[ale] Best Offsite Backup Solution for Home

David Tomaschik david at systemoverlord.com
Wed Feb 1 14:42:01 EST 2012


As many on the list know, I'm going to be relocating to California
later this month, which has made me take a look at my backup
procedures.

While I have good software for backups (rdiff-backup is pretty
awesome), finding a way to get the data truly offsite is easier said
than done.  The problem with most backup procedures is that anything
requiring manual intervention will eventually become an "I'll do that
later" task.  For example, the idea of storing an external hard drive
in a safe deposit box occurred to me, but that limits access to
business hours and requires manual intervention.  I'm sure it would
happen for the first few weeks, and then every now and then for a
while, and then not at all until I need the data.

I've also considered cloud storage providers, but between my wife and
I, we have ~1TB of data to backup, and growing at ~100GB/yr.  This
makes something like Amazon S3 rather expensive: even at reduced
redundancy pricing of 9.3 cents/gigabyte, this is an annual bill of
$1100 before the bandwidth used to ship it around.

Another thought I've had is running my own "cloud storage" by coloing
a 1U atom server with about 4 SATA drives crammed into it, but that
seems like it's not going to pay off until I get to the ~4TB space
range.

Anyone have recommendations on a good offsite solution for home use?

-- 
David Tomaschik
OpenPGP: 0x5DEA789B
http://systemoverlord.com
david at systemoverlord.com


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