A lot of people are going to get burned by offsite file storage services - and I place this in two categories:
- people who get burned by AOL/xdrive/Amazon/S3 when the privacy of their data is ruined - either by sharing information to enable advertisements or by rolling over like cowards to any government agency that even picks up the phone
- people who get burned because the wacko distributed custom database-driven filesystem in the sky that they trust their data to has a glitch and goes down for days or weeks if there is ever any significant disruption in Internet connectivity and/or routing.
This is of special importance to me because regulatory concerns _require_ that I store critical data offsite, so I had to bite the bullet... I'm pleased so far with my choice (rsync.net) for offsite backup of my linux data, but it took a lot of research and a lot of reassurances before I would take the plunge. I concluded that I was far better off with a provider that put my data on real, rational unix filesystems (like exavault, strongspace, rsync.net, etc.) and then the decision came down to who had the most reassuring privacy and search warrant policy.
If you are a technical person and like things to work your way, and not xdrives way or mozys way, rsync.net is the way to go.
They are the only offsite backup provider I have found that supports rdiff-backup and duplicity as well as the normal SSH standards (scp, sftp, rsync).
Although rsync.net doesn't look like an "e-discovery" provider per se, my own use of their service makes it clear that you could very well use it for this purpose.
Their platform is totally open and totally based on open source (I think they run on FreeBSD, but perhaps it is Solaris) software like rsync, OpenSSL, and apache, etc.
If there is any doubt, their warrant canary seals the deal for me and a lot of other folks I know that use thier service for offsite backups and email storage:
This goes against the grain of the comments in the thread, but I have to voice gratitude and pleasant surprise at my offsite backup ISP, rsync.net.
I'm not that interesting of a customer - I pay something like $5/months for some offsite storage through them, so I kind of expect to not be a high priority.
However, their customer support philosophy clearly states that there are never "first level" technicians, there is no ticket system, and all support is handled immediately in a normal, sane email conversation.
And it turned out to be true. At 11 pm on a Saturday night (ok, I have no life) I emailed them a fairly technical issue regarding how I was doing ssh key exchange with their system, so I could do automated rsyncs. I got a response two minutes later (!) that not only showed me how to fix the rather obscure permissions issue that was causing the trouble, but also with a full rewrite of the small script I was using to do the rsync and save logs, etc.
So I would say that the kind of support, and the philosophy of not having lame ticket systems and first level junior techs that rsync.net employs is my favorite support anecdote.
Anyone that has done business with their parent (or is it a spin-off, or just the same principals ?) company, JohnCompanies, knows what it's like to get good (and personal) support.
As a longtime JohnCompanies co-location customer, I got used to just firing off an email, and getting an almost immediate response from an actual unix person that had root on my system. No phone tree, no auto responder, and no first level or junior techs.
And the same philosophy seems to be in place at rsync.net.
I wish more people did this - it seems even small, clued-in companies force you to deal with first level support, or go through a ticket system. Why ? It's so much faster just to quickly deal with someone.
I'm going to stop readin/respondig to this topic, but for the last time, rsync.net+++:)
Once I established that my technical requirements were taken care of (rsync uploads, with random access browsing over sftp and webdav) I made my choice based on my perception of their technical acumen and general cluefulness.
Whoever answers the pre-sales email address discussed rsync command line options with me, and offered to help write a log-trapping script (!)
Then I saw the warrant canary, and that was it. We all got an email last month describing the addition of subversion support and the multiple country offsite locations. It just keeps getting better.
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A lot of people are going to get burned by offsite file storage services - and I place this in two categories:
... I'm pleased so far with my choice (rsync.net) for offsite backup of my linux data, but it took a lot of research and a lot of reassurances before I would take the plunge. I concluded that I was far better off with a provider that put my data on real, rational unix filesystems (like exavault, strongspace, rsync.net, etc.) and then the decision came down to who had the most reassuring privacy and search warrant policy.
- people who get burned by AOL/xdrive/Amazon/S3 when the privacy of their data is ruined - either by sharing information to enable advertisements or by rolling over like cowards to any government agency that even picks up the phone
- people who get burned because the wacko distributed custom database-driven filesystem in the sky that they trust their data to has a glitch and goes down for days or weeks if there is ever any significant disruption in Internet connectivity and/or routing.
This is of special importance to me because regulatory concerns _require_ that I store critical data offsite, so I had to bite the bullet
We'll see...
If you are a technical person and like things to work your way, and not xdrives way or mozys way, rsync.net is the way to go.
They are the only offsite backup provider I have found that supports rdiff-backup and duplicity as well as the normal SSH standards (scp, sftp, rsync).
What really did it for me, though, was this:
http://www.rsync.net/philosophy.html
and _especially this_ :
http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt
Although rsync.net doesn't look like an "e-discovery" provider per se, my own use of their service makes it clear that you could very well use it for this purpose.
Their platform is totally open and totally based on open source (I think they run on FreeBSD, but perhaps it is Solaris) software like rsync, OpenSSL, and apache, etc.
If there is any doubt, their warrant canary seals the deal for me and a lot of other folks I know that use thier service for offsite backups and email storage:
http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt
This goes against the grain of the comments in the thread, but I have to voice gratitude and pleasant surprise at my offsite backup ISP, rsync.net.
I'm not that interesting of a customer - I pay something like $5/months for some offsite storage through them, so I kind of expect to not be a high priority.
However, their customer support philosophy clearly states that there are never "first level" technicians, there is no ticket system, and all support is handled immediately in a normal, sane email conversation.
And it turned out to be true. At 11 pm on a Saturday night (ok, I have no life) I emailed them a fairly technical issue regarding how I was doing ssh key exchange with their system, so I could do automated rsyncs. I got a response two minutes later (!) that not only showed me how to fix the rather obscure permissions issue that was causing the trouble, but also with a full rewrite of the small script I was using to do the rsync and save logs, etc.
So I would say that the kind of support, and the philosophy of not having lame ticket systems and first level junior techs that rsync.net employs is my favorite support anecdote.
Anyone that has done business with their parent (or is it a spin-off, or just the same principals ?) company, JohnCompanies, knows what it's like to get good (and personal) support.
:)
As a longtime JohnCompanies co-location customer, I got used to just firing off an email, and getting an almost immediate response from an actual unix person that had root on my system. No phone tree, no auto responder, and no first level or junior techs.
And the same philosophy seems to be in place at rsync.net.
I wish more people did this - it seems even small, clued-in companies force you to deal with first level support, or go through a ticket system. Why ? It's so much faster just to quickly deal with someone.
I'm going to stop readin/respondig to this topic, but for the last time, rsync.net+++
Once I established that my technical requirements were taken care of (rsync uploads, with random access browsing over sftp and webdav) I made my choice based on my perception of their technical acumen and general cluefulness.
Whoever answers the pre-sales email address discussed rsync command line options with me, and offered to help write a log-trapping script (!)
Then I saw the warrant canary, and that was it. We all got an email last month describing the addition of subversion support and the multiple country offsite locations. It just keeps getting better.