online backup

[blu_discuss at seremeth.com (Steve Seremeth)]

Tom Metro wrote:

> Jack Coats <jack at coats.org> writes:
>
>> Yea, I wish [Dr.Backup] also had a hookup that was as nice for *NIX.
>
>
> Years ago I had the idea that if only someone developed the open source
> software for doing remote backups, and it became popular, there would be
> an abundance of commodity storage providers to chose from. The same way
> there is with web hosting. But that didn't happen. At least not the 
> storage provider side of things.
>
> On the software side, there is of course rsync, though it isn't a 
> complete solution, as ideally you want to encrypt the data before 
> sending it off to some storage provider. More recently I ran across 
> Box Backup (http://www.fluffy.co.uk/boxbackup/), which claims to be a 
> complete open source solution for online backup. I haven't evaluated 
> it yet. An RFC to set forth some standards in this area would be nice.
>
> Earlier this year I toyed with the idea of using generic web hosting
> providers as online storage. They're cheaper per GB than the online
> backup services, but you have to roll your own software solution, and
> not all hosting providers will take as good of care of the data as an
> online backup service might. (Though the impression I get from these
> franchised backup services that many might be pretty small-time
> operations, probably running in less than "world class" data centers.)
>
>
I've been going through the same quandry -- and also have been expecting 
providers to just start popping up on the radar offering services, but 
they are few and far between it seems.

I ended up mirroring a lot of my critical content to an external drive 
and then just attaching it to a remote machine that had good internet 
connectivity (and security!), and I'm rsync'ing over ssh to that, which 
is nice because it's only pushing/pulling the data that's new on either end.