Best Online File Backup Service?

[OrbitzXT]

My boss asked me to look for an online service to back up our office files on, it's about 150GB total. We have everything backed up here in a couple places but he'd like something out of the office in the event of a fire or some other disaster. Can anyone recommend a few places to look at? I'm trying to find best price for best services. I don't want to choose a bad website and look like a fool.

 

[digibucc]

i had to do this just recently as well.

for most cheaper services, you are limited by 3 things:
ability to backup network drives
amount of space allowed
and number of machines.

keep in mind 150GB over your ISP will take days to backup. if he doesn't need the ease of use and availability an online backup solution offers, i would just recommend a few external drives, back them up and place a few different places/ safety deposit for instance.

with that being said, if you are going to pay for a service, get a good one. the best, most professional and best value i have found is with a company called SOS backup.

$10/month. which is 2x compared to most $50/year services, but the space speed and quality make it worthwhile, definitely.

 

[OrbitzXT]

Hm, I have Fios at home and am used to 40mbps upload, I forgot they have about 0.6 here, it would take around 20 days to upload 150GB. What exactly are you referring to when you say safety deposit? How would I go about rigging something like that up?

 

[digibucc]

Hm, I have Fios at home and am used to 40mbps upload, I forgot they have about 0.6 here, it would take around 20 days to upload 150GB. What exactly are you referring to when you say safety deposit? How would I go about rigging something like that up?

well i was saying if he didn't need to back up every day, he could just store a hard drive with files in a safety deposit box. there would be no rigging to keep backing that up. it'd be manual.

anything over their net connection would then be slow. you could do a full back up through usb, then do incremental over the internet to external drives where you can put them.

if you pay for a service, you will need to do a full back up over the internet, no way around that.

 

[W1zzard]

get a dedicated server and push/pull data to it using rsync

works great for tpu

 

[Kreij]

if you pay for a service, you will need to do a full back up over the internet, no way around that.

Some services allow you to send the inital data to them on a hard drive (or whatever) and then just sync the data when you want to do so.

I do what you suggested (take removable storage media off site), as our work internet connection is not spectacular (~2Mb upload).
It doesn't even have to go to a safety deposit box if you don't want, just get it out of the building.

@W1zz : Isn't renting a dedicated server pretty expensive?
How about you set up another server and rent us inexpensive space on it
(Think additional revenue stream )

 

[W1zzard]

Isn't renting a dedicated server pretty expensive?

it should be cheaper than what other companies are offering you. they have to rent that server to get their own storage, slap on some fees to keep the company going, you pay for that.
or go for a dirt cheap vps where you pay a buck per gig or something

 

[Kreij]

Hmmm .. after a little surfing seems that nothing is very cheap if you need 250+ GB of space.

 

[W1zzard]

amazon s3 costs you 14 cents per gb per month + 10 cents per gb of traffic
14*250 = $35

at ovh/kimsufi you can get a dedicated server with 250 gb hdd for $20 per month

the more storage you need the cheaper it becomes compared to commercial backup hosting

 

[Kreij]

S3 is a good deal. For their "reduced redundancy" storage it would be under $25 a month for 250GB, and still under $30 if that grew to 300GB.
Unfortunately with my internet connection at work it will take 11.5740 days to get the 2Tbs to them (and that's assuming optimal upload speed). DOH!!

Kimsufi has some oddities. You get 250GB of storage, but they only backup 100GB for free. So it looks like if the server you are renting takes a crap, they would not restore it and you would have to upload again unless you pay more. Plus another $19 a month for a firewall (after $150 setup fee). Unless I am not understanding things right on their features page.

Thanks for the info, W1zz.

 

[W1zzard]

extra firewall is useless .. linux has iptables which is perfectly sufficient and often performs better than hardware firewalls.

you dont want to use their 100 gb of backup .. the 250 gb of storage are your backup storage, you have the live data and the on-site backups anyway, so even if the hdd in the server dies you wont lose data
those servers are unmanaged - all they will do is replace broken hardware and reinstall the OS, the rest is your job. not willing to do that? gotta go to a real backup provider then