Best Online Remote Backup Service w/Linux Client?

technocraft asks: "I've been searching for an online service to backup data from my Linux file server and have come up with nothing. For many users, Carbonite looks to be a great solution: Affordable, with 'unlimited' capacity. Unfortunately for me, you can only backup from Windows XP and explicitly NOT from external drives or network mapped drives (like my file server)." Is anyone aware of an online backup services without these restrictions?

This looks pretty good

[dtfinch]

They use rsync over ssh:
http://www.rsync.net/ [rsync.net]
Base rate: $1.80/gb/month
Volume discounts:
25-49GB - 10% Off
50-99GB - 20% Off
100-199GB - 30% Off
200-399GB - 40% Off
400-999GB - 50% Off
1TB+ - 60% Off

You get supposedly unlimited storage, and pay for only what you use.
I haven't actually tried them though.

Re:This looks pretty good

[Bogtha]

We're customers of the parent organisation, JohnCompanies [johncompanies.com], and I can't recommend them highly enough. The thing that makes them stand out in my opinion is the support, you don't get clueless newbies reading from an FAQ like you do with every other hosting provider I've ever encountered.

I've been looking for an excuse to try out rsync.net, it seems like an interesting service, for example it offers WebDAV access, which is built into Windows, OS X and KDE.

Yeah, I know I sound like a fanboy or astroturfer, but I don't care, it's really rare to find a company that actually gets it so right when there are so many incompetents around, especially in the hosting business.

blacksun

[illuminatedwax]

I use Blacksun [blacksun.ca] which doesn't have the "unlimited" storage you had before, but they are very affordable and offer rsync, ssh, sftp, and the regular linux services as well as the typical dragndrop interface clients. Very nice, and their tech support is helpful and quick to respond!

Re:How do you trust?

[Gothmolly]

Write the keys down on paper. Place paper in bank safe deposit box. Profit.

Jungle Disk / S3

[crt]

Jungle Disk [jungledisk.com] is a cross-platform front-end for Amazon S3 that supports Windows, Mac, and Linux. You only pay the Amazon fees ($0.15/gig/month). On Linux you can mount it directly using DavFS then backup using any software you want (rsync, etc). It supports encryption and caching as well.

Re:This looks pretty good

[igb]

Taking a quick look on Froogle, the tape drive alone will cost about $900, and 80gb tapes cost about $70 each.

If you have serious backup requirements, LTO-3 tape drives are about $6000, the tapes are about $80 each, and they hold (in our experience) close to 1TB with compression turned on. You'll need a fast machine to prevent shoe-shining the tape, as you want to drive ~40MBytes/sec into them for best performance. The tapes last for practical purposes indefinitely --- it's a close cousin of DLT, and I think we lost one tape (and that to a mechanical, rather than tape surface, failure) out of a cycle of about a thousand over five years. Many of those had been recycled (ie scratched and re-written) in excess of thirty times. With LTO the most used tape we have is 8 recyclings, but we've had no failures so far.

The casual claim that tapes are old, expensive technology is simply nonsense if you've got 20TBytes of data and you want to keep a weekly copy for three months and a monthly copy for several years. 20-odd tapes times perhaps 30 sets in circulation is 600 tapes, which might cost about $60000. That's $0.10 per gigabyte, at very conservative media costs. A decent six-drive, 72-slot robot might cost you $60000, so that's a further $0.10 per gigabyte amortised over the whole estate.

You can easily split those tapes between multiple firesafes in multiple locations, too.

It's also about 600TBytes: disk is indeed cheap, but if you can build 600TB on multiple arrays for $0.20/GByte you're doing pretty well, and absent some very funky power management that's going run rather hot (assuming that RAID5 is the bare minimum and you can tolerate say 6+1 raidgroups it's still well in excess of 100 spindles). A six drive robot will easily sink 250MBytes/sec, which is at the bleeding edge of very fast disk arrays (that's saturating multiple FC links, unless you're using 4G FC).

What's the benefit of tape? The marginal media costs are low, tapes don't break while they're quiescent, they don't consume power while they're quiescent and they're astoundingly fast.