Dreamhost as a backup provider

The more I read, the more tempted I am to bite the bullet, buy “web hosting” space on DreamHost, and just start rsyncing all of both my and my wife’s data up there.

Downsides?

  1. ADSL lines have terrible upload rates
  2. Remote backup means we may not have access if the network is down (which does happen quite regularly)

Overall though, I think remote backup is the way to go. I am far, far too lazy to do regular backups to DVD, and definitely too lazy to copy my backup disks every few years in case of media failures. Outsourcing the lot makes a lot of sense to me. I’d probably try and keep a local DVD-based backup as well, but that would be just for convenience rather than the master copy.

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7 thoughts on “Dreamhost as a backup provider”

  1. It seems like only a fortnight ago that I put together a really quite successful backup script for our server in the office.

    Yep, I did it a fortnight ago.

    If you want to pick over my scripts and laugh at any security problems, just give me a shout. It does actually work rather well – we have a fifteen-working-day (aka three week) rolling backup courtesy of rsync, public-key SSH and hard links. The box that the backup sits on is shortly going to be moved to head office’s server cabinet. My script emails me daily so I can keep an eye on the disk usage and the files that have been updated – so far all is good, and we may move to a four-week backup with a DVD-backup at the end of every four weeks to go with.

    I’m pleased because the system I wrote in Bash scripts is better than the purpose-built Perl monster that it replaced =)

  2. Yeah, I think that’s the post from his blog. The problem with S3 is that the terms and conditions specify that the whole thing might go away at any point; there are no assurances.

    That worries me far too much, especially in the light of the A9 recent feature cuts.

    Although on reflection, I seem to recall hearing about Microsoft using S3 for something? Ah, here we go

  3. How much space you need to backup, how about mounting google mail and using that?

  4. I thought about it briefly, but it has the starting problem of limited attachment size on mails of ~15MB.

  5. Ah sorry, I meant using it as a mounted filesystem. I´ve seen several people suggesting this is possible. I don´t know much about how possible it is tho.

    Surely just a matter of time before google give us all space for free 😉

  6. Well, I guess they’re half way there with the Google Desktop tool doing backups across machines for given directories and so on.

    If they open up an API for that, then yep, Google Disk is here.

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