On Aug 13, 2011, at 10:44 PM, Jared Mauch wrote:
On Aug 13, 2011, at 1:12 AM, Randy Bush wrote:
charles skipped what i see as a highly critical question, personal backup.
I've been wondering this as well.
My home backups are somewhat large and not yet offsite due to their size. (~4.7TB).
This is due to both purchased digital media storage and photography. These are sufficiently large that the problem is harder to resolve, as nobody "makes" a 5TB drive I can ship to a colo. Drive failures in the "backups" host also become painful to work with as I'm cheap so the ZFS pool isn't 100% mirrored.
Some machines use netatalk plus the "defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1" hack.
I've considered just subbing to backblaze as it's "cheap" on a single-host basis, but need something closer to ~5-7TB plus some room for growth (maybe 250G-500G/year). I have considered just trenching copper/fiber (see other thread) to a neighbor and placing the host there, but it's not much geographical diversity, plus if the neighbor moves it becomes fun to re-explain what you are doing. (worse if they're non-techie).
The biggest problem I've seen is with a "cloud"/"tubes" provider, my upload speed puts the 4.7TB initial sync somewhere around 145 days (assuming 3Mb/s upload).
Is anyone aware of a solution for this that is sensible $$$ without rolling my own (i'm estimating about 2-3k to do this...)? And preferably costs maybe $ or $$?
Stretching the definition of "cloud" (why not, everyone else has), you can include SmugMug, Flixter, Picassa, etc. For $20-$40/year (yes, _year_), some of these allow infinite uploads. Moreover, while you only get a few MB/s per session, you can open multiple simultaneous uploads. I've filled my upstream pipe uploading things - which still takes days, but not 100s of days. Anyway, this is one way to get an off-site backup, lower your b/w requirements on your personal server, and even get someone else to do things like make thumbnails, multiple sizes / magnifications, allow (paid) prints to be made, etc., etc. -- TTFN, patrick