Online Storage Solutions for Home Users?

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

[arrow]

You could just open a couple dozen Gmail [gmail.com] accounts.

Aready Covered

[jakel2k]

Okay this issue has been cover several times in slashdot. Solutions that have been suggested:

1. Burn to CDs
2. Burn to DVDs
3. Buy more HDDs and HDD caddies
4. Get Tape backups
5. Upload compressed and encrypted as "Olsen Twins and Britney Spears Sex Tapes.avi
6. Learn to delete files

Re:Aready Covered

[itwerx]

Okay this issue has been cover several times in slashdot.

Yep, parent has it right. This is a dead horse.
Mod parent up to 5 and stop posting replies.

Re:Aready Covered

[almostmanda]

The poster is asking for storage site recommendations, not for storage solutions. None of these apply.

Re:Aready Covered

[itwerx]

The poster is asking for storage site recommendations, not for storage solutions. None of these apply.

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...

[fnord123]

It sounds like your main goal is offsite backup. Unless you have a very fast network connection, serious multi-gigabyte backups online just don't make sense. Buy a USB hard drive and periodically backup your data to it, then leave it at a friend's house. If you don't trust your friend, encrypt the data first. Do the above every month or two and you are set. Catastrophic failures don't occur that often so a low frequency offsite backup solution like this works well and is relatively inexpensive.

Re:Just use a USB drive...

[Gangis]

For data encryption and large size, you could go for the Sony GigaVault, with built in encryption and 20 or 40 gigs of space. It's USB 2.0 compatible.

etc

[XO]

Emails, documents, 'media' etc.

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? :P

Not such a bad idea

[tod_miller]

why not some giant P2P powered virtual raid striping setup in which each client gives the same as they receive. Bob has his files securely (using a cert) ripped apart and sriped redundantly over several machines, which also have a token system (if too many disconnect, that data gets restripped (they might have formatted thier drive)

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

[Isbiten]

Backup to it every month and leave it at a friends place. Just make sure that you stay friend with him/her :) You don't want someone to take a peek at your personal love letters now do you.

Re:Get an external hardrive

[Asgard]

That's why you pipe the tarball through gpg before storing it.

Re:Get an external hardrive

[shadowbearer]

Put the backup drive in a safety deposit box. That more or less eliminates the basic home dangers (fire, theft, etc) which leaving it at a friends house does not.

SB

Re:Get an external hardrive

[NateTech]

Ah ... Banks aren't allowed to burn down anymore, eh? Cool.

(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

[shadowbearer]

The risk isn't even in the same ballpark, my friend. It's not just the fire risk, either; theft, company, carelessness.... come on, now, you know that's a BS argument (at least I hope you do! ;)

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

[BeatdownGeek]

Spymac [spymac.com] offers some web storage space (via webDAV or FTP)- I think you get 250 MB in addition to the 1 GB of mail space.

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

[Sesse]

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

[stonebeat.org]

Make sure the online storage space provider that you choose, supports WebDAV [webdav.org] . WebDAV will allow you to map these online storage space as drive letters on your Windows, or as mount points on your OS X/Linux.

Re:WebDAV compatible

[ion++]

is webdav writeable in OSX?

Re:WebDAV compatible

[bjpirt]

yes, that's what apple use for their iDisk. It's the ftp that has problems

FlashBackup

[AlexA]

Check out FlashBackup [flashbackup.com]. They offer 5GB of storage for only $10/mo, which is one of the cheapest deals I've found, and they support FTP, WebDAV and web-based transfers.

P2P application

[Anonymous Cowdog]

This would be a great application for a P2P network. Donate 100GB of storage space, and it gets you 20GB of 4X redundant space "out there" in the P2P ether. The remaining 20GB is for overhead and slack for system management. A subset of the 20GB could be encrypted, leaving the other files in plaintext so the service could detect duplicates in order to save space.

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

[jvagner]

These people:

http://www.tranxactglobal.com/ ..charge $0.50/gb. Pretty great.

Off-Site Storage Cheap!

[DeComposer]

Here's a thought:

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

[bcrowell]

Like a lot of "ask slashdot" articles, this one is just too vague.

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?

[loony]

Why don't you just put up a small server? If you go outside your own network it will get so much slower and less comfortable to work with... I've been there and dropped it after a while - between downtime of your PC, downtime of the network and your storage provider its not really all that useful...

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?

[Yaztromo]

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?

[cornice]

I was wondering about something like Freenet would work but with the rules all mixed up. In this mixed up version you would have a redundant encrypted network that stores everyones files only the files aren't public. They're private. You can download only your own stuff and your quota size is relative to the space that you make available to the network. You don't know where your stuff is held. You just know that it's safe.

DVD burner with offsite storage.

[Bishop]

If you are looking to backup data in the 5GB range a DVD burner is a good option. As required create and verify two discs. Store one disc locally and mail the second disc to your mother. You will gain the benefit of an offsite backup, and would it kill you to write a letter to your mother more often?

At your cube at work!

[filenabber]

Use an external USB drive (not the flash drives, but a true HD - maybe 80GB). Many workplaces (mine included) have lockable cabinets in the cubes. Backup your files to your USB drive and lock it in your cube at work. Once a month (or week) take it home and refresh it. Simple and cheap.

SourceForge?

[Grab]

Don't know about you, but what I want to avoid losing is my work. Family snapshots on the HDD I can live with losing, but losing the software I've written over 5 years would be a big kick in the teeth.

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.

[t-maxx cowboy]

I figure you have a perfect free offsite storage if you have a G-mail account. Most data files are unber 10MB for most home users. Just e-mail your self the files. When you change them send them to your self again. Once your g-mail account is full, just go to the oldest e-mails with attachments of the same name and delete them.

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

[scorilo]

I think a solution that doesn't involve relatives is better (what if you just go through some argument and then your HD crashes?). Get a safety deposit box at your bank, and you can use it for many other things (your will, etc.).

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.