We have about 45GB of data here in the office that if it were ever lost, our company would be screwed. With a subscription to Amazon’s S3 storage service, the freeware utility JungleDisk and some freeware backup program or other (there are plenty out there), we’ll be able to safely and easily store our data offline for roughly $20 a month.
I’ve been looking at a lot of different online storage services lately and this seems to be the simplest and cheapest setup by far. Not to mention reliable, since Amazon isn’t going out of business anytime soon.
I wish I had found this in December while I was in the US. My father’s PC self-destructed just last week and he lost nearly everything.
What exactly do you do with that company. I remeber that your company teaches using lego’s, but what is it that YOU exactly do?
Website development and maintenance, Linux and Windows sysadmin, tech support, employee training, video/audio production and editing, translation, photography, purchasing, and technical research/consulting. Basically, anything here that requires more technical aptitude than using MS Office or a web browser. It’s a small company with >10 employees running five different companies.
Were you at all apprehensive about sending your company’s data out there into the ether? Is it sensitive data?
With that setup, everything’s compressed and encrypted at both ends.
some other options were discussed in David Pogue’s column in the NYTimes.
two look interesting to me: CARBONITE and MOZY ($50-55/year and unlimited storage!)
Carbonite’s my second choice because they’s no guarantee they’ll stay in business or stay at the same price. Probably better for home. They’re just a middleman between you and S3 anyway. If we have to recover quickly, we’ll be slowed down by their daily bandwidth quota. I’ll have to look at Mozy. never heard of them.
One more thing–I want total control of how backups are performed. We might want to do offline weekly/monthly incremental backups if we can afford it. Carbonite is very simple, which is great for home users.
Between all my systems at home (includes home office), I have over 2.5 TB of storage — I am seriously looking into getting a NAS-RAID or two (when I can afford it) just for backups.
Here’s a good post for you to read. It covers all the free options.
http://www.avidardik.com/2006/07/18/how-to-create-a-linux-backup-server-and-automatically-backup-your-windows-xp/
One word of caution with cheap bulk online backup accounts is the common giveaway of large space and upload ability combined with the flip side being a miniscule download or restore allowance per month. This is what is known as the Hotel California of online backup and not a nice scenario if you find yourself in a data loss scenario. I use http://www.backupanytime.com which has no download or restore limitations.
F.W.