Advice for Archiving from Mac
 

I have about 50 + GB of data residing on an External drive as well as on DVDs. I am now thinking of getting an online service to store my data so that I do not have to worry about backups of the archive.

The cheapest service I have found is a Hosting package from www.godaddy.com which offers 100 GB of storage for around $ 11 a month.

Is this worth it? What are my other options?

I am on a quest to reduce material goods at home.

As usual, Thank you in advance.

Typically hosting plans do not allow the space to be used as an online backup.

Also troubling are these provisions in the Godaddy T&Cs.

Why not just back up to DVD's and drop them off at a friends house? Or leave them at the office, in a safety deposit box? With the low costs of dvd's off site back-up just doesn't make much sense anymore.

If you have a newer mac you can use backup to store files on you @mac space.

I have worked with http://www.rsync.net/ before. Starting at $1.80/gb/mo. There are other commercial backup services out there, but not many support the mac. You can access webdav servers with the finder natively -- it is the same technology/protocol Apple uses for their .mac idisk.

Here's a link to their Mac OS X page:
http://www.rsync.net/resources/howto...tegration.html

More on the burn to DVDs and leave at a friend's house technique... you could make disk images and encrypt them, or make encrypted disk images... that way you could feel more secure about your data finding its way out without your supervision. You may also want to keep a copy at your desk at work, again encrypted for your privacy. I know others who just keep a copy in the trunk of their car, but I wouldn't depend too heavily on that, since temperatures and constant movement can be detrimental to long term media storage.

Buy another external USB drive. Back up to it once every two weeks or a month. Keep it at your place of work. That way you'll have more than one copy and no single point of failure. The online services will cost a lot more and restoring 50Gb over your cable modem/DSL will take quite a while...not to mention that most ISP's will give you <10GB per month.

With the cost of hard drives being so cheap these days, I agree with the others here that an external hard drive is an excellent backup choice. I carry around a 2.5 inch hard drive enclosure complete with firewire and USB interfaces, with a 120 GB Seagate Momentus drive inside. So small and lightweight, yet very fast for backup purposes.

If you want online storage, I'd recommend Jungle Disk. They're a front-end to Amazon's S3 service, and they're dirt cheap - 15¢ per gigabyte for storage, and 20¢ per gig transferred. . 50GB would cost you $10 to transfer it up, and then $7.50/month. Best of all, you wind up using Amazon's backups, which are quite a bit better than anything you devise yourself.

They have Mac, Windows and Linux clients.

Jungle Disk looks quite good although there are some drawbacks I see in here http://www.jungledisk.com/faq.shtml Nothing too serious if it's truly just an archive, though. If it's an archive where you're really just going to upload once and forget it except on the off chance you need to get something out of there, this should be perfect.

The main drawback of online storage in general is that you can only upload to it as fast as your connection's upload speed, which on many types of connections is much slower than your download speed. So 50GB is gonna take some serious time to get uploaded.

Other than that, though, looks like it's even cheaper than an external drive, at least until several years go by....

I would buy high quality backup rated dvd-r or more preferably dvd-ram (if your hardware supports it) discs. Then archive the files using a combination of rar and par2 (mostly used on usenet). Par2 is a data redundancy scheme used on most alt.bin posts and works miracle even on heavily damaged archives. Burn at the lowest possible speed.

If you are concerned with having physical media with potentially sensitive material you could always encrypt it, but I would rather rely on the security of the physical location.

Yeah, you wouldn't want to use it for lots of up and downing of files, and that 50GB initial transfer will take forever. Once you get it done, though, you can use rsync nightly and it'll just move changes.

The nice thing about an external drive is that you're not just backing up your data. You can back up the entire contents of your hard drive: OS, software, preferences, the whole bit. (I use SuperDuper but there are other options.) If anything happens you get another laptop, boot from the external drive, and you've given the new system a "brain transplant" from your old one. If you have a temporary replacement, keep running from the external disk; if it's permanent, copy it onto the internal drive.

That saved my bacon when an FA spilled milk onto my PB in flight a few months back. I was out of business for the duration of the trip (fortunately OK that time) but as soon as I got home I borrowed a friend's spare iBook, plugged in the external drive with the backup from the day before the trip, and was 100 percent back in business immediately. I repeated the process when the replacement PB showed up. (Yes, the airline paid for it.)

(This won't cross PowerPC-Intel platforms, but it works within one family.)