Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 89 posts

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

#71

Post by scraplab »

I'm surprised Duplicity hasn't had a mention. It supports full and incremental, zipped encrypted backups (using GPG) to S3/SCP/FTP/local/etc. Under the hood it uses librsync for fast binary diffs.

Duplicity + S3 is somewhat similar to tarsnap. It's not quite as friendly - you have to put a bit more effort in - it doesn't provide easy key generation, and it doesn't support snapshots, but you have no reliance on any third party service other than S3.

If the Duplicity software disappeared off the planet you could still recover your files - it's just split gzipped encrypted files.

Oh, and you can install it on OSX using homebrew: `brew install duplicity`

http://duplicity.nongnu.org/ (unfortunately the site seems to be down for me right now - here's the cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:2s6jQju... )

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

#72

Post by msh »

jkahn wrote: post #16

I use JungleDisk ( https://www.jungledisk.com/ ) - it's good because it can be used for backups, syncing, and previous versions of synced folders. It also does multiple users and multiple operating systems (Mac/Windows - probably does Linux too but I haven't checked). It's also quite cheap. I previously used Mozy, which was excellent, but only does backup. Mozy was much more efficient over the wire, better at notific…

Jep, jungledisk is really good.

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

#73

Post by dangravell »

sbierwagen wrote: post #2

rsync.net Not cheap, ($.80gb/month) but bulletproof, and about as hacker-friendly as it gets. As you may be entirely unsurprised to hear, you can use rsync with it, as well as sftp, webdav, etc, etc, etc.

One of my favourite things about rsync.net is the support: you seem to get access to an engineer (or at least someone that knows what they are talking about) immediately.

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

#74

Post by limmeau »

jkahn wrote: post #16

I use JungleDisk ( https://www.jungledisk.com/ ) - it's good because it can be used for backups, syncing, and previous versions of synced folders. It also does multiple users and multiple operating systems (Mac/Windows - probably does Linux too but I haven't checked). It's also quite cheap. I previously used Mozy, which was excellent, but only does backup. Mozy was much more efficient over the wire, better at notific…

Do you use the old just-pay-the-S3 client or the new $2/month service?

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

#75

Post by St-Clock »

scraplab wrote: post #71

I'm surprised Duplicity hasn't had a mention. It supports full and incremental, zipped encrypted backups (using GPG) to S3/SCP/FTP/local/etc. Under the hood it uses librsync for fast binary diffs. Duplicity + S3 is somewhat similar to tarsnap. It's not quite as friendly - you have to put a bit more effort in - it doesn't provide easy key generation, and it doesn't support snapshots, but you have no reliance on any th…

+1 for duplicity. With the command line tool, you can also:

1- Easily go back in history (if you erased a file and want it again, it's here, in a previous incremental backup).

2- Ask to automatically make a full backup every X months.

3- Ask to automatically remove incremental and full backups older than X months

4- Select the granularity of the backup buckets (very useful to avoid having hundreds of files or if your connection is unreliable).

5- Upload a backup bucket while preparing the next one in parallel.

6- Use S3 reduced redundancy storage if you want (cheaper...)

Duplicity is written in Python and the API is easy to use if you want to rely on a Python script instead of a shell script.

The fact that you can use S3 was a deciding factor: it is a really cheap solution with a big ecosystem of tools and it should still be there in 10 years...

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

#76

Post by cperciva »

esun wrote: post #63
cperciva wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tarsnap will support windows eventually. But seriously, if Tarsnap usage increases tenfold overnight, the service will collapse under the load the following morning. Making sure that the service keeps running smoothly takes priority over attracting new users.

I like you, and I like your service. I especially like that your service is clearly designed to be a successful operating business rather than a 'sell it to google' startup. I wish you much success.

It's pure selfishness, really. I use Tarsnap, and lots of my friends do too. If I sold Tarsnap and ran, I wouldn't have good backups any more, and I would have a lot of ex-friends upset with me for not taking better care of their backups. :-)

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

#80

Post by fluidcruft »

quesera wrote: post #11

Tarsnap. Simple, cheap, efficient, honestly secure. I can't imagine storing personal files and photos somewhere "out there", managed by someone else, in readable form. Seriously, how do you Dropbox (etc) fans sleep at night?

tarsnap is great. The problem is you are relying on a single brilliant person (cperciva). If he gets hit by a bus, etc you're screwed.
Post reply on HN