Knowing full-well all hard drives die eventually I’m contemplating going to an offline storage service. This is personal data, not for a business so I don’t need a super-duper ger-un-teed to survive an atomic attack service; price will be the primary criterion and ease of use second. 50- to 100 gigs should be plenty for a while.
Any dopers out there in a similar situation? Who do you use and how do you like 'em?
I use Mozy.com. Up to two gigabytes is free, while more than two gigabytes (and less than infinity) is five bucks a month. It’s automatic. On my system, the software waits until the computer has been idle for thirty minutes and then does an incremental backup.
Thank you Dewey Finn. Looks like Mozy meets the requirements.
Go tape. It’s classic, it’s sequential, and it’s generally fairly cheap. A big external drive is still probably cheaper, but magnetic tape has this old-school charm.
I guess I’m sort of confused. Your topic and OP specify “offline,” and yet mozy is (and indeed states as the title of its page) an “online” storage solution – but somehow “meets the requirements.”
Do you want to know the best way to back up your data yourself, so it resides someplace other than a computer’s hard drive, or are you soliciting opinions of online storage services?
Tape is pretty expensive considering the media and hardware. But i too like its charm.
I think tape hits a good niche, though. You can get storage capacity that can only be rivaled or beaten by a hard drive. A good external drive shouldn’t degrade either, but if I had to make really long-term backups I’d probably go tape. At the sizes the OP is talking about, the choices are finding ways to logically split the data onto several DVDs (easily as many as 25), get a tape drive (pretty cheap off eBay), or just buy an external hard drive.