Crashplan or backblaze are very user-friendly, but rather expensive, too. As a cheaper alternative, you can use Amazon Glacier. It costs mere pennies a month. ($0.18 in my case, where I would spend over $5.00 a month at crashplan/backblaze). However, AWS will charge you a lot more if you ever need to get your data back in a hurry. As a last resort solution (for instance my house burns down and my off-site external harddisk gets stolen) it's excellent, though.
Crashplan and backblaze are not rather expensive, they're cheap. Five bucks a month and you don't have to do any complicated calculations when you want your data restored.
Okay, "expensive" might be stretching it a bit... But in my specific case it's a lot cheaper. If you have several TB of data/photos and/or want an impeccable UI, by all means, go for one of these!
I considered the same thing. But when you are backing up several terabytes of photos and home movies collected over many years the cost of storing them on Glacier isn't as cheap as using the unlimited service of Crashplan or Backblaze ($10 a month vs $5-6 month). Furthermore, Crashplan and Backblaze don't charge you to retrieve your data unlike Glacier, which is where it gets very expensive.
Absolutely. After messing around with various combinations of rsync/ssh/unison/s3/glacier/etc for a few years, I bit the bullet and paid for Crashplan. It's cheap - the family plan is ~150 USD/year for up to ten computers, unlimited.
It's a lifesaver. I've installed it on my parents/wifes/siblings computers and the piece of mind it gives me is immense - when I get the inevitable phone calls about the damn computer deleting that important file, I can either tell them how to recover it, or do it myself.
I'd like to use the Crashplan Family option to cover everyone but since it's all shared and there's seemingly no way to silo the data per-computer, that's a total non-starter. Which is a shame because I'd love to give them my cash.
Does anyone have an open implementation of the glacier api? I'd like to add support for it to my backup tool, but I don't want to have to take on the financial risk of a large bill from Amazon if I happen to mis-use the api. So I'd like to try it out on a local server first, to project what the cost would be after a few months of use.
Actually, I meant is there an open project where I can put something on my own server, to provide the same API that glacier uses? That way I can development / test my code against it instead of testing against Amazon directly.