Online backup for linux

Kalrog

Does anyone use an online backup service? I know that the SmugVault is there, but I don't know that I want to go that route. I was thinking something more inclusive. I want essentially a full backup of my system at a better cost as $0.22/GB/month is cheap for small amounts, but not so inexpensive when you start talking about 100GB+ in backups. Carbonite caught my eye, but they don't have a Linux client (and that is a must). I have found SpiderOak and MemoPal that look like they would meet my needs, but they are not unlimited space like Carbonite is.

What does everyone here use for online backup for Linux?

jdryan3

Kalrog wrote:

Does anyone use an online backup service? I know that the SmugVault is there, but I don't know that I want to go that route. I was thinking something more inclusive. I want essentially a full backup of my system at a better cost as $0.22/GB/month is cheap for small amounts, but not so inexpensive when you start talking about 100GB+ in backups. Carbonite caught my eye, but they don't have a Linux client (and that is a must). I have found SpiderOak and MemoPal that look like they would meet my needs, but they are not unlimited space like Carbonite is.

What does everyone here use for online backup for Linux?

Actually $0.22/GB/month is a good price for so little amount of storage. We back up several terabytes for work and a few years ago that rate is close to what we paid. It is sustantially less now, but again we are talking much more than 100 GB.

I have almost a TB in storage at home - using external HDs. You could get a 160GB USB drive and simply take it with you when you leave home. Those are only $99.

Quzol1

Try http://jungledisk.com/ they have a linux client. I use it for a secondary automatic office backup. They tie you into amazon's S-3 service.

Kalrog

Quzol1 wrote:

Try http://jungledisk.com/ they have a linux client. I use it for a secondary automatic office backup. They tie you into amazon's S-3 service.

Jungledisk and SmugVault both tie into the S3 service and are essentially the same price. It looks like a fair value, but not the screaming deal that I could get if I were to use a windows client. I'm starting to think this is one of the few things that might just be more expensive on Linux.

ian408

There are a number of different on-line services. Carbonite, Symantec, Iron Mountain and others offer off-premise storage. Typically, these services compress & encrypt your data in-flight and encrypt it again when it hits the storage array. Do not lose your keys as they will not be able to help you

There are very few that offer an unlimited amount of storage for a fixed price. As you get north of around 10G in space, the price starts to increase (sometimes pretty quickly). Those who offer unlimited storage for a fixed price are banking on less than a few gigs per customer--and that's what they'll get.

Don't forget that it will take a significant amount of time to move 100G at 1.54mb/s. Calculate the change rate as this will give you an idea of how much data you will have to move on a daily or regular basis. If these are large numbers, time to backup and bandwidth will be key issues. Might be easier to dd the contents of 1 disk to another then store the other somewhere else rather than do network backups.

If you use jungledisk, you don't need any sort of software--just tar/dump/whatever the stuff off.

In the end, I decided it would be cheaper and easier to backup to disk and take the disk elsewhere.

I guess how you do backups is more dependent on your goal for recovery. If it's just to get stuff back people delete accidentally, look into Open Snapshot (or Timeslider if you're an Open Solaris user). Can you tell us more about your requirements?

Kalrog

Sure.

I am a KUbuntu user. I want to backup some standard office type files and previous year tax files and things like that. But that isn't a large volume of data. The large volume is me wanting to backup all of the RAW files that I take so that I have the original used prior to creating the jpeg file uploaded to my SmugMug site for sale.

So we are talking an initial load of about 100GB of files uncompressed and adding probably 10-30 GB per month. It will probably be less than that on the server side with compression, but that is the uncompressed size. Mostly additions with very few deletions and restore requests.