as well as the typical dragndrop interface clients. Very nice, and their tech support is helpful and quick to respond!

    --
    Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
    1. Re:blacksun by corychristison · · Score: 1

      My experience with Blacksun has been pretty, well, terrible...

      I developed and maintained [and, sadly, had no say in the design] the Saskatchewan Air Show web site for 2 years until the accident that occurred in 2005, then the organization decided to give up and well, to my knowledge there isn't going to be an Air Show ever again... unless someone is willing tp pay off their debt.

      Anyway, back on track. They were originally hosted by Blacksun... and I have to say we had nothing but problems. When I first joined the project we requested PHP and MySQL access... it took them over 2 weeks to get it set up, and by that time we had moved to some hosting provided by DirectWest / Sasktel as they were a major corporate sponsor. Then, to my knowledge, the Air Show committie continued to have problems regaurding retracting their account, etc... but I wasn't involved in that. :-)

      This was over 2 years ago, so maybe Blacksun has gotten better since, but I, personally, will never deal with them again. :-)

  5. More details by Bender0x7D1 · · Score: 1

    Do you have any more information regarding your situation? For example, why does it have to be online storage? Is there a reason tape/optical/hard drive doesn't work for you? Also, how much data are we talking about? If it is hundreds of GB, then online may not be the best solution; the time to restore your data may be prohibitive. In line with that same question, what kind of bandwidth are we talking about? DSL is great for a couple of GB, but you need a lot more than that if you have a lot of data. Finally, how critical is this data? Is it a personal file server, or is it for a business? How long before downtime becomes an issue?

    If time is critical, you might want to use tape or a spare hard drive and store it in a safe rated for digital media. If you need to restore, it can be a matter of minutes instead of hours or days. If you do daily backups of the entire server, you could just get a new machine, load the data, (or plug in the hard drive), and be back up in minutes. For absolutely critical files (financials, etc.) you could use online backup, and have all the non-critical backed-up locally.

    So, if you can provide more information about your situation, the advice might be better.

    --
    Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
    1. Re:More details by technocraft · · Score: 1

      Thanks for the questions.

      I'm looking for easy, reliable offsite backup functionality. I'm a photographer with a lot of photos. I use a Linux box with a raid array for my primary storage. This is backed up to DVD piece meal. I've also been using an external usb drive as more a nearline backup device.

      In terms of bandwidth and speed, I expect my data to be slowly backed up over time. Probably will need a few weeks to get everything uploaded. I'm assuming the backup client will use idle time to transfer. Once the initial transfer is completed, I assume that only additional files will transfer and that that will only take a few hours at a time when needed, doesn't realy matter. I don't need to have revisions available, but I would like to not have items deleted from the backup if they are removed from the source device.

      For restore, I don't expect for that to happen quickly either. It will take weeks to download all my data again. Possibly, some kind of bulk restore option could be available (dvds, hd, whatever), and would probably be pretty expensive. But that's ok - the point of this backup is to be OFFSITE and SAFE.

      For data privacy, I'm assuming the backup client encrypts the data in some way prior to reaching the service facility. I know that Carbonite works this way.

      This is not meant to be a sole backup solution, but simply a cost-effective offsite copy in the event of a catastrophe onsite. I know of photographers who've had their servers AND backup tapes/drives/whatever stolen from their studio. I really don't want to have to constantly shuffle tapes/drives to a safe deposit box. I want a slow, constant online backup being built as my data grows.

  6. How do you trust? by polymath69 · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Presumption: Backups are intended for crash or loss recovery.

    Presumption: After a crash or loss, you may not have access to any of your own encryption keys.

    Query: How can you possibly trust any third party not to take liberties with personal or business information entrusted to their care?

    I really think you're better off taking care of backups in-house, along with of course keeping some of those same backups off-site in a secure manner.

    --

    --
    I don't want to rule the world... I just want to be in charge of mayonnaise.
    1. Re:How do you trust? by Gothmolly · · Score: 1, Informative

      Write the keys down on paper. Place paper in bank safe deposit box. Profit.

      --
      I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
    2. Re:How do you trust? by Schraegstrichpunkt · · Score: 1
      Presumption: After a crash or loss, you may not have access to any of your own encryption keys.

      GPG can encrypt using a symmetric key. Re-encrypt all the aforementioned encryption keys using GPG, and post the result to your Slashdot profile or something.

