I would like to hear about how this group handles backing up your data

[G+_Mike Buchanan]

I would like to hear about how this group handles backing up your data.  My issue is this.  I have about 300 GB of software, movies, music and files to keep backed up [currently on a WHS].  I currently use carbonite however beyond backing up documents, this option is really not practical because trying to backup movies and software carbonite begins to throttle my uploads and frankly it takes way to long to back that stuff up.  I also use an external drive as a 3rd copy however I like the idea of having all of my data in the cloud for easy access but I am also concerned about data security since I would be backing up financial documents and tax documents.  I was curious as to how this group handles backups.  I have looked at Amazon S3 and Glacier.

[G+_Dan Phillips]

Maybe there could be a show on setting up your own NAS using RAID. There are a few "out of the box" products aimed at the consumer market where you just need to plug in your drives. 

[G+_Mike Buchanan]

Dan Phillips I personally use the now extinct Windows home server which has worked great for me so far. I am able to remotely access my data from anywhere and it has something similar to raid but not exactly. I think there are better options out there now like drobo etc. I agree, I think that would be a great topic.

[G+_Cole Brodine]

My brother-in-law and I both have homemade linux servers with large raid storage.  We're working on setting them up to sync across the internet, giving us some "cloud" back up.  I haven't finished doing it yet, but hope to write up some sort of blog post or something when I'm done.

[G+_Dan Phillips]

Michael Buchanan I thought I had heard in the WHS community that 2005 is the best version to run and MS kinda screwed up the features in later versions. 

 

Cole Brodine Doesn't Unbuntu have some kind of Cloud feature? Also look at the first few episodes of Know How where iyaz akhtar showed off some cloud solutions. 

[G+_Mike Buchanan]

Dan Phillips the WHS I have is one of the HP models before they discontinued it. I have the 495 model or something like that.

[G+_Cole Brodine]

I believe Ubuntu does have a cloud feature.  I'm rolling my own offsite backup for two reasons.

 

1 - I'm paranoid about uploading my data up to the nebulous "cloud" where I don't really have any control over it.  I trust my brother-in-law more then Amazon or Ubuntu.

 

2 - Both my brother-in-law and I already have all this storage available and want to avoid the monthly fee for storing that much data. (This is probably the bigger reason.  I'm cheap.)

[G+_Mike Buchanan]

Cole Brodine hehe im right there with ya.

[G+_Trisha Mercer]

I use CrashPlan myself. Yeah, it's a competitor to Carbonite, but Carbonite doesn't work with Linux. It has a paid version for access to the Cloud, but the free version will work for peer-to-peer backups, whether over the same network or remotely

[G+_Tom Gehrke]

I'm another CrashPlan user.

 

Something that some don't realize is that if you've got a friend or relative with storage capacity, the software supports using them as a targets. You don't have to back up to CrashPlan's servers. If you do this, you pay nothing.

[G+_Troy Poirier]

I went from SpiderOak to CrashPlan's cloud storage and really liked both of them, but then I got my Synology DiskStation and decided to go with Amazon's backup rather than trying to install and use CrashPlan via the terminal (no GUI). With the DiskStation I now have Redundancy (RAID-hybrid) and Amazon's Glacier pricing ($0.01 per GB) has really been saving me money. Anything of private nature I already have encrypted with TrueCrypt before uploading to their servers.

[G+_Mike Buchanan]

Troy Poirier How do you handle backing up files, lets say documents that are currently stored on Glacier and now you have updated or modified those files locally and now need to back up once again.  Do you create a new archive and store those files in Glacier again and essentially have versioning going on?  I want to begin using glacier but I am trying to figure out my workflow as it relates to files that has changed, and how to manage that. 

[G+_Troy Poirier]

Michael Buchanan I use the Amazon S3 buckets with rules to move any files over 30 days old to glacier, so the files I don't have to update anymore (a lot of them are in this category) are archived at the lower cost with Glacier, while files I update frequently stick to the standard S3 costs. Rules apply to individual files, so within the same bucket you can have some in S3 and some in Glacier. I could save a bit more if I enabled Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS). I guess it all depends on how much data and how often you want to back it up. I am currently on a once-a-week cycle for all my backups, but you can set it to back up as frequently as you like. Here's an interesting article:

 

http://alestic.com/2012/12/s3-glacier-costs

 

Was not sure about versions, so I had to look it up and found that you can add versioning on buckets that don't have lifecycle rules. Means you can't use versioning and Glacier rules on the same bucket.