I know this topic is like beating an dead horse, but I'm having a hard time finding a good *nix supported online backup service....

I mainly want to backup approximately 10Gb of personal photos, along with approximately 1Gb of valuable documentations such as financial docs, personal docs...

Now if the data is encrypted on the backup servers that's an bonus, but I'll be pre-encrypting all of my personal/financial documents anyway, so its not a too big of an concern here.


Anyway, my main concern and problem is, lots of the online backup discussions are about "free" or "windows" based application, which are not acceptable, now I wouldn't mind "free" however, the main concern with these are the fact that odds are they're overselling, and other issues with them. Plus how would I ensure reasonably that they would be there a year later, five years later, etc....


So it would probably be an bonus to have the service being backed up by a big company such as Amazon for their S3 storage service...



Anyway without additional ados here's the list of backup services that I've found so far that meet my requirement, (10-20+ Gb of storage with expansion option, supports rsync or other products similar to it, optionally support ssh/ssl for the actual file transportation)


Steadfast Networks
Storage: Starts off with 20Gb plan all the way up to 5Tb
Pricing: Starts off at $10 a month to $700 a month for 5Tb
Bandwidth: Claims to be unlimited for backup purpose only
Product supported: rsync, ftp, ssh
Extras: They seems reputable, and the pricing isn't too bad for the amount of storage I want, at 10$ a month for 20Gb
Url: http://steadfast.net/services/backup.php


rsync.net
Storage: "Pay for what you want" aka say I want 20Gb I would pay $32 to $56 a month
Pricing: $1.60 to $2.80 per Gb per month depending on single or geo-redundant storage
Bandwidth: Unlimited
Product supported: rsync, ssh, ftp, scp, sftp, subversion, etc....
Extras: Warrant canary (http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt), Shell account, Negative is the price is a quite a bit higher than the other two options
Url: http://www.rsync.net/products/index.html


Amazon S3
Storage: Pay as you use it, so technically unlimited amount of object, however objects are limited to 5Gb each
Pricing: $0.15 per Gb + $0.10 per Gb transfered inbound
Bandwidth: Technically unlimited but pays $0.10 per Gb transfered
Product supported: Only amazon own protocol via REST/SOAP
Extras: Seems very reputable, amazon their selves uses S3 for their own products, plus the pricing is pretty attractive, However, the negative part is if any part of the file get changed the whole thing must be uploaded again, and it also uses its own protocol based off REST/SOAP....
Url: http://www.amazon.com/S3-AWS-home-pa...&node=16427261


So at this point in time I'm not sure which one to go with, plus I'm wondering if anyone out there can give me more information about these two service, or recommendation for any other alternative services.

Plus please don't tell me to buy hard drives and enclosures and backup to those, and please don't tell me to use mozy or other products similar to mozy, I mainly want something that is "open protocol" aka it uses rsync, sftp, etc... or something like amazon S3 which the protocol is open for others to implement/use

Get yourself a couple of 16GB flash drives and a safe deposit box. In the long run it's cheaper, faster and more secure.

That's the issue, I don't have any safe deposit box anywhere, and I am currently moving around every 3 to 6 months so it won't be very convicent, but once i settle down, i can consider that idea, but for now online backup imho is the most flexible option.

I'd second the safety box. But oi, safety deposit box would not be much of a problem; you don't need one in the middle of a laguna with sharks swimming around it and molten lava crashing from the sky.

That can come later. ;P

Hahaha that safety deposit box would work for some of my most important docs and pictures which don't change much, however I was just hoping to have something I could setup an script to automatically backup any changes I did to the server and keep it for what X amount of time aka 30, 60, 90 days or so.

If you're willing to keep the majority backed up offline, then I can make a suggestion. If you sign up for an AOL IM (instant message) account (free), you also get 100MB of online storage (also free). While that seems pretty small, the interesting thing is that you can access it via ssh (or sshfs) and place encrypted data on it via encfs. That's pretty convenient, and the volume of data is doable for a backup in a reasonable amount of time with most ISP connections. You won't run into a problem with your ISP capping you due to excessive uploads either.

1. Sign up for an AOL account.

2. Using FUSE and sshfs, mount the space:

3. You can either copy pre-encrypted data to it or use encfs to encrypt on the fly:

I suggest that once the space gets near to full you move the new content to your offline storage.

macemoneta: Neat! I didn't know that amazon had online storage...

But as I've expressed concern before about using stuff like dreamhost, and now this AOL thing, is they're not created for backup purpose, they're mostly created for file sharing or web page stuff, so... A company that is dedicated toward backup probably would have better system for ensuring no loss of their client data? And another concern is I've been hearing that AOL has been gradually declining, so will that space be there 5 years later?

That concern applies to all online services. That's why a couple of drives and a safe deposit box is more secure. Nothing will be as good as what you can do yourself. For long term archival of information, think LOCKSS - Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe. Whatever storage system you use, don't make it your only backup.

Good point, I sorta of thought/didn't think about that issue.

What I was hoping to do so far, was to have hopefully 2-3 way of backup...

1) Having RAID 6 for my important data, now I know RAID 6 is not a replacement for backup, but it will help less the odds of a single harddrive failure wiping out the data on the actual computer.

2) Some form of online backup, preferably some site like rsync.net or amazon s3 or whatever that provides multiple geo-redundant server, so if one of their server goes down the data should hopefully be safe on the other one.

3) A whole bunch of DVD with par2 or dar2 or whatever to help protect versus corruption, along with several checksum on each file. Now these probably will either get left at my parent house, or go into a safe deposit box once I start to settle down, later this may be replaced with tape or harddrive media


The first and second approach should be done automatically, aka crontab job to copy the changed stuff to an online backup server, then the third one would be whenever I think about it or whenever a "large" amount of data has changed, say perhaps once 3 to 6 months.

Would that be suitable for approximately 10-20Gb of valued photo and personal data?

It will be suitable, but one further suggestion; don't use RAID for the data. Instead, place the data on one drive and periodically rsync via cron to a second drive. The reason is that this provides protection from you - an errant command, or script or bug as root will cost you the data on a RAID array, whether the hardware fails or not.

I use an external drive for this. I keep the drive unmounted and spun-down to protect it from bugs and errors. A couple of times a day a cron job kicks off that mounts the drive, rsyncs, unmounts and spins it back down. I've shot myself in the foot too many times over the last few decades to ignore protecting important data from myself.

Thank you for all your help however I already have a RAID 6/10/0/1/10 for my system, I've split it into a few partition and did RAID on partition basis, like raid 1 for boot partition, raid 10 for root/system files, raid 0 for swap, and raid 6 for home and my critical data, which are also stored on a separate partition, so I have copy of my data in /home directory and copy of it in /storage/*whatever*

I just need to establish a good backup program aka storage the absolute critical stuff online and a dvd or other backup media and store it offsite, and etc...

Thank you