      --
      http://outcampaign.org/
    3. Re:How do you trust? by Schraegstrichpunkt · · Score: 1

      Good question. Also, one of the things you might be concerned about is the remote compromise of your machines. If you have a 7-day daily backup stored in separate directories on a remote server, but they're *all* writable via rsync, and you have a cron job on your (e.g.) webserver that backs up to the remote server, what stops someone from corrupting both your webserver and all the remote backups?

      --
      http://outcampaign.org/
    4. Re:How do you trust? by cortana · · Score: 1

      The backup directory on the remote host can be owned by user1 and group-owned by user2, with the following permissions: u=r-x,g=rwx,o=r-t

      A backup is copied to the remote server as user2. Once the backup is complete, change its owner to user1. user2 will then no longer be able to read, modify or delete the backup file.

      If you are confident with the syntax of sudoers(5) then sudo(8) is a good way to do this. If not then it can be done with a cron job, as long as you ensure the job runs once the backup is completed.

    5. Re:How do you trust? by Schraegstrichpunkt · · Score: 1

      Yes, that would probably work. Does rsync.net support that?

      Also, I personally wouldn't fully trust that, given the number of local-root holes that Linux seems to be prone to having.

      --
      http://outcampaign.org/
    6. Re:How do you trust? by dheltzel · · Score: 1

      Good assessment! I agree with your thinking. Have you looked at Box Backup. The developers seem to have thought out the encryption and recovery issues pretty well.

    7. Re:How do you trust? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      USB keychain flash drives can be gotten for under $10. You can literally keep all of your keys, physical and encryption, on your keychain. If your data is truly valuable, you can keep copies of your keys in a safe-deposit box at a bank.

      Encryption keys should not be the concern.

  7. bandwidth costs... by HockeyPuck · · Score: 1

    Don't forget to include the costs your ISP will charge you for the bandwidth usage... or if you need to restore 10GB over a T1, I hope you didn't need that data that quickly :)

    It's not the online backups that sound like your concern but "outsourcing backups", otherwise you'd backup to a RAIDed pair of disks or backup to tape, both which will be cheaper than $onlineserver + $bandwidth costs. If the tech (could be you) loses the tape, breaks the tape, corrupts the filesystem that is the target for the backups, you can't sue them. But if a company that you are paying to keep your data, loses it, you can sue them for $lost per minute.

    If you are going to outsource to a backup company, make sure they a) will be around for a while b) have been around for a while c) have references from people more complex than you.

    Some people say backups aren't exciting, try losing a backup tape sometime...

    1. Re:bandwidth costs... by John+Hasler · · Score: 1

      > But if a company that you are paying to keep your data, loses it, you can sue them for
      > $lost per minute...

      Up to the maximum specified in the contract, which may be zero.

      --
      Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
  8. External SATA drives... by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 1
    are cheap... probably under $150 for a 100+GB server-grade drive + USB/FW shell. Get two and do differential backups to alternating drives daily - make sure that one's off-site at night in case of a fire where you can't get the drive out. Much cheaper than bending over monthly for an online backup service where your data's in the hands of god-only-knows-who. If you're using an online service, I hope that you pre-encrypt the data with your own keys before handing it over to their software and keep your keys in a safe location (like on two USB keys - one at home).

    -b.

    1. Re:External SATA drives... by fireboy1919 · · Score: 1

      Much cheaper than bending over monthly for an online backup service where your data's in the hands of god-only-knows-who.
      Sounds like somebody should let someone else handle their investment banking. You're not thinking this math through very clearly. Have you, perhaps, bought a hybrid to save money?

      Cost for offsite backup: around $2/GB*month.

      Two SATA drives (lifespan of three years): $300

      How many GB can you get in a three year timespan for $300?

      $300=36*$2*X
      X=4.17GB

      So at the cost already mentioned, you break even if you've got 4GB of critical data assuming that *BOTH* drives
      make it to the three year mark, which is definitely pushing it. If you've got less (which most people do), then going for the offsite option is definitely better. You also usually get the added advantage of a class A facility with redundant power sources, big line conditioners/surge protectors, bomb-proofing, sophisticated physical security, and big raid arrays.

      That's a lot of added value for your money, and much more reliable than a mere two hard drives.

