[Techtalk] offsite backup for home users

[Wim De Smet]

Hi,

On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 3:06 AM, Amanda Babcock Furrow <alb at quandary.org>wrote:

> No one has mentioned Amazon S3 yet.  I'm pretty sure they're the
> cheapest way to back up large amounts of stuff.  They've just
> rolled out the ability to have your older S3 backups archived
> to their new Glacier tape backup service.
>

I looked into this a while ago. I find the pricing a bit hard to parse (do
you pay monthly for all data in the system, or for data added?), but it
seems if I add up the numbers I get ~100$ per month for 1TB? Something like
crashplan+ costs less than that _per year_. Comes at the cost of
flexibility of course, but I don't see the cost advantages of S3. Please do
tell me if I'm missing something major.

Here's the website for crashplan:
http://www.crashplan.com/consumer/crashplan-plus.html
Not an endorsement (I haven't used it, but I do think it's one of the
cheaper ones). I do wonder if they really "mean" unlimited GB. That's a lot
of data I could load on their servers for that 6$/month.

Aside from that and spideroak, I didn't really find any attractive (cheap)
options. But I don't really remember all the companies I looked at and why
exactly I rejected them again.

I'm not a fan of using rsync for backups btw (rdiff-backup is okay, but
still a bit wasteful in space). I can heartily recommend obnam (
http://liw.fi/obnam/) which I started using recently. It's still a little
rough around the edges and takes some configuration, but works very well
and deduplicates blocks to save on space, which really does do the trick to
keep my backups small and efficient enough. I use it to backup to disks as
well as to a different server.

hth,
Wim