personal backup

Sun Aug 14 12:38:51 UTC 2011

On Sat, Aug 13, 2011 at 10:44 PM, Jared Mauch <jared at puck.nether.net> wrote:

> My home backups are somewhat large and not yet offsite due to their size.
> (~4.7TB).
>
>  I've considered just subbing to backblaze as it's "cheap" on a single-host
> basis, but need something closer to ~5-7TB plus some room for growth (maybe
> 250G-500G/year).

I wrestled with this same problem when I started using Backblaze, and yes,
my initial full backup took about six months, but it did get done.

Backblaze doesn't have a way to prioritize, but the way I dealt with it was
to exclude the media directories from the backup for the first month or so
while the more important stuff got backed up, then drop their exclusion and
let them start trickling up.

The 500G/year of new data shouldn't be a problem, since that's under 2G/day,
which should not be a problem to push up over a decent connection.

I didn't worry during the initial six months since I also have some backups
made to bare 2tb drives in my safety deposit box (I use one of those desktop
adapters you can drop bare drives in).

All backups pass through the windows XP box since that's the gateway to
backblaze.  It has 4x2tb drives on it.  No raid or anything since it is a
copy itself, just 4 separate volumes.  All of the "most important stuff"
lives on C so if I had to switch backup services I can exclude D/E/F from
backup until C is done.  To keep power usage reasonable drives are slower
RPM and also set to spin down when idle 15 mins.