Since the fires here in California I've been thinking about off site back up of all the data on my computers.

I have a backup drive of course in case my hard drive crashes, and I religiously back up. But what if something were to happen to my home....while I were away?

Obviously I need another set of backup...off site. But how?

I have 30gb of images alone!!! Then theres all the websites and personal info...close to 50gb.

I checked for offsite, online solutions...but we're talking about $500 a month + for this type of storage....get real.

I thought about CD or DVD backup....but what a pain. It's just too much information.

What I'm wondering is what all my fellow Kualoites are doing to ensure that if something should happen to their home or office they will still have all their data???

Well if you're talking about 30GB you could get a low end server, we can provide that kind of thing for a little over $100 a month. Say your reseller account costs $30 a month, so you could stop the payment on that too and merge your reseller account onto the new server so you'll save that additional cost.

You may find another solution, but at least this way you can have online backup of well over 100GB available to you for a fraction of the cost of other online backup solutions which may well offer far less space. You'd just need to leave the FTP uploading for a while

Just thought I'd throw this into the pot as an option to consider...

I have a 200GB hard disk that I carry in my laptop bag (yes it is quite heavy though!). When ever I do something on my laptop I normally then plug in the disk and back it up.

I do also sometimes upload work to my server as an extra, plus it lets me access it from campus.

Personally I wouldn't go with HD solution as they are a little fragile (yes I am clumsy )

If you want to access the data any time, any where, an online storage solution would be much better idea. You can upload, dowload and update.

For the time being what I do is CD backup. It's cheap, It doesn't take too much space. With the nice little CD bags they are easy to carry (no I am not selling one of those )..
For example 50gigs should take around 70-80 CDs. If you are paranoid you can double backup to 140-160 CDs, one set with you and one set at your mom's house..
But then you should classify every CD's contents on a file for easy access. May take some time...
Plus if you need to "update" the previously written data you'll have to use CD-RW. Maybe a little expensive if you would like to have lots of "updatable" CD backups.

Or have a fire proof safe at

Well, to complement what Umit said, I bought a DVD writer (it writes on the 4 existing formats +r, -r, +rw, -rw), so it's a much better option for me, to back up data stored in my work PC. And everytime I need to take it to another PC, I just pass the needed info to a CD, or if he/she has a dvd-rom, I can take it there.

DVD's is better in my case, 'cause I have a 120GB HDD and... let's just say that otherwise it would be needed a lot of CD's and I don't have the desk space to put them all in there.

Regards,

On a second thought, yes...
DVD would be a much better solution...

CD or DVD backup is not really on option for me - I have over 100GB of video files on my disk which would take a fair few CDs! Also the disks in my server are no where near that big either and it would be fairly slow to access everything.

Thanks everyone for sharing your solutions!

You've certainly given me food for thought. If I had the extra cash right now, I would do the dedicated server. Its a MUCH better deal than any that I saw out there!

My next big expenditure will be a new computer, so DVD backup might be an option (can you believe I don't have a DVD writer!?!?). However, everything changes so often that I'm leaning toward the extra hard-drive backup.

What I think I may do is back up to another (on top of the one I back up every day and keep at my desk) external hard drive every 2 weeks and keep it at a separate location (friends/family/auto).

Ultimately, the dedicated server will happen....someday!

Thanks again everyone!

Yay