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I need to backup ~300gb of data on a machine, just in case of fire, asteroids, or other unforeseen events. I do not need 'live' access to the backups.

Is there a cloud-based storage solution that's cheaper than s3? $45/mo for 300g is too much for me.

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For clarity, Amazon charges $0.15 per GB when backing up 300 GB. – Greg Aug 31 '09 at 22:03
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I'd stay away from cloud based solutions for this quantity of data... it's cheaper to buy a new drive at $30 per mo and mail it to uncle bob, and store weekly diffs on whatever webhost you're already paying for. – Paul McMillan Sep 1 '09 at 0:33
Just saw Backblaze: backblaze.com Anybody used that? Seems like it might be feasible. – Kyle Sep 1 '09 at 15:28
That said, it appears Backblaze lacks *nix support. (??) – Kyle Sep 1 '09 at 15:30
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11 Answers

up vote 9 down vote

Alternative solution: How about buying a USB harddrive and storing at the house of a family member?

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Surely the most simple solution. I feel like cloud-based solutions generally may have higher 'upload' bandwidth and would be less subject to service outages, etc. But again, surely the most simple. – Kyle Aug 31 '09 at 23:19
The other idea would be to find a like-minded technical person to swap service with - anyone with a cable modem has more downstream readily available than you're likely to be able to achieve with any of the cut-rate cloud-based solutions. Go look at real upload numbers before you pay for anything, most of them are incredibly slow. – Paul McMillan Sep 1 '09 at 3:41
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(and to be pedantic, mailed hard drives have incredibly high bandwidth, but terrible latency) – Paul McMillan Sep 1 '09 at 3:42
Seems like this 'low tech' solution is still the best. For >= 100s of gigs, owning your own off-site hardware seems the cheapest. – Kyle Sep 1 '09 at 14:49
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up vote 8 down vote

How about using Crash Plan Central?

http://www6.crashplan.com/consumer/features-central.html

I've never used it personally, but it seems to be a low cost online backup solution. Has anybody used it?

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I've used it. Its cheap and works well. Even better, for those in the USA you can get them to ship you a 1 TB HD to "seed" your backup with so you don't have to push all 300 GB across the Internet. I run it on my headless Linux box, using my Windows box to manage it through it's GUI. – Cry Havok Oct 27 '10 at 12:40
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up vote 4 down vote

Carbonite is $55/yr for a claimed unlimited amount of data. I have known people to put 500 gigs on Carbonite with no troubles.

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Carbonite seems cool but - How can the offer "unlimited" backup? That just doesn't make sense. - It doesn't seem to have an API such that you could script a backup and run it from cron in a *nix environment. – Kyle Aug 31 '09 at 23:15
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Unlimited because for most people it takes too dang long to move 500 GB up a straw ;-) – Chris_K Sep 1 '09 at 0:14
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up vote 3 down vote

Mozy Home Unlimited is only $4.95/month for unlimited. I've been using their free plan (2GB) and am quite happy with it.

Edit: Mozy no longer offers unlimited plans. Their cheapest plan is now $5.99/month and offers 50GB of storage.

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+1 - Mozy seems good. Use it at home (only got 9ish Gb on it tho) - tech support are clued-in as well. – Tom Newton Sep 1 '09 at 11:24
Kyle needs 300GB, which is substantially more than the 2GB offered by Mozy. – Greg Sep 1 '09 at 14:48
Mozy offers UNLIMITED for $4.95/month. Barely more than a tenth of his current cost, and substantially more than the 300GB of storage he needs. – tnorthcutt Sep 8 '09 at 18:33
This is out of date. Mozy would now charge at least $27.99 a month for 300 GB. More if you wanted any older files. – Jon-Eric Apr 12 '11 at 0:06
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up vote 2 down vote

Carbonite is good but has limitations set to only work for (if memory serves correctly) certain OS's, and will not back up external drives. It only allows cloud storage and as such could take an extended amount of time to re-download all your data. The UI is very user friendly and stores the last 30 version changes of each file.

CrashPlan looks like a great product, offering the ability to save to the cloud, as well as other computers and/or hard drives locally or remotely. I only had one issue (a question really) and was snubbed by the company for asking about storing to remotely mounted ssh filesystems by the help center and the CEO (who responded via twitter after a bad tweet about their support). So hopefully it just works for you. Its aslo cross-platform. While I may be bitter about it- its one of the best backup utilities I've seen yet. The UI is easy and allows you to set whatever number of version changes you like.

I've used both in different circumstances extensively.

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up vote 1 down vote

Spideroak would give you 300gb for $30 per month, which is a $15 saving over S3. I'd be loathe to go too cheap though as good, reliable cloud storage is not cheap and you want your data with a reputable company.

Other than that, I'd second the vote for CrashPlan - get some USB hard drives and install it around a few family members or business partners; your data can go to their place & their data to yours! Your own cloud... the CrashPlan client seems to work quite well too (from my brief playing with it)

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up vote 1 down vote

best of all worlds :

Sheevaplug + usb hard drive = shared network drive accessible anywhere on the web and usable as a little server if needed ... cost about 200$ for all this ...

IMP : I would add an battery powered ups if you really need it everytime but it don't protect you if the internet don't work but you may have the same setup in sync at multiple places but it's too much for most needs ...

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That is interesting (& a cute little device). – Kyle Sep 1 '09 at 14:47
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up vote 1 down vote

I think Symform might be a good option but you must contribute space to avoid paying although it sounds like that is no problem for you. Another option would be DiskAgent - they allow you to backup to networked devices for no additional charge even if you don't use their S3 storage. I don't think Mozy or Carbonite will work because they limit your upload speed to them. You could also try livedrive but I think they limit upload too - never used them

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up vote 1 down vote

I use Crashplan.

BTW you don't have to worry about "seeding" your initial 300g of data, you can just make a one-time copy of it to another HDD and keep it at your grandparents'. Once you start with Crashplan, it ALWAYS first backs up the latest-changed files and then goes to check how much of older files does it yet have to upload. So you always have everything backed up, even if it even takes a year to upload all of your 300g.

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up vote 0 down vote

Rackspace cloud tart at 15c per GB see it here http://www.rackspacecloud.com/

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S3 is $0.10 per GB. – lee Aug 31 '09 at 21:55
S3 appears to me to be $0.15 per GB stored and $0.10 for incoming and $0.17 for outgoing transfer. <a href="aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing">Amazon S3 pricing</a> Rackspace Cloud Files doesn't charge for transfer if using Jungledisk (<a href="jungledisk.com/desktop/pricing.aspx">Jungle disk pricing</a>), but appear to charge for other cloud file usage <a href="rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/files/… Cloud Files Pricing</a> – Brian De Smet Sep 3 '09 at 1:45
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up vote 0 down vote

Not totally "cloud"... but I've had great luck with LogMeIn Backup. If you have a server at a different site with space to hold backups it is a very cost-effective solution.

Management via the cloud but you provide the storage.

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