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by rdl 5438 days ago
From someone who had building burn down: back up to offsite locations, ideally off-state, ideally off-continent, over the Internet, and CHECK YOUR RESTORE PROCEDURE PERIODICALLY. A wifi backup to a time capsule hidden up in the rafters (digital rat line!) isn't going to help you if crackheads break in...and then burn your place down with an errant crackpipe.

(also, envy on the car journalism; being an equipment reviewer for stuff you really love, like cars, guns, scuba gear, computer gear, headphones, etc., would be a really fun paid hobby)
2 comments
stevejalim 5438 days ago
Yeah, offsite is the way to go, I think. We're due to get fibre broadband here in December, and that's when the whole lot will go up to S3 monthly if not weekly.

That said, I guess I'm talking about ~2TB of stuff (work data and personal data) -- wasn't there a thread somewhere that discussed the various options? I'm in the UK, rather than the US, and would rather keep my data in the EU

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kristofferR 5438 days ago
Try BackBlaze, much cheaper than S3. The data will be transferred to the US, but you can encrypt it if you are worried about that.
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kenjackson 5438 days ago
I tried to use Carbonite. Nice UI, simple service. But with Comcast it was going to take about 3 months to back up 400GB -- and that was with leaving my laptop on 24/7.

To this day I'm not sure if it was Comcast or Carbonite that made the uploads so slow, but I've since had to rethink my offsite back up plans. Would love suggestions.

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rdl 5438 days ago
I use comcast business at home, and use crashplan pro for our laptop and Linux server backups.

The initial backup of my laptop (200gb since I included iTunes mp3 and 2 x 25gb vmware images) took a couple days when idle. After that the incrementals were basically unnoticed.

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rdl 5438 days ago
Encrypt locally (tarsnap, crashplan, etc.) and who cares really where the data goes (except for availability/reliability)?
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lutorm 5437 days ago
The internet backup option isn't really feasible for a normal home connection. With the Comcast 250gb monthly quota it would take me half a year to get all my data up.

In this case physical drives is the way to go.

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