TimeMachine to an external USB drive (a WD Passport).
Offsite? I put it in my bag with me when I leave. :)
Ask HN: What do you use for personal, offsite backup?
31–40 of 40 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you use for personal, offsite backup?
#32Dropbox. Well, it´s an online and offline solution for me and my most valuable files no a Macbook Pro - since I get online access via getdropbox.com and I got an old PC (yes, a Windows XP PC) as a sync client for Dropbox on a second location. So if both machines fail: Online copy. And if Dropbox fails, I still got everything on two harddisks in separate locations.
Re: Ask HN: What do you use for personal, offsite backup?
#33I initially tried Backblaze however it didnt play nice with Mac OSX forks and special files. I ended up using the somewhat overpriced "Twin" on mac. The cool thing about it is it can just upload to S3 (as well as sftp, external drive, etc).
Re: Ask HN: What do you use for personal, offsite backup?
#34I founded SpiderOak in 2006: Zero-knowledge encrypted offsite backup and sync. It does intensive deduplication across your full data set, keeps historical versions and deleted files for as long as you like and supports all major platforms. You can use the GUI or cmdline/cron/launchd. 2GB free, $10 per 100 GBs up to 1.5 TB, but use the promo code "askhackernews" for a 25% discount, or get a 50% discount automatically…
Do you provide an API or do I have to use your client?
Does the client run on 64-bit installations?
Are you really offering storage for $10/100GB/month or $100/100GB/year? Sounds quite inexpensive to me.
Do you also give discounts to students with non-edu addresses (e.g. ac.at = education subdomain for Austria).
How well is the data of your customers protected against hardware faults? Your website mentions a distributed filesystem that tolerates the loss of many nodes, but not how it does that? (erasure coding, mirroring, ...?) Also, do you have geographically distributed storage nodes?
If I view data via the web interface, the password needs to be on your servers. A mail provider, Hushmail, also did not store user encryption passwords, they did actually not even require the password to be on their servers for decryption, they used a Java applet. Due to a court order they had to turn the Java applet into a trojan to spy on their users. Obviously, you face the same danger (court order that requires you to store the password for law enforcement when the user logs in on your website). Do you offer a "Warrant canary" similar to rsync.net? http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt
Re: Ask HN: What do you use for personal, offsite backup?
#35I've been using rsync.net (http://rsync.net/) for years. With your requirement to be able to encrypt, you can use a number of means since they are very flexible. One I've used is to have some/all of my files encrypted with TrueCrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org/). This won't work for large data sets though, so you can look into something like Duplicity (http://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/duplicity.txt). Haven't used it myself so can't comment on it. They also support encrypted file systems. All in all, I think rsync.net is easily one of the best values of any service I use.
Re: Ask HN: What do you use for personal, offsite backup?
#36I copy the data arenas to another machine and when they are full (500mb per arena) I burn them to cd.
I us this script to copy the arenas
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sources/contrib/maht/rc/vbackup
It's slightly sloppy in that I could just append the unwritten bytes but for Venti dumps give me a full history of file changes. On the plan9 central server one can browse the daily snapshots for 10+ years of plan9 development. It also coalesces duplicate blocks so storing 20 copies takes as much room as one.
Venti is available for plan9 and Lunix.
i accidentally wiped $home this week, then :
cp `{yesterday $home}/* $home
Re: Ask HN: What do you use for personal, offsite backup?
#37Jungle Disk. http://www.jungledisk.com/ It's great because it backups to S3 and it's cheap.
Good, cheap, reliable. You can use your own Amazon S3 account and key, and you need not give the key to JungleDisk; if you don't share your key, you can't use some features that involve JungleDisk's own servers, but backup and restore work just dandy with the encryption done once on your own computer. Very efficient and cost effective.
Re: Ask HN: What do you use for personal, offsite backup?
#38crashplan. they just revamped their pricing too to have unlimited. way nicer client/more reliable for me than carbonite or mozy. but, of course, ymmv. we use them for production servers too.
For Offsite I too use CrashPlan, to computers at friends rather than using their 'central' service.
Re: Ask HN: What do you use for personal, offsite backup?
#39Jungle Disk. http://www.jungledisk.com/ It's great because it backups to S3 and it's cheap.
I too use this.
The nice thing about Jungledisk is that you can just mount the thing as a directory (uses fuse under linux) and use rsync to do the backups. That works well for me with multi-Gb source repositories, whereas when using Mozy on windows, its built-in scheduled backups struggled badly and chewed a lot of CPU, presumably scanning through all the thousands of files.
That's not really a fair comparison - I haven't tried Jungledisk's built-in scheduled backups, merely using it as a mounted drive and doing the backups manually with rsync. But that's too bad - last time I looked, Mozy didn't support mounting as a drive, or even linux.
Re: Ask HN: What do you use for personal, offsite backup?
#40Mozy Sad but true story: I worked for a company that backed up email by printing them. They finally upgraded after a year of pleading...to a hard drive in a safe-deposit box at a bank down the street. And this was 2008!
> to a hard drive in a safe-deposit box at a bank down the street What's the problem with that? It's probably better than 95% of small businesses out there. No, it doesn't offer geographic redundancy and it might not withstand a killer tidal wave or nuclear strike, but for many businesses that's a moot point: such a situation would destroy their business outright anyway, to the point where their computers would be th…
The company was in Malibu, a place known for fires and floods. Any disaster that would destroy the office would make the bank inaccessible. And the backups were done weekly because it wasn't convenient to drive to the bank in rush hour traffic. The biggest flaw in the plan: the one guy with the key was fired!