Home Data Backup Options/Suggestions...

[Scarpozzi]

I've been backing everything up to a 2TB NAS the past 2 years. I found out yesterday I lost a drive. It got me thinking, even though I have 3 copies of my data, this isn't good enough.

Does anyone here know of a good 1-2TB tape solution or recommend cloud storage?

My NAS is a QNAP TS-212. It supports ElephantDrive and Amazon S3. My only issue is, both of those services are more than what it costs me to house the data locally (long run). Amazon S3 has Glacier Storage, but I'm not sure how the NAS would handle versioning and how Amazon handles billing on that stuff. (they may charge for standard storage and then move it to glacier for instance) I just want to get the most bang for my buck and certainly want to protect the data.

I know keeping my stuff on site definitely is a risk and tapes would allow me to maintain a copy under lock and key without depending on the cloud....if I could find a cheap enough solution that's easy to work with.

I just ordered two of these as replacement drives: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008JJLZ7G/ref=ox_ya_os_product

 

[aigomorla]

how much of the 2TB storage do u actually have used?

would it be possible to write them on a dual sided BLUERAY per collection?
Or is each vol just too great for the 50GB max per Dual Layered BL disk?

Id think blueray is a lot faster then tape... also a lot cheaper then the tape method.
Then you would have hard copies for your backup which u can store offsite.

 

[mfenn]

Tape only gets cheap when you have scale. A 2TB HDD costs $100, and a 1.5TB LTO-5 tape costs $30. However, an LTO-5 drive costs ~$1500. So, you would need at least 50 TB before you hit the break-even point.

So, what I'd say to do is to buy a couple (encrypted) 2TB drives and keep them offline in separate places (safety deposit box at the bank, family member's house, etc.).

 

[nsafreak]

Personally I'm a big fan of having physical copies along with a cloud backup. I personally use & subscribe to CrashPlan. Main reasons I prefer it over solutions (even though it's not free): 1) It has a multi-platform client (Windows, Mac & Linux) 2) You don't have to subscribe to make a virtual cloud setup. It has an option to install the client on friends' PCs and use codes to allow you to backup to their PCs and vice versa. 3) Files are encrypted with a pretty strong encryption algorythm 4) The datacenter that is setup for subscribers is well equipped and I'm confident will have no problem making sure my data sticks around

 

[DaveSimmons]

Amazon Glacier storage is pretty cheap but it is essentially write-only since reading the files back costs extra and has a delay of up to a day. I think it's currently around $10 per year per 100 GB of storage but that should drop over time.

With it, they manage multiple backups for you and it's off-site in case of fire, flood, earthquake, theft, tape-chewing dogs.

We had a tape drive backup for the storage server at my previous employer, and tapes do go bad over time so keep that in mind. This was 15 years ago though so maybe durability has improved.

Cloudberry and CrossFTP have free tools for uploading files to Amazon S3 and Glacier.