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

In my (very) limited knowledge - I am able to do retrieve backups on my machine using my key, which I supply to the command line. I was thinking of how it would work in a web based environment. Perhaps I could copy paste my key into a textbox, and I could retrieve my backups from a webpage. This would only last for the session (tarsnap would not store the key).

I know that you can think of a million ways that this can be exploited, but that is MY cross to bear. If I am prepared to do this, because I need immediate access to my backups from another machine - then please let me do this (basically, give me a way to access and create my backups in less than two steps).

I personally do believe that this would be a killer feature.

It used to be that a backup was a full or image backup. It is a bit funny how I used to say I have a backup and it meant a backup of my entire computer. If I didn't, I'd say I had a backup of the database, or a backup of home. Now if someone says I have a backup I assume it is just of some of their files.

There are really now three types of backups.

Image or full backups - These are far more useful. You can actually fix your computer without reinstalling and reconfiguring everything.

Partial backups - Files and Folders, unfortunately letting the software try to select the "Important Files" is fatally flawed on windows. They generally select based on file name and location. If you use any software slightly off mainstream you will want to make sure those data files are backed up.

Sync - Sync software maintains a copy online which is good for most files and is essentially an extra copy or backup. But some files or directory structures are troublesome like build directories, databases (especially email databases like outlook pst files). Make sure they support multiple versions...

Begin shameless plug...

Hybir Backup recently won "Software Product of the year" from the DaVinci Institute.

I wrote Hybir Backup https://www.hybir.com It is windows only for now. Hybir Backup performs full online backups and full local backups (simultaneously). Bare metal restores can be done from the windows PE 3.0 recovery environment.

The interesting part to the technology is the data identification and global data de-duplication technology. Essentially only data unique to your PC needs to be uploaded. First backups on relatively clean machines are pretty quick. If you have a bunch of unique user data, you will have to upload it just like the other services. The advantage is all of those other files are backed up too.

During a full restore only files that are truly different need to be restored to fix the computer greatly speeding the restore process when a computer won't boot, but the disk is still functional hardware wise.

Another cool feature is that if you backup online only, and need to do a bare metal restore, you don't have to download the full image. You can simply backup another PC to a USB drive. You probably need another PC to burn the recovery CD you didn't burn before the problem anyway. Any data that is common and identical on the USB drive will be copied from the USB drive. The unique bits will be downloaded at the same time. You have a fairly good chance of not having to download the OS, MS Office, etc.

The software is free to use for local image backup and supports network drives. It works great for a small office environment and includes the data identification technology. This makes it really efficient storage wise. It is probably the only free local backup solution that has global data de-duplication.

Besides, there is much more to cryptography and building a secured system than just using that crypto suit or another (e.g. AES256-HMAC-SHA256 etc.)