Stoopad.com

Back story: In my home I have almost two terabytes of usable storage space: One 250 GB drive in my iMac, two connected external drives at 500 GB and 750 GB each, a legacy NAS at 250 GB, an Apple TV at 150 GB, an Eee PC at with 56 GB total space (including internal and external peripherals) and my phone with 8 GB. Nearly two terabytes of (estimated [and I'm not bothering with "actual usable space," in case you were wondering]) total storage, of which I use a little more than half: The 750 GB external drive is configured as my Time Machine and rsync’d virtual machine backup. The 500 GB drive stores mostly media (music and movies not stored on the Apple TV), and most of my “important” data stays on my Mac. This as less than ideal.

Even though I have Time Machine running, I have no guarantee that the Time Machine backup will be “good.” Yeah, I hope it’s good. Apple tells me it will be “good” (haha, marketing). But I have no idea if it’ll be good in the event of the catastrophic failure of my primary drive. And what if my apartment burns down? Not only would that suck, but I’d lose my most important data (assuming the drives didn’t survive the fire). I’d rather have a better solution. Maybe revolving drives in a safe deposit box? Haha! Not that it’s a bad idea, I’m just lazy.

So I set about looking at online “backup” solutions. I qualify that, because they’re hardly backup, any more than a RAID solution is backup… However, offloading some of my most important data to a remote location securely and conveniently and at a scheduled interval? Well, I can’t pass up a chance to give it a whirl. So I did and this is my experience…

First, yes, I have an iDisk. That’s 15 GB of online storage that Apple gives me because I’m a big sucker and I don’t mind paying Steve Jobs for MobileMe (I allocated 5 GB to email, in case you’re wondering where the extra five went). I sync my calendar, contacts, etc. to MobileMe, which means these items are also on my phone. And I don’t worry about these items. I also have a weekly scheduled backup of most “QuickList” items to iDisk (my iPhoto library, for example). And I’m comfortable enough with this setup, but 15 GB isn’t enough space to hold every RAW photo I have in my general photo library, and it’s not nearly enough space to store any of my music or movies.

So there’s Amazon S3 (using JungleDisk, for example), Mozy, Carbonite and a flock of other providers in the online backup provider landscape. Take your pick, they’re all fantastic.

I settled on JungleDisk/Amazon S3. I already use Amazon S3 and pretty much love it. JungleDisk is a nice little interface on top of S3 that makes it act like a local drive, plus its primary feature is its backup utility: You pick a bucket, it backs up whatever you want to that bucket.

All of your data is encrypted. This is good. My upload speed from Cox is 5300 kbps (estimated using speedtest.net during a peak hour). This is also good. Theoretically (And with a big fat “I’m just guessing” caveat), I could upload 440 GB in a single 24 hour period. Practically, though, it’ll probably take a weekend-plus to upload 200 GB. I find this acceptable since I highly doubt I’ll be backing up that much data to S3… In the end, that much data hosted on Amazon would simply be too expensive. But 30 – 50 GB is perfect and exactly what I’m looking for: Space for my images, possibly music (I’m very protective of my music library!) and some of the (most) important items that make up my functioning system.

It’s quite slow, I’m not going to lie. I’ve only backed up a couple of items, but I scheduled my main backup (all 45 GB) to start this Saturday at 2:00 AM, and I fully expect it to take all weekend, plus some time on Monday and Tuesday. After the initial upload of everything, all later backups should be diffs and I don’t expect it to take as long.

Time will tell. I’ll write an update to this in a month. Of course, the real test will be a full system meltdown. How easy will it be for me to get back everything important?

Are you using an online backup system? Which one? Like it?

EDIT 12/5/08: Ha! I was a tad bit overenthusiastic about my upload speed: To Amazon S3, it’s around the 500 to 600 kbits/sec range. Pretty slow. We’ll see how this works out…