Cheapskate Offsite Backup
Thursday, 12 February 2009

 

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Adrive helps the skinflint
The problem of offsite backups has vexed me for some time. If the house was burgled by some maniac disc-stealers, or simply burned to the ground I would have lost all my 40,000+ photos from the last 10 years. Not a necessarily good thing. I had tried various techniques, like stashing a hard drive at Tonks' place or work but this just turned out to be too laborious. Besides, what if the San Andreas fault migrated a thousand miles eastwards and swallowed Denver? Same problem -- history would lose the photographic gems from the last decade nonetheless.

So I tried Mozy -- 5$ / month seemed like a great deal. And so it was..._unless_ you're running windows 2003 server as an OS. Elephantdrive? Forgetit, bloatware written by some highschoolers who've rejected compsci for hackery. Carbonite? Asifimgivingmoney4ayear. So my options were limited, confined by my operating system on one side and my desire to spend <6$ /month on the other. Then Santa delivered, with 50GB of free remote space on Adrive.com . My music is 38Gb and my photies another 10Gb, so it won't last forever but it's a good start. Combined with open-source snazzy backup for creating incremental backups and it's a semi-workable ersatz solution. So there.

A few photies from a babysitter-sponsored night on the town (975 and Left on Lincoln/Sutra) with the girls.