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Happy World Backup Day
An anonymous reader writes "Easter isn't the only thing some people are celebrating today. Today is also World Backup Day. What steps have you taken to be able to resurrect your data, instead of having it go to eternal oblivion?"
Amazon Glacier has really changed my backup strategy since this time last year - I now push all my own, generated content (ie: pictures, documents, things I could never get back if I lost everything) up to Glacier using the free Windows client, Fast Glacier. In February I was charged $0.13 by Amazon for storing ~8Gb of data. I tend to push new content up as and when I create it (for example, after I process holiday snaps, or get back from a day out).
Day to day file changes are now handled by Windows 8's File History feature where my changes are pushed to a small NAS (Dlink DNS-320) in my shed (technically off site?) over a Homeplug AV ethernet link. For added security I use the legacy Windows Backup application (still present in Windows 8) to create ~ monthly snapshots of the system which I store on a 320Gb external HDD. This drive is one of two which go back and forth between my parents house each time I got and visit. These disks are encrypted using Microsoft Bitlocker drive encryption.
I should get around to properly encrypting my NAS in the shed, I've been looking at encfs.
Thanks a lot for writing up this suggestion. I had no idea Amazon Glacier was only a penny per gigabyte, and thus a realistic way for me to backup virtual machines offsite, finally, (using only my available slow home upload bandwidth). Which got me to Searching on the net...
CloudGates.net does indeed look like a useful service.
A Search engine lead me to a free Windows client called FastGlacier http://fastglacier.com/faq.aspx
This technote from 'AWS Blog' explains how to use the more standard and better documented Amazon S3 Data buckets to automatically offload data after a specified time to Amazon Glacier storage. The trick is to create a lifecycle rule. I'm inclined to try this, once I get myself better organized, although CloudGates also looks very worthy. Kudos! http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/11/archive-s3-to-glacier.html
Happy World Backup Day!
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.