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Ask HN: What service do you use for personal file backup?

12 points by agotterer ↗ HN
My Mozy subscription is about to end. I thought the overall service was good, but sometimes unreliable or slow. I'm trying to decide if I should renew or go elsewhere. What other backup services do you recommend?

29 comments

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vaksel
none really,

I just backup on DVDs every 3-4 months, the folders that change over that period.

agotterer
I do that as well. But there's always that small chance or fire or theft. I also like having incremental backups that are taken every night. Just in case a file gets accidentally modified/deleted or corrupted. Better safe then sorry, and for $50ish bucks a year it easily justified.
aberman
I use dropbox for everything. I can't imagine a better solution.
agotterer
I also use dropbox. Its fantastic for sharing. But to me its not a real backup solution. Everything doesnt live in the same folders or drives, seems like a lot of work to turn dropbox into a half baked backup solution.
swolchok
You can start by moving things into Dropbox and symlinking them back to their original locations. Can't help you if you're on Windows.
edb
Jungledisk! It allows you to store all yor data on your s3 account
agotterer
This comes out to slightly higher then my Mozy account would cost per month. Does Jungledisk do any encryption or protection for you? I know Mozy encrypts everything.
rgrove
Be careful with Mozy. If you haven't done a test restore, I strongly recommend you try one now. The Mozy restore process is extremely broken and has been for years.

You can read about my horrible experience with Mozy (and the horrible experiences of hundreds of commenters) here: http://wonko.com/post/it_turns_out_mozy_isnt_so_hot_after_al...

agotterer
After some more research it appears jungledisk is the best option. I have never had to do a restore from Mozy, but the reviews and horror stories are enough to turn me off.

Thanks everyone!

dryicerx
Amazon S3.

  cron job -> tar gz -> s3cmd -> s3
Their cheap, very reliable, and fast. What else can I ask for.
cperciva
What else can I ask for?

How about faster, cheaper, and more flexible? If you back up the same or overlapping sets of files, tarsnap's snapshotting functionality will probably result in it using less bandwidth (and thus end up being cheaper) than a raw tar | gzip | s3 approach.

dryicerx
The --newer switch does the trick
whatusername
--newer woks at the file level - I believe that tarsnap works at the block level. So depending on the nature of changes - tarsnap (or anything else block based) would likely still be more efficient.
cperciva
Incremental archives via 'tar --newer' are better than just storing complete archives each time, but they fail compared to tarsnap in two important ways: 1. If you modify a file and then perform a backup, you'll store the entire new file rather than only the parts of the file which changed; and 2. If you modify a file and then perform a backup, you now have two copies of that file stored, and you have to continue paying to store both copies even if you only care about the most recent version of the file.
dryicerx
Point taken. Of course you are comparing a full personal backup solution meant specifically for this task to a one liner :)

But for my purposes as personal data backup, I just wouldn't see a speed or price difference of that type of efficiency.

rgaidot
rdiff-backup distance (via ssh)
KB
I prefer my Apple Time Capsule. Wireless backup, runs in the background whenever my MBP is up, fixed up front cost, and all my data stays on my own network.
dazzawazza
Everything I care about goes in to an offsite SVN repository.
kailoa
For just about everything non-media, I use mercurial to a colosite. Works fantastic. Big media files (movies, iTunes Library, etc.) are backed up locally to a big data server.
Elepsis
SugarSync, though I also use it to keep files in sync between PCs.
catone
I've been very happy with SugarSync. I also back up my most important files to a couple of USB thumb drives.
mrinterweb
Time Machine on mac, Back in Time on Linux. Both are great. I backup to a network drive. If you are using a mac, and you want to use time machine, don't waste your money on their time capsule product. To find out how to use time machine with a non-apple backup resource, look into sparse bundles.
mustpax
I make bootable clones of my laptop hdd with SuperDuper. I use 2 drives and an external SCSI drive enclosure for this. This way, I have a weekly copy and a daily copy. And when my laptop hdd fails I can switch over to a good copy with no downtime.

I also use Dropbox for a certain subset of my documents, so that adds another layer of backups w/ partial rollback as well.

Online backups are good, but an external SCSI enclosure costs at most $40 + the cost of an internal drive, which is cheaper, and allows faster recovery.

ballen
Jungledisk for my laptop, Duplicity -> Amazon S3 for servers.
rgrove
CrashPlan. I've got it backing up all my machines to a Drobo on my LAN as well as remotely to CrashPlan's servers, encrypted before it crosses the wire, and it costs me $5 a month. Been using it for years and have done several very large restores and it's worked like a charm.
mjh
rsync.net has been fantastic over the years, I use them and several of my clients do as well. No first level support, straight to an engineer. Plus discounts for open source projects, students, etc.

In addition to their own backup agent; they support rsync, scp, sftp, ftp, rdiff-backup, Unison, duplicity, svn+ssh, WebDAV and any other combination or concoction you can come up with.

Plus, they have a ToS agreement that can't be beat: http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/tos.html

smithjchris
2x 16Gb USB sticks and TrueCrypt.

I don't keep anything immediately replacable (like media).