Off site data backup/storage?

We have a home-based business and I have everything backed up onsite in such a way that our data could survive storms, flood, computer theft, or hard drive failure, but a friend's house burned to the ground yesterday, which reminded me of the weak link in my plan. We had originally used Carbonite several years ago, but they completely failed when we had a computer meltdown about 6 months later and went to get our data. After several days of trying to get a response from them, we got, "Whoops, sorry, there's nothing there. You're SOL."

I've been reading some good things about Mozy on Cnet. Anyone have any thoughts on them or any other secure, online system to store ~500 GB of data?

Thanks!

This is relevant ...my wife has been nagging me to cloud-backup our computer for a long time.

How much data? If we're a small amount, buy a half dozen terabyte drives, back up to a different one each day, and keep five in a small firebox you can carry with you if you have to run. Keep the friday backup of last week in a lock box in your bank's vault.

I don't know about BenB, but I'm far to lazy to do that!

My wife (techno illiterate) has been saved by Mozy recently, and was very happy.

The low tech solution I had to a similar situation to yours was to keep an ecrypted copy of the backup disk in the glovebox of my truck. If the house were to burn down, the likelihood of the truck going with it is pretty slim.

Problem with keeping the disk in the glovebox is that the interior of the car tends to get hot in summer when you park it and that heat doesn't do the disks much good.

I'm looking at doing this with running Owncloud on a Raspberry Pi with an internet connection. I really want to put one at my parents and run 2 partitions - 1 for me and 1 for them and have the same setup at home. That way we both have redundant off-site data backups for like <$150 each (or so).

Or even solar powered setup in a tree in the backyard.

bgkast wrote: I don't know about BenB, but I'm far to lazy to do that!

It may be overkill for a home office. I worked for a business where we had a series backup tapes two month's worth, and we would - every day - send our latest daily backup to a remote site. (...and they would send theirs to us.)

The net result was that if one of the buildings burned down, the last backup of the servers in it would be at the other site a mile or two away.

I use BackBlaze for our offsite backup here at home. $5 per month, unlimited storage. Reason I like them is because they have been very open about the hardware design. They've blogged about the custom servers they built as their storage building block and even provided plans on how to replicate their custom case and detailed parts lists with cost breakdowns. Very cool.

A number of big research orgs have taken the design and run with it for their storage requirements.

I haven't had to restore from them, but they do offer a service to send a drive/dvds with all of your data if you need restore quickly. Otherwise, it is just off of the internet as fast as your connection will allow. Pretty simple to setup to.

My day job is reselling things like this. Mozy is pretty good. They're owned by the largest storage company, EMC, and have a lot of good enterprise features and the money behind them to ensure they'll be around for a while. I don't deal with a lot of sub 20-TiB customers, but when we do run across one, Mozy is our go-to for pure-play cloud. If you're not using a lot of SQL/Exchange/Oracle type stuff, you're probably good with Mozy Pro. 500GB of cloud capacity would list out at about $2273/yr.

If you have concerns about trying to restore large-scale amount of data from the cloud in the event of a disaster, or if you want to have a local copy for any other reason, I'll usually recommend Barracuda Backup. Enterprise features if you need them, but it's stupid simple to set up. For a half-TiB, you're probably into the 390 appliance which would list out at around $7k for the local appliance, 3 years of support, and 3 years of unlimited cloud.

Those are the two that I usually steer customers towards mainly because they're pretty proven overall and when you're talking about your backups you don't want a provider to flake out. Idrive is out there and looks fairly decent, there are a few private-label offerings out there, but if they're using Asigra as their back-end run like hell from it -- we tried that for a year or two and it is terrible. You can always try removable/portable drives, but that becomes a hassle pretty quick and can be a security nightmare if one goes missing with PPI on it.

BoxheadTim wrote: Problem with keeping the disk in the glovebox is that the interior of the car tends to get hot in summer when you park it and that heat doesn't do the disks much good.

True, but I updated the disk weekly.

If the files were damaged, I just replaced the disk.

Thanks for the suggestions! I'll look into Mozy and Blackblaze. They look like they might be what we're looking for. Our current setup is 3 machines backing up to their own individual USB external HDs, plus they also all back up to a NAS that's hidden in a closet in the middle of the house. My biggest concerns for an offsite backup would be security, since the files we handle are confidential, and ease of getting to them, if necessary. I'm just a bit paranoid, since Carbonite screwed us.

For security I'd recommend using Truecrypt, LUKS or EncFS to encrypt the drive. You can use BitLocker but it's Windows-specific, and I don't like to trust closed stuff (especially since Snowden confirmed the reasons for my mistrust).