Whats the cheapest and easiest to use off-site backup for a few TBs?

[Losse]

Instead of sinking money into a wireless server box with a few TB HD in it, i was wanting to know what my options were for internet backup?

I have used carbonite in the past but i didnt really like its interface and it seemed like a resource hog.

I dont have a ton of data to backup, under 5TB.

[mmettin]

Instead of sinking money into a wireless server box with a few TB HD in it, i was wanting to know what my options were for internet backup?

I have used carbonite in the past but i didnt really like its interface and it seemed like a resource hog.

I dont have a ton of data to backup, under 5TB.

I'm thinking this would be an option

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

You only pay for what you use

[Hardware]

5tb is a huge amount for internet backup. Its impractical. Just buy a few external hdds and use them. You can maybe place them in some bank deposit box or something.

[Brandito]

my only suggestion was going to be carbonite. unlimited storage for a flat rate.

it'll take a month to upload all your data, but it's safe and off site. i remember ryan talking about using it for their data backups of the podcasts. if i recall he was using somewhere up in the TB of space too.

i've been using it and doesn't hog any resources on my rig, not sure what's wrong with the interface, of course i haven't lost any data yet so no need to really use it.

i suppose it also depends a great deal on WHAT you're backing up.

off site storage is a really good idea though. if you have all your backups under one roof your data isn't as safe as it could be.

[cjh6386]

s3 is the best value.

[cjh6386]

agreed with hardware though - 5TB is far too much data to transmit offsite through the internet. You need a local storage server for this, and if you have critical data that you would need in case of a disaster, such as a fire burning down your pc and storage server, you back only that critical data up online.

[Palandri]

What's wrong with a CD/DVD backup? You could then store it any where you like.

[molestedbyasus]

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Read it using Ryan's voice in your mind

[Nope]

What's wrong with a CD/DVD backup? You could then store it any where you like.

7,200 CDs or 625 DVDs

[konnex77]

First to get an idea of what level of suggestions we could make to you it might be important to have more of an idea why do you want to do this. I've got to think that why you want to do this is going to determine how much money you are going to be willing to throw at the problem. If its to save electricity and to have all of your blu-ray movies you've ripped be accessible to the whole house then build or buy a lower end machine with space and power for more hdd's later put it in the garage run an Ethernet cable to it and be done with it.

on the other hand if its for a mission critical D.O.D. database that can never be hacked, corrupted, or offline. Then you are going end up spending some SERIOUS money to make it happen and I have no idea how.

That being said I love to shoot blind and from the hip:

I wouldn't recommend amazon for 5 tb's of just data storage. It would be way more then carbonite at 55 a year and carbonite is automatic. the only draw back is that it will only back up internal drives on your system. As far as load goes 5TB's is a lot of data and that will take some time to upload. but once it is there it is done. I also understood that carbonite has options that allow you to limit backup to certain times of day and levels of cpu power/upload speed.

For that much data I cant think of any other off site back up that gives you that much storage. Every thing else is quoting 2 to 100 GB's and cost way more.

The only other suggestion that hasn't been mentioned that I can think of is for you to do a co-location or managed hosting. But I have no idea how much this is. I could only find companies that wanted to take info and get back to me with a quote. Which to me sounds like it is EXPENSIVE on the level of hundreds of dollars a month. I'm sure that there are some places nearby that could take your machine and put it in there closet and let it run by itself on there internet connection but those types of places aren't going to pop when you type in server co-location into Google and I wouldnt trust them with my data unless I knew the guy.