      --
      Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
    2. Re:External SATA drives... by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 1
      Sounds like somebody should let someone else handle their investment banking. You're not thinking this math through very clearly. Have you, perhaps, bought a hybrid to save money?

      Sounds like somebody should stop being a condescending prick... I suppose it's easy on Slashdot - in real life, someone'd have curbstomped them by now...

      So at the cost already mentioned, you break even if you've got 4GB of critical data assuming that *BOTH* drives make it to the three year mark, which is definitely pushing it.

      Enterprise-grade SATA drives will make it that long and more. Remember: we're not talking about heavy use here - we're talking about copying a few dozen MB per day at most! BTW - 4GB of critical data isn't that much - I know of several ~5 person engineering/design firms that have more data than that on their servers. Same with dental and vet offices - digitised X-rays take up quite a lot of space!

      -b.

    3. Re:External SATA drives... by Eivind · · Score: 1
      Your calculation is correct -- IF you've got no more than about 4GB worth of data worthy of being properly backed up, then the online-solution is the better one.

      Which means that for 95% of the target audience (i.e. people with a high techknowledge and interest) the online-solution is going to suck major.

      Even if I backed up *only* my digital photos and own written documents (i.e ignored the movies and oggs since they can be recreated from the CDs (though at a cost of 100 hours of work or something), even then I'd end up with like 100-200GB of data to back up. So, by your calculation the online-solution will be a factor of 50 or so more expensive.

      It's an order of magnitude to expensive for large amounts of data, plain and simple.

  9. Simply THE best by FazeOut · · Score: 1

    http://www.dataprotection.com/

    I work for these guys, vaults in 3 redundant datacenters, 10 years doing remote backup for almost EVERY operating system out there and, most importantly, a thiry day free (as in beer) trial just to check out what we can do. Not to mention we're one of, if not the biggest, player in the continental US when it comes to remote data storage.

  10. 1000 gmail accounts ... by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 1
    ...should do the trick. You just need a smart client that splits the data into 2.34532 GB (or whatever) chunks, e-mails them to you, logs on, verifies their existence, and deletes outdated chunks :)

    -b.

    1. Re:1000 gmail accounts ... by Miniluv · · Score: 1

      No no, use http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-files ystem/gmail-filesystem.html
      Much easier way to do this. Still not a good idea, but at least a better implementation.

  11. Forgot to add size of backup by technocraft · · Score: 1

    I current have about 500GB on the server. That will likely double over the next year.

    1. Re:Forgot to add size of backup by technocraft · · Score: 1

      This is going to be expensive... Even with the 50% discount at rsync, that's $450/mo... *ponders other ideas* Perhaps a dedicated server somewhere isn't such a bad idea. Could possibly share it with a few friends.

    2. Re:Forgot to add size of backup by Bender0x7D1 · · Score: 1

      OK. I think there are a lot of solutions that would work, and there are quite a few that people have mentioned.

      I think the biggest issue for you to consider is how much security you want for your data. I don't just mean encrypted and properly administered, but also the likelihood that the company will be around for the next few years, and prices won't go through the roof.

      Consider Carbonite. They claim unlimited storage for only $5/month, but I'm not sure how they plan to do this and maintain a profit. Just your data will require an entire hard drive, maybe more. Call it $150 to cover the drive(s) required. This means they can't afford a failure for 30 months, or they will lose money on your account. This ignores the cost for administrators, RAID and the actual hardware to drop the drives into. This would mean over 3 years without a failure just to break even on the hardware, let alone the bandwidth and admin costs. They may decide your business isn't worth it to them and cancel your account, putting you back at square one.

      Now, for that amount of data, it can get pretty costly for some of the solutions. For 1TB, rsync.net will run about $700/month. I am assuming this is more than you want to pay, but I could be wrong.

      Since you are specifically worried about a catastrophic onsite incident, you might want to consider setting up another server at home, and another at a trusted friend or relative's house. If you have a friend/relative that your trust, and is far enough away to avoid any natural disaster that hits your office, but close enough you can get there in case of a system failure, you may consider asking them to keep a server in their basement or attic. (Beware of flooing basements.) You could make a decent system for the cost of 2 months at rsync.net, so in 4 months you could have 2 completely redundant systems across a small geographic region.

      You can sweeten the pot with your relatives by offering to pay for their Internet since they are hosting your server, and this will be a lot cheaper than online storage.

