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Comment by legohead | Hacker News Reader

1cent/GB still isn't that impressive to me.. I have terrabytes I need to archive -- mostly family photos and videos (and my oldest kid is 5!). 1 terrabyte = $10/month. It's still cheaper to just buy external hard drives.

There are those online backup services that are unlimited for $X/month, but I have been bait-and-switched by those services twice now, and it takes such an incredibly long time (months) to upload everything.. so I've quit relying on those as well.

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I also have about a terabyte of videos of kids and so forth.

You are right that external hard drives are a cheaper option, but you must actually take the time to transfer the drives offsite. I'm lazy and since I can't automate physical transfer of drives, that does not work for me. That's why I use Glacier via Arq.

Aside: CrashPlan and a few others allow me to backup to drives I've placed at a friend's house. But I'm not interested in setting that up.

What about having a small device, say based on a BeagleBone board (or similar low power) hooked up to a USB drive and wifi. Then set it up in your car to power up for a while when the car is turned off. When it power up, it looks at the network that it can connect to -- if it is your home network, then rsyncs from your home backup server. If it is an alternate (say, office network, or another place you visit frequently), it can rsync to that server.

If someone marketed a turn-key solution like this (home backup appliance, plus vehicle-based transfer appliance), would this be a good alternative to online based services?

That's a clever idea.

I have been wishing for something like that for years. I'd love to have all my music sync'd to car automatically when I get home. Even better if it can take all my docs and whatnot with me. Security would be an issue; you're upping your exposure immensely by driving your data around.

Ouse a pair of mirrored drives (software raid1) for my main home storage, with a corn job rsyncing that to an external USB drive running encfs (which I swap out approximately weekly with a duplicate in my office drawer) - I could happily wifi sync that encrypted drive to one in my car without worrying about it if/when it goes missing. (and I've got a spare RaspberryPi and wifi adapters on the project box too… I can just see the hassle of getting a DIY power supply from the cars "12v" system to reliably power the RaspberryPi being more time wasting than I'd be prepared to invest in this though… Noisy automotive power systems are a pain in the ass…)

Problem solved: http://www.mini-box.com/DC-DC

Take a look at one of those phone power pack batteries. These already have clean USB 5.0V output, and can charge while it is in use.

Security would be an issue

Encryption would solve that.

I think you can help yourself a ton by using compression softwares for images, and especially videos. The cameras nowadays are of very very high resolution -- I am pretty sure that even if the image/size is quartered by a good compression method, your eyes won't notice a thing, be it on screen, or in print.

Why would you ever back up lossy, compressed copies of your irreplacable pictures? If you're going to do that, you might as well just put them all on Facebook.

Exactly

In terms of long-term storage, decent lossy compression and Facebook are both better bets than lossless images on a hard drive you don't bother backing up because you can't justify the cost.

You do realise that Glacier is triply-redundant and your data is stored in at least two geographically redundant locations. Not to mention that they ensure that data isn't undergoing bit rot as will definitely happen with HDDs that are just sitting around..

They do feel a bit more reliable than just buying your own external hard drives. Or do you have a good data recovery plan?

I admittedly do not have a good data recovery plan. A house fire and it's lost (assuming the drives are beyond repair).

I'm kind of hoping a good+cheap service actually comes along. All I'd really need to do is take a backup to work though and swap them out once in a while -- but I'm not disciplined enough for that :)

Backblaze has worked very well for me. It took two months to upload but now it stays synchronized. When I had a disk failure I had them overnight a HDD to me for $250.

This is why I worry about cloud backup — as things stand (local + periodic offsite backups), I periodically flatten and bare-metal-restore my systems for the sole purpose of testing backups, so I have a reasonable level of confidence that the backups will work as intended when disaster strikes. For $250, I'd probably never do this.

You don't need to pay them $250, you can download your data at 1MB/sec or so. I just needed my data ASAP and paid them to overnight the disk.

Rereading my post, apologies if it came across harsh. I'm in pretty much the same boat. My kids are right about 5 and it is crazy how much I've managed to accumulate. I'm currently forcing myself to edit down pictures when I get a chance and paying for Amazon's cloud drive.

I certainly wish things were cheaper, but all of the "do it yourself" options have left me more than a little worried at my own lack of discipline working against me.

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