Best / cheapest way to back up files
 

Hi
i have quite a large amount of files i need to backup.

Whats the cheapest or easiest way to back them up? Its around 1 - 3 tb that i need to back up. Are there any decent online backing up companies for this sort of amount of data?

was thinking of getting a blu ray writer, but its like £12 per 50gb, would be cheaper to buy a dedicated harddrives. (Prefer something like a cd shape though, easier storage)

any suggestions?

3TB of managed online storage is going to cost you a shitload. You'd probably be better off ordering a dedicated server with a couple of 2TB drives in it.

Then again... have you considered how long a local restore will take if you lose ALL your data?

I personally use a couple of 1TB drives in a caddy with a daily rsync backup which modifies/adds changed or new files... one drive lives at another location and gets swapped over regularly.

rowan has a good idea with rsync.

But for the love of god get some redundancy in the system as well. RAID5 or generate a bunch of PAR2 data. Magnetic media is so unreliable.

PAR2 looks interesting, hadn't heard of it until the post above.

Another thing I'm looking at getting is a fireproof case to store my backup HDs in. No point having your backup media sitting on your desk if it catches fire at the same time as your computer...

These products are prob not meant for such large amounts of data but for my personal computer at home and office I have over 25 gigs of data backed up on carbonite.com and backblaze.com

Carbonite.com looks solid

3 tb's is fucking huge and is going to be a real pain in the ass no matter how you choose to back it up.

I'm a huge fan of multiple backups, in multiple ways. I back up everything on 4 external HD's, 2 here and 2 off site, in case of fire, etc...
I also have a massive library of cd's (kinda dumb) but its good to just have another back up.

I dont have 3 tb worth of shit though. Keep us posted on how your going to do this, i'm quite interested.

Some sort of distributed backup system would be cool, but the catch is that in order for people to store a redundant copy of their data EVERY participant would need to use double the storage space they usually do (since the data is stored twice - once locally, once remotely).

Imagine a distributed system where files are broken up into blocks and scattered diversely around the planet, so a single comp dropping off won't have an impact... and when this is detected a copy of that block is sent off to another location. As a last ditch failsafe, PAR2 forward error correcting files are also sprinkled liberally around the net so that if both the local and remote blocks happen to disappear at the same time there's still a possibility of recovering the data.

I wonder if anyone is working on something like this? Not sure how many people would be keen on buying extra storage space when they could just use that space to back up data themselves. :2 cents:

setup few raid1 arrays with 2tb hd's and you all set

I have about 700 gigs of data I back up on to 2 one tb hard drives. What rsync program would be best to keep the 2 external hard drives mirrored?

So what happens if the place goes up in flames?...

Hmm... looks like my idea is already in use! :D The concept of "trading" disk space is interesting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuala

try www.badongo.com

That is a shit load of data!

I have heard good things about carbonite as well.