      Since you already have a Linux box with RAID, I assume you have the ability to administer a couple of simple file servers. Using rsync gives you encrypted communication, and there are dozens of solutions out there for encrypting the files once they are on the server.

      --
      Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
    3. Re:Forgot to add size of backup by dtfinch · · Score: 1

      If most of that isn't changing, you can archive it to removable hard disks. Get two removable hard disks, keep one at home, the other in a secure place, and swap them from time to time. Keep your recent (since last swap) work in its own folder, and back only that folder up online.

      Or you can set up a backup server on the other side of your house and hope both servers aren't taken out by the same disaster.

  12. No trust necessary by woolio · · Score: 1

    Query: How can you possibly trust any third party not to take liberties with personal or business information entrusted to their care? Answer: I wouldn't trust with my real email address, much less my data... I would encrypt the data before backing it up.

    1. Re:No trust necessary by snarlydwarf · · Score: 1

      At which point it is cheaper to grab a cheap USB hard drive, put an encrypted filesystem on it, and use that for offsite backups. Get two if you want to be really safe.

  13. DIY Route might be good in this instance by Kadin2048 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    My reaction to rsync.net was similar. I'd really love to try them out, but I can't come up with any really good ways to justify that kind of expense.

    If you have multiple locations available for your use -- and if you're a home user, who doesn't? (parents, friends, etc.) -- it's a lot cheaper and you can get a lot more flexibility if you take an old PC, put a bunch of drives in it, and set it up somewhere. Then just have your systems replicate to it at night. (Yes, it's not bidirectional if you just use vanilla rsync, so if you have a lot of file churn you'll need to script something to keep the backup from bloating.)

    I guess the 'setup cost' is higher than a managed service like rsync.net, but a minimalist system doesn't even take that long. Install Debian, install rsyncd if it's not already there, and open a port in the firewall for it. (Actually you don't really even need to run it as a daemon, now that I think about it.) WebDAV could take longer, but you'd have to really value your time highly to pay rsync.net's prices in exchange for an afternoon setting up Apache and a couple of cron jobs.

    Personally I just have an old 600MHz Celeron machine that I set up with rsync and ssh/sftp with dyndns, and then traded a friend for a similar system that he had set up. I keep his box in a closet, plugged into my router, and he does the reverse. We both get off-site backups, and the only real cost of ownership is the electricity. (And if I was doing it today, you could get one of those routers that can run Linux from CompactFlash and can mount an external HD via USB 2.0 ... I bet you could get the whole thing down to a few watts that way and under $200.)

    I am normally very skeptical of the DIY route -- it's tough to compete with mass-production in many instances. But I think that this is one situation where even a low-grade geek can toss themselves together something in a day that will be nearly the equal of rsync.net's service, for workstation-backup use. Hopefully the rsync.net guys will adjust their pricing accordingly and make a liar out of me soon, though.

    --
    "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
    1. Re:DIY Route might be good in this instance by swillden · · Score: 1

      Install Debian, install rsyncd if it's not already there

      Look into rdiff-backup. From "apt-cache show rdiff-backup":

      Description: remote incremental backup rdiff-backup backs up one directory to another, possibly over a network. The target directory ends up a copy of the source directory, but extra reverse diffs are stored in a special subdirectory of that target directory, so you can still recover files lost some time ago. The idea is to combine the best features of a mirror and an incremental backup. rdiff-backup also preserves subdirectories, hard links, dev files, permissions, uid/gid ownership, modification times, extended attributes, acls, and resource forks.
      Also, rdiff-backup can operate in a bandwidth efficient manner over a pipe, like rsync. Thus you can use rdiff-backup and ssh to securely back a hard drive up to a remote location, and only the differences will be transmitted. Finally, rdiff-backup is easy to use and settings have sensible defaults.

      I've been using it for a couple of systems, and it works very well.

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    2. Re:DIY Route might be good in this instance by Schraegstrichpunkt · · Score: 1
      Install Debian, install rsyncd if it's not already there, and open a port in the firewall for it. (Actually you don't really even need to run it as a daemon, now that I think about it.)

