[kwlug-disc] Linux friendly Online Storage / Backup

[Eric Gerlach]

brackup will encrypt locally and upload to S3: http://code.google.com/p/brackup/

Cheers,

Eric

On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 11:43 AM, Chris Irwin <chris at chrisirwin.ca> wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 01:27, Colin Mackay <zixiekat at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Good day fellow LUG members,
>>
>> I recently (today) had a scare with my backup drive and nearly killed
>> all my photos trying to RAID one of my drives...
>>
>> Anyway, it got me thinking about online storage and I was looking for
>> some recommendations from the KWLUG group.  A GUI is alright, but I'd
>> prefer a command line tool to run nightly backups that can be resumed
>> each night if it runs too long.
>
> You didn't say how much data you wanted to back up. That alters the
> cost considerations considerably. For example, I currently back up
> about ~800GB of data, but only *need* 500GB of it. I can only expect
> this number to grow as we've started taking larger photos and more
> videos now that phones have decent cameras.
>
> I currently use two 1TB drives I bought for $90 a while back (they
> became cheaper since then, and then more expensive again with flooding
> in Thailand). I rotate the drives every week, taking one to work, and
> bringing the other home. Saturday night my server backs up to the
> swappable disk, and Monday I take it to work. Total cost, about $200.
>
> However, I'd much rather a backup system I don't need to rotate (I
> forget now and then). So I priced some options (I did this during the
> holidays, and am recapping from memory). I probably missed a decent
> provider or two.
>
> * Tarsnap: Encrypted locally so it is trustable. Looks simple and
> cool. Cost is $0.3/GB/mo for storage, and the same for transfer. That
> means storing 500GB will cost $150/mo, and just as much to initially
> get the data there or out again.
>
> * Duplicity: Can use S3, but since I could find no mention of pricing,
> I assume this is self-managed S3. Which is more work, but doable.
> Plain S3 storage is $.14/GB/mo, or $70/500GB/mo. It looks like data
> transferred in does not incur a cost, but transferring out is $.12/GB
> up to 10TB. There is also a price per request, I'm not sure how that
> works (it probably depends on how duplicity stores its data).
>
> * Spideroak: It has a GUI and is cross platform. It costs
> $100/100GB/year (it is priced in 100GB increments, with the first 2GB
> free). In the same units as above, $42/500GB/mo (if bought on the
> yearly rate). Their pricing structure is different as I believe they
> run their own infrastructure, rather than using S3. Also, as far as
> billing is concerned, 501GB is the same as 600GB. Has some pretty nice
> multi-machine and dedup support.
>
> * Linode: I have a linode VPS already. I can apparently only add an
> additional 12GB of storage, which is slightly insufficient. Besides,
> where would my Linode server back up to?
>
> I'm currently setting up spideroak for my parents. They have less than
> 100GB of data, and the spideroak client will allow a few folders on
> their laptops to be kept in sync (similar to dropbox) in addition to
> backing them up. Their current solution (my old NAS in their basement)
> is not replicated offsite (though I could probably rsync it to my
> home). Also, the NAS failed to power on after a power outage, and they
> had not noticed that their backups were not working. I went the NAS
> route after they didn't ever use the USB disk I had set up. So a nice
> hands-off online solution is ideal for them.
>
> However, for myself, I have not found an affordable online option.
> Even for the cost of spideroak, the cheapest listed here, I could buy
> three 2TB drives at today's inflated prices for less money. I could do
> that *every year*. I could buy new large drives for offsite storage
> every year, then take my old backup drives to upgrade my local RAID
> capacity, then take my old RAID drives and sell them on kijiji for
> $30/drive, then laugh in a rather maniacal fashion as my storage
> capacity grows faster than my needs for once.
>
> --
> Chris Irwin
> <chris at chrisirwin.ca>
>
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