I use Arq[1] on my macs and it does the same thing but handles all the "complicated" bits that I'd rather be programmatically dealt with. I have 6 macs, about 2TB of backups in Glacier and a ~20GB "system image" backup in hot-storage on S3.
Interested to hear more about your "system image". How do you do it and what do you store in it? Documents / preferences / Library etc? How would you use it in a recovery situation?
Restoration is downloading the vault to a new SSD and shoving it in a computer. The "root" user is included in the backup as an encrypted volume. My setup's a little strange in that the OS disks on my computers are filevaulted and each user's homedir is also in an encrypted volume only they have the password too that's mounted to the correct /Users/folder with fstab.
(It'd probably be helpful to note that I have a hackintosh this is done on with 10 internal bays, in which one resides this SSD with a clone of this SSD elsewhere)
My main system: Hackintosh -- core i5 / 32GB RAM / GTX680, 2 x 250GB SSD, 2x 60GB SSD, 6 x 3TB 7.2K drive. (The handy thing here is my hackintosh build runs the vanilla kernel and I patch all my kexts at runtime so all the binaries are stock -- thus the backups are portable). This is my workstation and it's primarily a single-user system but there is the occasional remote user login. I use this same setup on all my macs though, and this is how it works:
1 60GB SSD for the OS, applications, and caches
X number of SSDs (usually 256GB), one for each user
maroch='diskutil cs unlockVolume <logicalvolumeid>' ##mount aroch's home directory
/Volumes/aroch /Users/aroch hfs rw,bind 0 0
The 60GB backup SSD (in slot #4): An install of (now) OSX Mavericks that includes my standard set of homebrew installs, xcode and the ~20 applications I use daily + Arq. It also has the a backup of my fstab and the root account DMG. There's a daily cron that copies my personal dotfiles to it as well. There's a weekly cron that reboots the workstation into the backup SSD and there's a startup script on the backup SSD that checks for system updates /MAS updates, applies them, Arq backup (Takes ~10mins usually) and then reboots back into the main OS SSD. The files total about 17GB right now but the delta is usually less than 100mb.
If needed, the OS and settings can be restored with Arq by using the backup SSD's vault
There is one question I've had about it. I keep everything in Glacier (about 700GB, I think). My understanding is that nothing is deleted from Glacier. If I deleted a whole backup set and then re-added it, would it upload the content again?
Also, I'm keeping an eye on http://www.filosync.com and I'm planning on trying it out soon. We currently run aerofs which is mostly really good - but sometimes we get into a situation (of our own making, we run it on an aws spot instance that can vanish) and sorting it out is hard work (and time consuming). The most frustrating aspect is that we don't know how it works, so we don't know what to expect when we perform certain operations. Sometimes it doesn't work how we expect and that bites us (I'm currently waiting for 12GB to sync - even though all the machines already have all the content).
Given my (really positive) experiences with Arq I'd like to try a product that was a bit more open about how it worked.
Features I'm interested in: - must use S3 or similar, as long as it's private and "unlimited" - must support multiple clients, even though I don't need real time sync - should encrypt on the client without need of a separate sw
I've been using Dropbox + CloudFogger so far, but dropbox doesn't scale anymore with the quantity of data I have, mostly due to the number of files (and I don't like depending on two different sw for one task).
I'll reply back from my personal email account.
Its not for "I may need this file next week" (thats what your local NAS / Time Machine is for...Glacier is for "what happens if this place burns down". At that point a week and £120 is not high on the list of your concerns...
You an cut down on requests by moving to daily backups (what I do) and narrowing down what you're backing up. Backing up your applications folders will take a ton of requests (Some apps have upwards of 1000 assets whose bless values may change if you open the application and this trigger Arq)
$0.010 per GB / month - Storage 2112.146 GB-Mo 21.12
$0.050 per 1,000 Requests 40,447 Requests 2.02
So for example, if you retrieve 100 GB in one hour, that's $720. If you retrieve 10 TB at the rate of 100 GB/hr for 100 hours, that's also $720.
Translated into bandwidth (assuming you're pulling at this rate for at least an hour), it's about $3 per Mbps. So if you limit your retrieval to 10 Mbps, you'll pay $30, regardless of how much data you retrieve. This makes it fairly easy to cap your expenditure, if you have a client that can stagger its requests appropriately (you need to throttle the Glacier retrieval requests, possibly using Glacier's range requests if you have very large files, not throttle at the network level).
Glacier takes hours just to get the listing of files, or start the file download.
Their pricing is very different. Crashplan charges per computer. Glacier charges per GB of storage and per GB of transfer out.
Think an archive of family videos and photos spanning 30 years, or all the tax documents for a large enterprise.