      And you shouldn't. Run it over ssh.

      rsync -e ssh -avSHx --numeric-ids / root@example.com:/backups/`date -I`/

      --
      http://outcampaign.org/
  14. "Personal" online storage seems to be the way by technocraft · · Score: 1

    Regarding your question on Carbonite: "Carbonite does not currently back up files that are larger than 2GB in size, removable hard drives (e.g., USB drives) or mapped network drives." "Carbonite will back up all the supported files on your hard drive whether you have 1GB, 10GB or more. As a practical matter, the speed of today's DSL and cable Internet services will make it very slow to back up more than, say, 40-50GB of data. Our Terms of Use will allow us to deny service to abusers." Given those terms, it's going to be tough to get past 100GB or so. I will have to consider getting a dedicated server at a hosting facility or do some kind of peer-sharing with friends and/or fellow photographers.

    1. Re:"Personal" online storage seems to be the way by Bender0x7D1 · · Score: 1

      If you are willing to lose a few days/weeks of data, you could use an external hard drive (or an internal drive with an external enclosure), and just store them at different locations. Visit your parents once a month? Drop off a drive and pick up the old one. You could also keep one in a safe deposit box and switch it out every few weeks. A 500GB external drive can be found for $350. Definitely not as convenient as the server solution I mentioned earlier, but less overhead, but more latency in the backup process.

      Trade-offs. It's always the trade-offs.

      --
      Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
    2. Re:"Personal" online storage seems to be the way by WuphonsReach · · Score: 1

      It's better to build your own external drives.

      Start with a good enclosure like the BYTECC ME-835U2F ($45). It has an internal power-supply using a standard A/C power cord so there are no funky wall warts or AC adapters to lose. It has both Firewire and USB so you can pick your poison. It's an aluminum shell so it will probably hold up well. Plus it has a 2nd internal fan which is designed to keep the hard drive cooler (most external units omit fans or only have a small 40mm fan in the back).

      Tack on the 500GB drive ($250) and you're in the pricing ballpark of the pre-built 500GB external drives. However, the advantage that you have is that you can make sure and buy hard drives with 3-year or 5-year warranties.

      Alternately, you can go the removable drive tray route (DRW115 series by StarTech). Costs are about the same ($45/caddy) but the drives are slightly smaller. For protection, look for "DRAWERBAG" part #s which are padded bags slightly larger then the removable drives. Between the shock mounting inside the drive tray and the padded bag, you'll have less worries about damage in transit.

      --
      Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
  15. Poor man's solution by martok · · Score: 1

    I realize this wouldn't be suitable for large companies but for my home network, I just use a regular webhosting provider for system backups. I use one-and-one which is $4.95/mo for 50gb of space, duplicity on the Linux side which is able to gpg encrypt the volumes and incrementally backup the systems, transfering the volumes over FTP to the webhost. The backup directory is configured so as not to be publicly accessible but it's gpg encrypted in any case.

    I'm not a big fan of rsync backups. In the case of an accidental deletion or worse, gradual FS corruption, the corrupt data gets transfered over in the nightly rsync and your backups are useless. Same if a cracker deletes content, those deletes hapilly spread to the rsync mirrors if not caught before the scheduled run.

    1. Re:Poor man's solution by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The way you are supposed to do rsync backups, is it has N directories for N copies of the last N backups. It doesn't actually take up N times your harddrive's space, because all files that didn't change from one day to the next are "hardlinked", not actually duplicated on the backup disk.

      Then, the incidents you mention such as a hacker deleting stuff or disk corruption slowly changing files, are noticed -- because you see an abnormal change in the size of the backup directories (which should be information that is mailed to you everyday, like nagios reports and etc).

      Please realize that I have not set this up myself, yet -- I am speaking only from reading and research, not experience.

    2. Re:Poor man's solution by Schraegstrichpunkt · · Score: 1

      I'd be concerned about an attacker getting access to my server *and* my rsync backups, and corrupting both.

      --
      http://outcampaign.org/
    3. Re:Poor man's solution by cortana · · Score: 2, Interesting
      You might want to take a look at rdiff-backup.
      rdiff-backup backs up one directory to another, possibly over a network. The target directory ends up a copy of the source directory, but extra reverse diffs are stored in a special subdirectory of that target directory, so you can still recover files lost some time ago. The idea is to combine the best features of a mirror and an incremental backup. rdiff-backup also preserves subdirectories, hard links, dev files, permissions, uid/gid ownership, modification times, extended attributes, acls, and resource forks. Also, rdiff-backup can operate in a bandwidth efficient manner over a pipe, like rsync. Thus you can use rdiff-backup and ssh to securely back a hard drive up to a remote location, and only the differences will be transmitted. Finally, rdiff-backup is easy to use and settings have sensical defaults.
      Basically it's a wrapper around rsync that does two things. First, gives you incremental backups; second, fixes the highly confusing options that control which files are included/excluded in a sync. :)
  16. Jungle Disk / S3 by crt · · Score: 2, Informative

    Jungle Disk is a cross-platform front-end for Amazon S3 that supports Windows, Mac, and Linux. You only pay the Amazon fees ($0.15/gig/month). On Linux you can mount it directly using DavFS then backup using any software you want (rsync, etc). It supports encryption and caching as well.

