Port 443 shaped - not by ISP

[ranger]

Hmm, well, for just 2 years of subscription to their 1-PC unlimited plan or 1 year subscription to their family plan, you can buy a 2TB external USB drive.

Let's you include the internet costs. It costs any ADSL ISP a minimum of R3.50/GB purely for the downstream bandwidth (not any other systems required, not any infrastructure, not any salaries, marketing etc., and assuming much cheaper transit providers than we currently use). So, if you were to restore 1.2TB once in 2 years it would cost R4200, the monthly cost of the bandwidth is a (absolute, impractical to actually operate) R175.

For this volume of data, you can easily afford to buy a NAS (e.g. HP Microserver, they could be had at <R1500), 2 internal 2TB drives,and one 2TB USB drive (for off-site). I haven't included electricity costs here (but, we are really comparing absolute minimum costs).

And you would be able to restore 800GB in a day or two

(So, while internet-based online storage is good for convenience, IMHO bulk backups of 500GB+ don't really make sense)

 

[rrh]

Hmm, well, for just 2 years of subscription to their 1-PC unlimited plan or 1 year subscription to their family plan, you can buy a 2TB external USB drive.

Let's you include the internet costs. It costs any ADSL ISP a minimum of R3.50/GB purely for the downstream bandwidth (not any other systems required, not any infrastructure, not any salaries, marketing etc., and assuming much cheaper transit providers than we currently use). So, if you were to restore 1.2TB once in 2 years it would cost R4200, the monthly cost of the bandwidth is a (absolute, impractical to actually operate) R175.

For this volume of data, you can easily afford to buy a NAS (e.g. HP Microserver, they could be had at <R1500), 2 internal 2TB drives,and one 2TB USB drive (for off-site). I haven't included electricity costs here (but, we are really comparing absolute minimum costs).

And you would be able to restore 800GB in a day or two

(So, while internet-based online storage is good for convenience, IMHO bulk backups of 500GB+ don't really make sense)

Part of any backup plan is an off-site backup, to be used in cases of total disaster e.g. when your house burns down.

It also protects against burglars stealing your NAS / USB drive / whatever when they steal your PC's, leaving you incapable of rebuilding your data.

If all you have is music and/or movies that can be re-downloaded then it probably doesn't warrant an offsite backup. But if you work from home, keep irreplaceable data (e.g. photographs, accounting records etc.) or similar, then the $4.00 / month that Crashplan charges to provide a remote backup system is relatively cheap insurance.

 

[Legosa]

Have to agree with rrh. How often do you decided to update the offsite backup (2TB hard drive). Once a day, once a week initially. Then you get lazy it only happens once a month.

Need to keep backups to the 3-2-1 principle. 3 copies, on two different media types (Solid state, DVD's, Magnetic Hard Drives), tapes) and 1 offsite.