Offsite backups for the rest of us?

[Sy]

Lennart mentioned istop.com in another thread.. and so I looked at
it.. and I wondered.

Well, the first thing I saw was "Headache surcharge for servers
running Windows - $10/mth extra".

Buuut..

It's perfectly reasonable to hire someone's box somewhere for just
this purpose.  In fact, looking at their rates it seems quite natural.
 5GBs a month sounds just fine for a good amount of backups.  The only
worry is backing up that initial chunk of data.  These guys seem cool
enough that you could probably arrange to ship a drive and ask them to
dump the contents into the box somewhere.

This is really just an extension of having a spare box at work which
you can push your offisite backups to.



On 4/12/05, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 12, 2005 at 02:10:03PM -0400, Sy wrote:
> > On Apr 12, 2005 12:27 PM, Michael Galea <michaelgalea-4VtgCsEi+FIybS5Ee8rs3A at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> > I want to avoid using a bay, because powering down (twice) is
> > annoying.  Right now I'm thinking of an external usb bay.  I saw a
> > couple of nice ones here and there.. maybe I should drop by canada
> > computers on my way to the meeting, and pick something up.
> >
> > The *real* solution, of course, would be to have another box
> > somewhere, and to have a gigabit network between the two systems, and
> > to throw backups into that box.. which can be powered off without
> > annoying the main box.
> 
> Yeah, so when are we going to get unlimited gigabit ethernet to our
> houses?
> 
> > I just got a separate firewall going.. so I don't have a spare anymore
> > (there's no way in heck I'm using my firewall as a fileserver.. heh).
> > Maybe I should pick up a $2 486?  Hmm.. I do have a 486 laying around
> > which is begging to be built.  I do also have an i/o card.. I could
> > pick up some drive bays and go to town on it.
> 
> Remember most 486's were limited to 512M, 2G or 8G drives.  A few have
> good enough bios's to run up to 137G, but non do LBA48 (drives over 137G
> need this), although I think Linux can do LBA48 in software if using PIO
> mode (not DMA) although at that point your transfer rate is about 2MB/s
> which would make filling a drive that big nuts in the first place.  If
> the sytem takes PCI cards you may be able to run a nice new controller
> card.  Of course aiming for a $100 Pentium 1/2/3 level machine may be
> much more productive.
> 
> > * No gigabit though.. but then that's what intelligent synchronization is for.
> > * The external usb bay is probably more travellable than the removable
> > drive bay though..
> 
> Certainly more compatible with a random PC.  If your house burns down,
> and you can't find that particular drive bay, well then you have to
> dismantle the drive cage and put the drive in normally to access the
> backup.  I guess that is OK since the restore should be the exceptional
> case rather than the common case.
> 
> Lennart Sorensen
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