[TriLUG] New Year's Resolution: Backup my data (backuppc rocks)

[Jos Purvis]

On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 10:14 PM, Maxwell Spangler
<maxpublic08 at maxwellspangler.com> wrote:
> However, what if you grabbed 20-30 people or a group like Trilug and
> they, in classic co-op fashion, decided to make a certain amount of
> space and bandwidth available for this purpose?  Then you'd be able to
> push out backups and know there are 30 copies in the world when that
> disaster hits?

Crashplan (crashplan.com) has had this as a business model for a
while: you create an account and can backup to their servers, and if
you recruit a friend, you and your friend can dedicate space on your
computers to hosting backups for each other. The backups from your
friend's computer go to a specific area on your computer, you can
designate the maximum space his backups may use on your hardware, and
they're all encrypted so you can't snoop through other people's data.
It's an interesting model, and they have interfaces for Mac, Windows,
and Linux (plus Solaris, it appears, for the "Pro" version), but I've
not heard good reviews about the interface they use for creating or
restoring backups. Might be worth a try, though, particularly since (I
think?) there's a free option.

For me, though, the real problem with online backup services is the
bandwidth usage, particularly when getting started. I've got 40-50
*gigabytes* of data in my digital photography library alone, and I
shudder to think how much data my wife has in accumulated digital
movies, to say nothing of the rafts of digital audio from my recording
work the last several years. Even over a high-speed upload link,
trying to upload all of that to a backup service would take forever,
and heaven forbid I have to restore it at any point. Much more
efficient to have a service that I can mail media to every so often
and they'll pop it into an archive online...or just exchange hard disk
media with a friend and call it even. Perhaps a TriLUG-organized
backup media swap? :) Or have we done that one already--seem to recall
it coming up on the list sometime in the last few years...

    --Jos