

Personal backup strategies with cloudberry and amazon glacier - damianstanger
http://foldingair.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/personal-backup-strategies.html

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drdaeman
Isn't Glacier overpriced, compared to other personal backup solutions?

Say, I have a mere 2TiB of historical data (various junk I made or collected
over last ten years or so). Storing on them with Amazon is $20/mo, and if I
want to look on that photos from 2008 I have to wait for several hours just to
find that I misremembered where they were stored and pulled out wrong files.
And unless it happened that I uploaded a good amount of data on that exact
day, I'll have to pay for downloads.

Other offers for unlimited storage are Cyphertite at $10/mo, Crashplan at
$6/mo, Carbonite at $100/yr, AltDrive at $4.5/mo and so on. While they're
probably not-so-unlimited (they don't say that, but I guess one won't have
much luck storing a petabyte), less respectable than Amazon, and most services
lack an API and require to use not-so-trusty proprietary software that has to
be sandboxed properly, Glacier doesn't look like a good deal to me unless
we're talking about backing up some either quite big data (like tens of
terabytes) or relatively small amounts of data (less than 500GiB).

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation to any of companies mentioned above. Just
happens that I'm currently fleeing from Bitcasa (they suck hard) and looking
at various options to not maintain a self-hosted NAS.

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tfe
The difference is that I trust Amazon far more than those other companies you
mentioned. If they go out if business or even change their "unlimited" policy,
you're exposed until you can get your 2TB re-uploaded to another provider.
It's a pain and a risk I'm unwilling to take. I know Amazon isn't going to
suddenly try to dump me as a customer.

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drdaeman
You're right.

Still, it's easy to improve reliability by introducing redundancy by using two
backup services. And a total of $9-15/mo is still cheaper than $20+/mo. I
presume the chances of multiple independent companies turning back on me at
the same time as reasonably low. Well, it's not either completely impossible
that even Amazon may have some hiccups, too.

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hengheng
I am using Glacier to store a backup of most of my personal data. This
includes my home directory, the most relevant photos I have taken as jpeg, my
gmvault and that's about it. I do not copy over any movies, music, raw photos
or software, as this is my last line of defense, so it only needs to cover the
essentials. I am under 1€ per month this way, and the backup gets refreshed
only every other month or so.

I do have a local server that stores a windows backup image of my whole
laptop, a second Harddisk in that Server to store a copy of the server, and an
external hard disk with a windows backup at my parents that gets a refresh
every time I am over there. All backups are truecrypt images for good measure,
and I have tested recovery. Amazon stores a split truecrypt archive. Recovery
cost about 20€ and took a day.

So yes, glacier is great as a personal backup, if you make it part of a larger
strategy. To me, this is disaster recovery, and a small price to pay for this
kind of insurance of important files and memories.

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e40
The chink in the armor of all these strategies is upstream bandwidth. I have
lots of data to back up. If I had to upload it all, it would seriously soak up
my upstream bandwidth. If I had symmetrical, 1Gbit Google fiber I wouldn't
have to worry, but I don't.

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pdubs
I know Crashplan will let you mail them a hard drive for the initial seed. I
think other services have this too. The solution posted isn't really much less
than Crashplan from what I can see.

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toomuchtodo
Backblaze AND Amazon will do this as well. You can mail a drive to both of
them.

