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Comment by diggan | Hacker News Reader

So what would be a good, affordable backup solution that doesn't get in my way on my linux machine?

I use a cronjob that uses duplicity for encrypted backups with Google Drive as external storage (python2-gdata package on Arch). After Google dropped their price on 100GB to $2/month they became the cheapest option for me.

I'd love to use something like Tarsnap, but storing my ~80GB of data with them would cost $24/month plus $0.30 per gigabyte of bandwidth. And rsync.net is $0.10 per GB of storage, so that would be $8/month. (that price only when signing up through git-annex http://www.rsync.net/products/git-annex-pricing.html )

Good question! cperciva supports Tarsnap. It's not included on the "deals" page yet, but I'd be happy to add Tarsnap if he wants to participate.

We did our best to invite all of the backup software companies (the more the merrier)! Better deals for customers means more people backing up! To participate, drop me a line at hello@backupweek.com.

I simply rsync my entire server (over ssh) to a large disk on another box. Super easy to set up and the backed up data doesn't need any special software to read/restore, beyond standard 'nix tools.

Except if your files get corrupted, then you're screwed.

I solve this by supplementing the daily networked backups with weekly manual backups to an external hard drive that remains disconnected at all other times.

Of course, and the same is true of every backup solution. The way to mitigate that problem is with a decent backup rotation scheme:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backup_rotation_scheme

> the same is true of every backup solution.

Rubbish.

A proper backup involves copies that cannot be modified after they are made (i.e. a snapshot after the backup has run if using disk, or for free on tape).

As it was ambiguous, I figured you must have been talking about the more likely scenario whereby files become corrupt on the live server, unknown to the either users or admins. Over time, these corrupt files then make their way through all generations of backup until no good copies remain.

There's nothing special about an rsync/ssh solution that precludes the backup server from creating a read-only copy of each and any backup.

A mac user, but I've been using crashplan (linux available) for the past three years and I love it. Haven't had any issues yet.

I second the nomination for crashplan. I use it on Windows, but linux client is available.

Depending on your definition of affordable, I've heard people raving about rsync.net for years.

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