Insurance For Your Data
About a month ago, I had a terrible dream that there had been a fire in my house and though I'd managed to save the kids and Amy, I felt as if I'd lost something irreplaceable. I didn't actually solve that in the dream (from what I can remember) but on the way into work the next day, I realized that I would have lost all my digital pictures and thousands of digital documents I had created over the past 10 years. Sure, I'd been smart to back everything up multiple times on RAID 5 disk arrays (I've had many hard disks fail) but the problem was that all of this data was stored in one physical place. A fire, flood or major earthquake would mean losing them forever.
Offsite storage isn't new to me (I back up all of my client's websites in two different locations (one East Coast and the other on the West Coast) which has saved my ass on a few occasions. Also, at the time, I managed an Engineering group for a major ISP where we took data backup extrememely seriously.
My were requirements weren't simple:
1) At least RAID 5 (preferably RAID 6 and NO SOFTWARE RAID)
2) Secure datacenter in a geologically and politically stable part of the world
3) Good, redundant connectivity
4) Support for rsync, sftp, ssh, Webdavs, smb and fuse (specifically sshfs so I can mount it locally on my Linux box)
5) A decent TOS (terms of service)
A week's worth of searching led me to rsync.net. They're a little pricey ($1.80 per gig per month) but these guys know what they're doing and only doing this one thing (most other providers also did shared web hosting). They have a TOS that really favors the privacy of the customer and secure file transfer is their priority. They support all the protocols I required above and just yesterday added Dupliclity which is basically rsync + gpg. Kick ass.
I've been using them for a little over 3 weeks now and they get 5 stars. SSHFS mounting has worked flawlessly and they even helped me with some really crazy stuff I was trying to do with rsync. It took me only a few hours to write a shell script that rounded up all the changed data on my machines and NAS arrays and automatically upload them to my rsync share.
If you are serious about protecting your data, sign up with rsync, they're really the only game in town.
September 6th, 2006 - 13:52
Mikey,
Check your email. Tell me who the pic reminds you of.
Love, Ma
September 15th, 2006 - 20:37
Ma, somethow, I missed this comment. Of course, that picture reminds me of Star. I’ve never really dealt with her passing though I probably acted as if it didn’t matter to me. It did but part of me had let her go months before and the other part of me hasn’t dealt with it.