[Discuss] pseudo-off-site backup

[tmetro+blu at gmail.com (Tom Metro)]

John Dvorak on last weekend's This Week in Tech (twit.tv) says he keeps
a 1 TB portable drive (hopefully encrypted) in his car as a
pseudo-off-site backup.

Although way more likely to be damaged along with your house, compared
to a real off-site backup, I bet if one looked at the percentage of cars
destroyed along with their affiliated houses, the cars probably survive
over 50% of the time. (If your car resides in a garage in or under your
house, that likely goes down.)

There are probably a few simple things you can do to increase the odds,
like putting the drive in a sealed plastic bag to guard against floods
(providing the car doesn't wash away) and fire hose water.

So while far from ideal, you may be better off in the long run if you
currently don't do off-site backups due to cost or inconvenience.

What I wonder is if one could boost the convenience even further from
sneaker-net to having a fully automated system with a low-power WiFi
server in your car. Something like a Western Digital NAS drive with
hacked Linux or a Pogoplug and USB drive. Just enough CPU and bandwidth
to handle the transfer of a few tens of GB overnight. Then it puts the
drive to sleep (which will also protect the heads).

(I'd say use a Raspberry Pi and notebook drive, but as Mark Woodward
pointed out on the Hardware Hacking list, the Pi runs its network and
disk I/O through one USB interface, so it'll likely have performance
issues.)

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/