Ask HN: What's your favorite online-backup tool?

Hey HN -

It's almost 2011, and my backup solution still calls for semi-regular huddles between my laptop and a few external drives, which I randomly scatter between home and school for redundancy. This is pretty low-tech, all things considered, and I'd like to enter the future. Right now at best I have a hodgepodge of things that I will try to upload to Google Docs or suchlike. Not so pretty!

Where to start? I could set up from cron scripts and buy Amazon S3 space, but that really doesn't seem to be the most elegant solution (perhaps for some software projects, but not for a personal basis).

Options I'm familiar with are, most prominently, Mozy (mozy.com) and Carbonite (carbonite.com). I guess using something like Dropbox could fulfill this need to some extent as well.

Would love to hear feedback about these services for automated backups and any other alternatives I should consider.

Thanks!

I had heard about this before, and I think it is really great - for small amounts. For backing up my laptop hard drive (~250 GB) and everything I normally would keep backed up (another... 1 TB?) or even some fraction thereof, this would get SUPER expensive. :(

What I really need backed up: - Documents (~5GB) - Photos (~20GB)

What I would _like_ backed up includes everything to do a full drive recovery, but beyond that, music [40 GB] and other harder-to-replace things.

If I can't backup all my backups, that's fine, but I think under even the bare-bones situation, rsync would be outside my budget :)

I use ADrive. ( https://www.adrive.com/login ) They give you 50GB free. No SSL support for free-users, so you might want to encrypt sensitive files. (Use the link above to log in with SSL for free.)

But to be really honest with you, I'm considering leaving ADrive for my own external HD only. That's the safest, not always easiest, solution.

Don't be too quick to overlook Dropbox. I use it for almost everything.

I've been pretty happy with Crashplan ( http://crashplan.com/ )so far. The free version will allow you to backup to one or more remote machines which you can seed via a hard drive if you want to avoid uploading hundreds of Gb for the initial backup. They have options to backup to their data center too for a competitive rate (unlimited storage).

Transfers are encrypted, de-duplicated and compressed, supports file versioning and it all works very well.

The only downside I've had is that their Java client uses a lot of memory both on my OS X and Linux boxes (haven't tried Windows) - It's using nearly 600Mb of resident memory right now.