Backup options

I dump to a tar file and store on amazon S3. It's easy and cheap.

Hi thanks, yep I looked more and s3 is the best option.

Im backing up to home and then using cloudberry to backup my entire home computer to s3

Glacier is (or will be) an option.

Backing up your home: BackBlaze. The idea that anybody would consider S3 cheap for this is laughable: S3 would charge $62.50 per month just to store that 500 gigs, and there would be any bandwidth and IO charges on top of that.

BackBlaze is $3.96 a month (in a lump payment, $5/mth otherwise), and provides unlimited storage for a single machine. The downside? Windows and OS X only (and it won't do network drives), so it's really just meant for desktops and workstations, not servers. So it's not going to back up your linode.

Glacier does look interesting, though. 500GB would be $5/mth to store. Additional charges (retrieval fees, bandwidth fees, early deletion fees) would probably add another buck or two. But it's definitely MUCH cheaper than S3. Still not as cheap as backblaze, which also comes with all the client software…

Yep it can get expensive

S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage cuts it down by 30%

I think many of these smaller backup providers could go but or get hacked so I might do a full full terabyte backup with someone like you mentioned but For $20 per month keep my ~100gb of business critical data at amazon

@Guspaz:

Backing up your home: BackBlaze. The idea that anybody would consider S3 cheap for this is laughable: S3 would charge $62.50 per month just to store that 500 gigs, and there would be any bandwidth and IO charges on top of that.

BackBlaze is $3.96 a month (in a lump payment, $5/mth otherwise), and provides unlimited storage for a single machine. The downside? Windows and OS X only (and it won't do network drives), so it's really just meant for desktops and workstations, not servers. So it's not going to back up your linode.

Glacier does look interesting, though. 500GB would be $5/mth to store. Additional charges (retrieval fees, bandwidth fees, early deletion fees) would probably add another buck or two. But it's definitely MUCH cheaper than S3. Still not as cheap as backblaze, which also comes with all the client software…

Instead of BackBlaze, look into CrashPlan. It supports Windows and OS X and Linux. Instead of $3.96/mo per machine it's $6/mo for up to 10 machines and unlimited backup space. If your home internet connection isn't the fastest, you can pay extra and seed the backup with a hard drive by mail. I don't work for them, but I do use them at home to backup three Macs and one Linux media server.

(I don't and wouldn't use it for backing up web servers since I prefer to manage that on a more stringent [and at times, manual] basis.)

$6 is the four year price, it should be noted. It seems to be a tradeoff. BackBlaze is much simpler to use and much faster (without any throughput issues) with better customer support and a native client (CrashPlan is Java), but CrashPlan has Linux support, cheaper for multiple computers, supports local backups, and seed disks.

A couple of choices to consider, depending on your cost v.s. effort tolerance, that are slightly different than what you asked, but are my personal preference, and what I do now.

All involve using BackBlaze to backup your Windows home machine. There are several choices for the Linode Linux backups:
3. Purchase Linode's Backup for each Linode (what I do now);

5. Write your own backup (rsync via cron, which is what I did on DreamHost VPS just before I moved here to Linode) between your Linodes, but that probably says you should move one of the linodes to another data centre, rather than having them all in the Japanese data centre;

6. Backup from Linode to your Windows machine (probably have to be incrementally even with a very fast Internet connection) where BackBlaze will do the rest so long as the backup file is in a Windows directory and isn't too, too big (which is what I used to do before DreamHost)

I have about 1.2TB at BackBlaze now, all from a single Windows machine, for $50/year.

@jonradio:

I have about 1.2TB at BackBlaze now, all from a single Windows machine, for $50/year.

http://www.quora.com/Backblaze/Is-Linux … -Backblaze">http://www.quora.com/Backblaze/Is-Linux-support-a-2012-priority-for-Backblaze

jebblue is correct to say that BackBlaze does not support Linux, but I have successfully placed Linux backups, even something as simple as a .tar.gz file, into a Windows directory on my home computer and had BackBlaze back it up.

The key things to investigate about BackBlaze are: 3. Be sure you have reviewed and corrected the default settings of File Extensions that are excluded from backup

5. Determine the current maximum file size exclusion (it has changed since BackBlaze started) and either break up any larger files you might create for backup or make other arrangements

6. Make sure you know exactly how a Restore will work for your situation. And test it.
   The last point is probably the most important. It works both ways. Downloading a lot of data does take a long time. But, for nearly all Internet connections, downloading is faster than uploading, often by a factor of 10 or more.

On the other hand, some data needs to be restored more quickly than other data. And some data does not need to be backed up at all, let alone restored from BackBlaze. For example, the vast majority of my linode disk space is files that are part of the Linode install packages. Although it is more convenient, I probably don't have to back them up at all, just so long as I backup the settings I've changed and the actual contents of my web site, though even my web sites have lots of "system files" I will get if I reinstall the software.

@Guspaz:

$6 is the four year price, it should be noted. It seems to be a tradeoff. BackBlaze is much simpler to use and much faster (without any throughput issues) with better customer support and a native client (CrashPlan is Java), but CrashPlan has Linux support, cheaper for multiple computers, supports local backups, and seed disks.

Correct, I should have mentioned that you need to prepay for a significant period of time to get the cheaper price.

Hi all useful info cheers

How many Mbps do you average uploading to BackBlaze?

@webconcepts:

Hi all useful info cheers

How many Mbps do you average uploading to BackBlaze?
I get well over my rated ISP upload speed (5Mbps) because BackBlaze does compression before it transmits.

They offer a throughput test here:

http://www.backblaze.com/speedtest/

But, again, expect more given their compression.

Nope.

I was thinking about this a bit. I really liked how I could do Snapshots on my VMWare server alos.
As such I really think Linode needs to store more snapshots for the $5 per month. IE: 7 Daily Snapshots. 4 Weekly Snapshots. 12 Monthly Snapshots.

I think one way to work the system might be to:
Do a Snapshot
Make a New Linode:
Restore to the New Linode

Do another Snapshot.
Also restore to that same New Linode

etc, etc.
Many Linodes actually use few resources so this can work potentially.

Another Working Option, at least for Linux Installs, is to use the TKLBAM System of TurnKeyLinux. The trick is to get Turnkey Linux installs running on Linode, which I have done. Still, it would be nice to fire up TurnkeyLinux on Linode as easy as it is on AWS.

Once you have TKLBAM (Turnkey Backups) they are quite efficient and inexpensive. I do do this as redundancy on my Linodes.