jeremy.zawodny.com — A comparison by Jeremy Zawodny that show the cost differences between building your own home backup server vs. using Amazon's S3 service. Interesting conversation about the analysis in the comments below.
Oct 4, 2006 View in Crawl 4
dotcom101010Oct 5, 2006
I am running a home server and i love the fact that i control everything is does.My server is used for more then just file sharing i use active directory so that every computer has the same stuff i only have the make and account once and i can log on any of the computers with all my same stuff.Server Specs2 250 gig seagate HDD in RAID 01 30 gig Westen Digital HDD for OS and programs1 gig ddr ramMSI Main board2.8gig P4350 watt antec smartpower supplyAPC smart-ups 750 (keeps my server and network up and running for well over and hour in a black out).and about my house burning down i keep a HDD at work with a back up.
kyoteOct 5, 2006
I've been trying carbonite. Flat rate service plus 3 months free if you click on the radio icon at the top. it's not a bad service at all. monitors the files for changes, stores deleted files for some length of time before deleting them from the backup. you might take a look at that and see what you think. www.carbonite.com (and no, i'm not an employee or getting paid for referrals)
golgo13Oct 5, 2006
What happens when, god forbid, your house burns down?
diggduggjoeOct 5, 2006
I would worry too much about my data being handed over to the "Kinder, Gentler Fascism" we have today. They will not even need a warrant for a data center, just a bobble-head manager to let them in the door. With the patriot act, they would likely never tell you that they have a full copy of your data in which crack off site. Now, I do not have anything that top secret, but giving up that much control makes me uncomfortable.
hansiversOct 5, 2006
Great thread! Since I didnt't read any description fitting my own home backup setup, you will here some new suggestions I hope it may help somebody outhere.. I have to backup about 50GB daily, for which about 0 to 500MB is new/modified stuff. So, I set up a linux home server with Samba, and I synchronize my Windows laptop with SyncExpert (only modified/new files are mirrored). It's very fast on 100Mbits LAN. However, this home server is synchronized once a day with an remote Linux server via SSH using rsync. Thus, only file changes or new files are compressed and sent via DSL to the remote server. The first time I setup the remote server, I just plugged it on my home LAN and did a full copy of the 50GB between the home and the remote servers. After the initial setup, I move the remove server at my office and the remote server connect once a day to my home server using a SSH public key to synchronize itself.It's cheap, it's secure (data are encrypted and I have a remote backup in case of fire), it's automated, the uploads/downloads never exceed 500MB per month on my DSL connection and I have COMPLETE control over all the hardware and setup.It's the optimal setup I found for my needs.
udhaOct 5, 2006
Sounds like the Pinetree backup place.
patangayOct 5, 2006
Yea, MacOSX time machine is great until your Mac harddrive fails :-PThen?S3 has privacy policies, so, personal data is always personal, the problem is if you have illegal things on your backups.. simple solution, delete all your warez.And he is just talking about backup servers, NOT production/development servers. Those, you will probably still run in house or at hosting providers.
patangayOct 5, 2006
@dotcom101010sooo much trouble, backup every week moving the hd back and forth from work?S3 is such a better solution, run a cron job once a night, and you are done!
mplsboy6Oct 5, 2006
Why would he say the cpu and drives are $1400. When I last checked, I bought a 300 gig hard drive for under a hundred bucks, and the server would just be for backups, so you use an old computer running Linux. He's overstating the cost of a home backup system. I think he works for Amazon. That being said, offsite storage is cool. I would pay to store backups offsite, but I don't really do that much at home that I can't store on DVD's. There are free services that will store my tiny (relative) bit of data.
djmajickmanOct 5, 2006
He also failed to include the cost of the initial upload of data to the server. And how many days would it take to send roughly 125GB of data to Amazon and have it verified that the server received everything. Also how long would it take to get the data back in the event that your home system crashed compared to over a 10/100/1000 internal network connection. I've personally seen what happens when people use over the Internet backup services and it's not pretty.
ka2errAug 4, 2008
> Yea, MacOSX time machine is great until your Mac harddrive failsYea, then you click on the timemachine icon and restore from the timemachine backup on your EXTERNAL harddisk. Even if you have to do a fresh install of the OS on a new, fresh harddrive you can use the timemachine backup, because TM backs up to your EXTERNAL harddrive, SAN-Device or Time-Capsule.It's not perfect but works for most of us.k2r.(Backing up his Filevault-Encrypted MBP to an encrypted backup on the Timecapsule. Yes, it's possible.)
goooooglerNov 2, 2009
I prefer backup on a local server as I do not want to take any chances here. Here is an interesting article that I found that lists some free backup tools <a class="user" href="http://www.ghacks.net/2009/04/26/the-10-best-windows-backup-software-programs/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ghacks.net/2009/04/26/the-10-best-windo ...</a>