  17. S3/Jungledisk by adinb · · Score: 1

    You might want to check out S3/Jungledisk. S3 by amazon is relatively cheap (15 cents/GB + transfer) and Jungledisk acts as WebDAV middleware. The middleware is still rather basic, but it works for backups, and passes the "are they going to be around in a couple of years" test. All data is encrypted by the Jungledisk middleware.

    --
    Moderation is for Monks!
  18. Rsync and ssh by Kadin2048 · · Score: 1

    This is quite true, and every current implementation of rsync that I've run across (not that I'm exactly a scholar on the topic or anything, but I've used it on Mac OS X and a bunch of Linux distros) uses SSH as the default shell when the address is specified with a single colon ('rsync -avz ~/Documents jdoe@foobar.com:/var/backup/'), although I suppose its probably best practice to specify the shell explicitly in a script.

    So just to restate what I should have said: the only thing you'd need to have running on your remote server is sshd; if you don't care about WebDAV access you could lock down everything else. That would give you scp and sftp as well which seems like it ought to be good enough for most people.

    I wouldn't recommend logging in as root when doing the backups though (since it has to have an un-passworded private key on the client machine to login as part of a cron job).

    Anyway, given that you can use most features of the rsync daemon via a shell (including named modules), there doesn't seem to be any good reason to run the daemon on a machine that's exposed to the public net. In retrospect, I have no idea why I mentioned it.

    --
    "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
  19. 1.2 Petabytes of Low Cost Storage in the Works by fedrive · · Score: 1

    http://press.xtvworld.com/article13092.html I am sure the storage landscape will change even further over the next few years so keep your hopes up for something better.

    1. Re:1.2 Petabytes of Low Cost Storage in the Works by DarkmoonFirelyte · · Score: 1

      Although it might sound a little like spamming, the company I work for has a decent solution they just recently launched. I personally haven't tried it out myself, but all the current clients we have that use it love the service. You might give it a look: www.indy-backup.com

  20. Divinsa is another option by ccktech · · Score: 1

    I provide consulting services to Divinsa. They use BackupPC to provide online backups for unix machines such as Linux, Mac, and FreeBSD. Dual datacenters with the data replicated between them. Check them out at http://www.divinsa.com./

  21. For Best Data Centers, NetMass gets my vote by tripster11 · · Score: 1

    Check it out... NetMass data centers And yes, the company does Linux. Bare metal restores and all that jazz

  22. Amanda open source software by amanda-backup · · Score: 1
    One alternative is to setup network based open source backup software, Amanda. With bunch of SATA drives sitting on a Linux server, you can put together a low-cost backup solution relatively quickly:

    http://www.zmanda.com/quick-backup-setup.html

    --
    Amanda: Open Source Backup Software
  23. Sago Networks by bikerhavoc · · Score: 1

    Try Sago Networks. http://www.sagonet.com/ Data centers in both Atlanta & Tampa FL.

  24. roll your own - or Amazon S3 by arete · · Score: 1

    Generally I'm pretty fond of a roll-your-own multi-site online-over-ssh backup solution.

    But if you weren't going to do that, Amazon offers:

    15c / GB/month + 20c / GB xfer
    Some middlewares already exist, like Jungledisk.

    --
    Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
  25. DreamHost by gottabeme · · Score: 1

    www.dreamhost.com Disk: 20GB/month, increases by 800MB/month; Bandwidth: 1TB/month, increases by 32GB/month. Price: $7.95/month. The longer you're a customer, the more space and bandwidth you get. Includes shell accounts, etc. On top of that, ssh/sftp/rsync bandwidth doesn't even count against your account usage. I use Duplicity (rdiff-backup+gzip+gnupg) to backup several gigs of data on a regular basis, and it's great.

    --
    "Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."