Online Storage Solutions for Home Users? 33
A not-so-anonymous Anonymous Coward asks: "Like many Slashdot readers, I have accumulated a lot of data over the years. Emails, documents, 'media' etc. Although I try to keep up with backups, I still feel I need some other place where I could dump my data without worrying about hard drive crashes and other problems. Googling reveals that there is a whole slew of online storage providers. But most are around $10 a month with a couple of gigs of space. So what does Slashdot recommend for sites that offer plenty of storage and fit the budget of a poor home user?"
Well (Score:4, Funny)
Aready Covered (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Aready Covered (Score:1, Offtopic)
Yep, parent has it right. This is a dead horse.
Mod parent up to 5 and stop posting replies.
Re:Aready Covered (Score:1)
Re:Aready Covered (Score:2)
As mentioned previously in the thread there are no appropriate "storage site solutions" due to present day bandwidth limitations.
Conversely, if you consider the fact that, excepting the humorous one at the end, the suggestions which were presented are all removeable/transportable then you will realise that they are the next best thing.
So there!
Just use a USB drive... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Just use a USB drive... (Score:2, Informative)
etc (Score:5, Funny)
I got about 40GB of unused space that you can transfer all your pr0n to, i'm sure that's what you meant by 'media' eh?
Not such a bad idea (Score:1)
On top of this, a nice partition on Bobs machine, about 150% the size of his required backup space, is used to stripe misc parts of peoples other data,
On red button call, and
Get an external hardrive (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Get an external hardrive (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Get an external hardrive (Score:2)
SB
Re:Get an external hardrive (Score:2)
(Yes, I know the vault is fairly safe when this happens, but so is a decent fire safe you put at your friend's house.)
Your argument isn't logical.
Re:Get an external hardrive (Score:3, Informative)
If what you were thinking were true, than people would trust their wills and other important paper/legal info to friends more than they would a vault, eh? After all, banks aren't rich enough to *afford* really decent protection...are they...
Comparing a home fire safe (even an expensive one) to a typical bank v
spymac (Score:3, Interesting)
Service is just a tad bit spotty at times, but most of the time (I'd say like 95%) it's reliable. Transfer speed is good enough for my DSL connection too.
Distributed backup (Score:4, Interesting)
Find a few friends and try dibs [berkeley.edu]. Should be one of the cheapest solutions (basically, you'll need about as much storage space as you want to backup yourself -- ideally a bit more), as long as you can find enough friends :-)
/* Steinar */
WebDAV compatible (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:WebDAV compatible (Score:2)
Re:WebDAV compatible (Score:2)
FlashBackup (Score:4, Interesting)
P2P application (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem with the current online services is the paltry amount of storage, and the cost. The problem with USB drives, CDs, DVDs, etc. is they 1
Online backup (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.tranxactglobal.com/
Off-Site Storage Cheap! (Score:4, Interesting)
Get (or have, or mod) a job with decent bandwidth and that allows you to bring your own hardware. Build a cheap PC with a decent-sized hard drive and use that as your off-site storage.
Even the best job isn't likely to allow you to set up a server that's accessible to the world-at-large on their network, but it's easy enough to serve the files from your home PC and pull them from there when you're at the office.
Of course, you'll want to secure access to both the home-based server and the office-based backup and encrypt anything sensitive that you leave at the office.
sorry, I don't get it (Score:2)
OP, do you really consider $10/mo to be too much? Sounds incredibly cheap to me. I assume you're talking about gigabytes and gigabytes of data, because presumably you wouldn't even be worried about it if it was small enough to fit on a CD.
Although I try to keep up with backups, I still feel I need some other place where I could dump my data without worrying about hard drive crashes and other problems.
I don't quite follow the logic here.
Put up a small server? (Score:2)
I ended up getting a storage router that allows me access from the outside if needed USR Storage Router 8200 [dealrover.com] its so much easier...
Peter.
What is your backup strategy? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm using an online iDisk through my .Mac account, which cost me something like $135CDN per year (with e-mail and some software included). It's currently at its default 100MB, although Apple allows you to purchase more space as needed.
100MB isn't enough to backup my 60GB hard drive, but then again why would I do something like that? Uploading 60GB of data, even at cable modem speeds, even with compression, is going to take forever.
Instead, I have a backup strategy that encompasses multiple levels, including online and offline backup.
For online backup, I'm storing some important documents and some application-specific data I'd really like back if it were lost (Firefox bookmarks, iCal data, my Address book, etc.). I'm also storing my Open Source projects sources and asssociated files (which are all on SourceForge's CVS servers -- but multiple backups certainly doesn't hurt!). I even have an encrypted image file for my Palm's backup card stored there, just in case. However, I don't store any applications themselves, anything I can readily download off the Internet anyhow, or anything required to boot up the machine in the first place (ie: any part of the OS itself).
For multimedia, applications, and other backups, I'm burning to DVD. A stack of DVD-R's can hold a lot of data, is easy to store, and if stored properly has a decent lifetime. I can backup the entire system to roughly 15 DVDs if I wanted to (so far I haven't).
For some really important data, I'm also keeping copies on my iPod and some of the other systems on my network. Redundancy doesn't hurt.
However, for really important data offsite backups are best. For this I tend to trust family first -- leaving a small box of DVDs with my brother or someone else close gives me peace of mind that if my home were to be destroyed somehow, non-critical application data would be readily available to me as well.
I love my online storage, but it's not the be-all and end-all of backups. Online Storage Providers have been known to have failures, and unless you have a T3 coming into your home, bandwidth is going to be an issue. So have some other strategies in place as well. Use the online storage for data you want to be able to access from anywhere on the Internet, and for critical documents and such you may need immediate access to in case of catastrophic failure.
Brad BARCLAY
Maybe a new Freenetish algorythm? (Score:2)
DVD burner with offsite storage. (Score:3, Funny)
At your cube at work! (Score:1)
SourceForge? (Score:2)
SourceForge serves a double purpose for that, acting not only as a release mechanism for what I write, but also as an offsite backup system. Nice one SF!
If what you've got isn't code, then put it on your website instead. Free web space is easy to come by. Whatever you're looking to preserve, it'll likely
Use your G-mail account is you have one. (Score:1)
Anything over 10MB should be put else where.
Further doesn't everyone have friends that they trust? You just have to all have a server running that can be ftp'd to and then back
poste-restante (Score:1)
Alternatively, find out how long does your post-office keep stuff in poste-restante (6 months usually). Then backup everything on a few DVDs, (encrypt it first) and then mail it to yourself at poste-restante.