[wplug] Online Backup

[Patrick Wagstrom]

Michael Semcheski wrote:
> I just got a digital SLR camera.  It takes great pictures, I'm very
> happy with it.  One problem is that I now have a lot more files, which
> are fairly large, that I want to have backed up offsite.
> 
> Before, I put everything into CVS and hosted my CVS repository at a
> secure web host.  But I don't have enough room at the remote webhost
> to hold the raw files created by my camera.
> 
> For Windows, there is a service called Carbonite.  For a reasonable
> yearly fee, they'll backup everything on your computer to a remote
> site.  Anyone know of a similar system for Linux?  Or has anyone run
> carbonite under wine?

I back up my main system files to an external hard drive.  Important
stuff, like SVN and photos I do a couple of different backups:

1. rsync to an encrypted filesystem on a server at school -- this isn't
an option for most people, I realize that

2. rsync to my brothers' computers in Minnesota

3. rsync to rsync.net.

For most people who don't have access to 1 and 2, I highly recommend #3.
 They're the same folks who used to run johncompanies.com, and while
they're a little pricey, your data will most likely never disappear.
It's pretty affordable too - $1.60/mo/gb with a minimum of 3gb.  If
you're really worried, you can do $2.80/mo/gb for a globally distributed
filesystem.  They work with basically all standards and don't charge you
for the the bandwidth of sending the data up there.  Really, I can't
recommend them enough.  I just noticed that they even allow you to have
it hosted as a subversion archive.  Because you've also got some simple
shell support (this is not a shell account), you can sshfs to connect to
your remote files as another drive.

Another dirt cheap option if you're using it primarily as backup is
Amazon S3.  It's got a bit of a weird interface and can be a little slow
for uploading, but it's rock solid and fast.  Unfortunately you pay by
the byte for transfers, don't worry, it's cheap.  Tools like s3sync
exist to do rsync type backups to it.

In case you can't tell, rsync is great for offsite backups if you don't
need history of the files.  I suppose if you needed history, you can set
up a local bacula instance that created a new volume for every backup
and then sent the new data to the remote site.  Actually, that could be
pretty neat, limitless backup essentially.

Hope this helps!

--Patrick