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Comment by cromulent | Hacker News Reader

A non-cloud off-site backup appliance.

This is what I want (I know there are alternatives, but this is what I want):

A device that I buy, and can plug at least one hard drive in to. I give it some sort of passphrase. I then place it in a friend's house and connect it to their internet connection.

I can then access it remotely from my house. I can easily backup my stuff to it. My backups are encrypted, both over the wire and on the drive.

When my house burns down, I can drive over there and get all my photos and records and stuff, instantly.

I don't pay a monthly fee. I buy the device and then it is mine.

I know I can build this myself. I don't have time. If I could buy this I would.

It would be nice if it was easy to use the other way around, e.g. buy one for your parents and keep it at your house and automate their backups somehow.

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Hey there,

I know it does not totally answer your request, but you totally can achieve that with Crashplan; and for free. Simply buy a NAS or equivalent, place it at your parents and install Crashplan on it.

It is not as perfect as a totally untied system like you want, but it is free and offsite :).

I am a happy customer of Crashplan for a while but other than that I have no ties there :).

https://www.crashplan.com/en-us/

Yeah, I think it is close but not quite. It seems that you can back up to a friend's trusted computer, but it has to be turned on. Plus I don't necessarily want to trust them in that way.

If you expect your friend to accept having something plugged all the time, I assume you'd be ok with having a similar device at your place running their backup, right ?

In that case, you can buy a NAS for you, have them buy one for them, backup stuff on your own NAS and let the replication from your NAS to their NAS happen in the background.

Bonus: backups/restore/browsing are much faster, and you can more easily accommodate multiple people wanting to backup at the same place -- instead of one device at your place for each of your friend, it's only one at your place to which all your friend's NAS backup to.

I use Synology NAS, not with this setup, but I know they have the software to do exactly this.

Try Synology Hyperdrive. I'd assume that all the other NAS vendors do something similar.

My Synology NAS does exactly this. Besides this it backs up my Google Drive and Dropbox too.

You could probably do something like that with FreeNAS and ZFS send.

Also, Crashplan has a "backup to friends" feature.

Raspberry running an SSH daemon or rsync or attic or whatever?

There's been a few services like this. None have seems to have made it, at least I can't remember any names.

Product already exists in the form of consumer NAS devices. You don't have to build anything, just turn on remote access.

You can do this with Time Capsule I believe. Doesn't help for windows or linux of course.

I want exactly the same thing!

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