[Discuss] CrashPlan Home is discontinued - what's next?

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

John and Dan suggested Amazon S3 and rsync.net: I wanted to clarify my
requirements.

Those, like ad-infinitum cloud services, provide raw storage. While you can
roll your own software to do backups to raw storage, they are not "backup
systems" that provide the following capabilities:

* Continuous streaming of file updates every time you change any file on any
backed-up filesystem
* Versioning of every update to every updated file for the past decade+
* Indexing of all versions of all files, in an easy-to-recover way
* Full sha-256 checksum registry of all stored files
* Periodic integrity verification against the stored checksums
* Periodic comparison of running filesystems against backup config, with
alerting for files that aren't recently backed up
* Data deduplication and storage management tools so I can recover space for
files no longer wanted
* Tight SSL and encryption security with MFA and assurance that I won't get
myself locked out

The "rsync and hope for the best" approach can and will fail when you forget
to update the config to include recently-added volumes, or when you belatedly
discover that the backup quit working a few months ago and you no longer have
your London vacation photos anywhere, or you need to go back 3 revisions to
get a piece of source code that you've made two or three botched edits to and
can't remember the last working version.

CrashPlan solves all the above problems except for storage-management and
reliable integrity verification. My "roll my own" scripts--so far--aren't
anywhere near all that I want, and I don't pay myself well enough to spend all
the time needed to improve them.

-rich