personal backup

Patrick W. Gilmore patrick at ianai.net
Sun Aug 14 12:05:15 UTC 2011


On Aug 13, 2011, at 10:44 PM, Jared Mauch wrote:
> On Aug 13, 2011, at 1:12 AM, Randy Bush wrote:
> 
>> charles skipped what i see as a highly critical question, personal
>> backup.
> 
> I've been wondering this as well.
> 
> My home backups are somewhat large and not yet offsite due to their size. (~4.7TB).
> 
> This is due to both purchased digital media storage and photography.  These are sufficiently large that the problem is harder to resolve, as nobody "makes" a 5TB drive I can ship to a colo.  Drive failures in the "backups" host also become painful to work with as I'm cheap so the ZFS pool isn't 100% mirrored.
> 
> Some machines use netatalk plus the "defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1" hack.
> 
> 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 have considered just trenching copper/fiber (see other thread) to a neighbor and placing the host there, but it's not much geographical diversity, plus if the neighbor moves it becomes fun to re-explain what you are doing. (worse if they're non-techie).
> 
> The biggest problem I've seen is with a "cloud"/"tubes" provider, my upload speed puts the 4.7TB initial sync somewhere around 145 days (assuming 3Mb/s upload).
> 
> Is anyone aware of a solution for this that is sensible $$$ without rolling my own (i'm estimating about 2-3k to do this...)?  And preferably costs maybe $ or $$?

Stretching the definition of "cloud" (why not, everyone else has), you can include SmugMug, Flixter, Picassa, etc.  For $20-$40/year (yes, _year_), some of these allow infinite uploads.

Moreover, while you only get a few MB/s per session, you can open multiple simultaneous uploads.  I've filled my upstream pipe uploading things - which still takes days, but not 100s of days.

Anyway, this is one way to get an off-site backup, lower your b/w requirements on your personal server, and even get someone else to do things like make thumbnails, multiple sizes / magnifications, allow (paid) prints to be made, etc., etc.

-- 
TTFN,
patrick





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