I don't know if they allow that, but I was thinking of getting one of the advertised-as-unlimited-storage dreamhost account and using rsync to do my backups. Anyone using this already?
I don't know if dreamhost has done this recently, but I've heard many stories of people having their accounts closed due to "using storage for a purpose other than web hosting".
Yes, it is against their terms of service and I'm sure they enforce it. They now market their storage as "Unlimited + xGB" where the x GB is the amount of space you're allowed to use as personal backup space (currently 50GB).
Dreamhost now has special "backup accounts" and seem to automatically patrol accounts for "abuse" outside of this provisioned space. They give 50gb for free, and then charge 10 cents/gb/mo beyond that.
It's not bad but a far cry from "unlimited." Still, it seems to work fine for rsyncing "small" backups.