Off-site storage solutions for individuals

Question

What are some good options for large (measured in Terabytes) off-site data storage solutions, priced for private individuals (i.e. not enterprise-level solutions)?

Update:

This is mean to be a general question, but in my specific case, I have about 5 TB of data which I'd like to store offsite in case my RAID array is disabled or destroyed (aka house fire, multiple drive failure, etc). The data does not need to be readily accessible, I'm just interested in long-term offsite backup capabilities. The budgetary restrictions are because, unlike corporations who generally profit from their data and thus can afford to invest in its safety, my data's value is personal and not commercial.

Understandably, I'd be willing to give up things like online access, turnaround time, frequency of updates, in exchange for low cost solutions.

Answer 1

Copy it to several external USB2/SATA/Firewire drives and leave them with someone you trust. If you have a trusted friend then a useful approach is to look after each other's backup drives.

There are network services that bill themselves as unlimited or that might be affordable (the choices depends on your OS) but the time to make the backups and restores may be prohibitive unless you have huge bandwidth available.

Following your clarification the multiple external drive approach still sounds worth considering, perhaps augmented by a network service that can offer your choice of cheap, simple, fast backup of (critical) data between updates of the external drives or to hold critical data that you would need before a restore from the external drives could be started or completed (e.g. if your RAID array lost a chunk of data and the restore would take a week or two to complete (time to buy new hardware, retrieve the disks, etc.)

Answer 2

It sounds like price is the only thing that is important to you. Offsite storage solutions of that size generally involve quite significant cost. As @mas stated use of external drives is one way to tackle the issue. Other ways to tackle the issue include services like Amazon S3 or a colocated server with vast amounts of storage.

You really need to make your question clearer as there are many ways that it can be understood. You need to highlight important constraints such as online vs. offline access to data, size of individual files, if you need versioning, how quickly you need the data back, what software needs to interact with the store (if any) etc.

Answer 3

I would be extremely surprised if you would find something that would be suitable and if you do find something, please let us/me know.

A few points. Have you actually worked out how long it will take to upload/download a terabyte. (You say you aren't worried about turnaround time, but seriously it could take months or years. Bear in mind, even if you have a super fast broadband connection, a low-cost service provider is not going to want you to tie up their whole bandwidth).

Also how much data will change. For example, if only 1 percentage of this data changes per day, it would still be possible for the daily backup to take more than 1 day to upload (or the weekly backup to take more than a week).

The provider we use at work (which isn't low-cost) asked us to perform an initial seed backup onto disk and ship the actual disk to them and then they only upload the changes to themselves and this was for a small (50Gb) backup. If we need a restore, then will ship a disk back to us. Not all low-cost providers provide this service, but it would be essential if you are talking about terabytes. Which raises another issue. 50Gb is easily shipped on say removable disk, but 5TB isn't quite as simple.

The problem as far as low-cost providers is concerned, is that they don't know how much it is going to cost them. If the data changes very infrequently, it might be possible for them to make money without charging you too much, but if the data changes a lot they might lose money. Hence they stay away from those accounts. And because they stay away from them, they don't really know how much they need to charge to be profitable.

On a personal note, I was using a online storage which advertised themselves as unlimited. Now I am not so naive, as to have thought they really meant unlimited, and as the service only cost about $50 per year,so I didn't really expect much of it, but their idea of what is acceptable is a lot lower than mine. I did wonder if they would stop me about 100Gb or allow me a Terabyte. (Their webfolders access site had a little fuel-gauge control to show how much storage I had used and this seemed to be scaled against 1000Gb, so I was hopeful, but not confident. In they end I did not even get to the 100Gb mark and they ask me to reduce my usage to about 10GB!. (I decide to close the account instead).

The cheapest provider I know, that will accept this amount of data is Amazon S3, but that will probably cost around the $1000 per month, which I assume is too much. The amount of storage I have is way less than that, but I only use Amazon for vital stuff. The rest of the items I have on removable storage disks at both home and work.

So, I would agree with mas, copy it to several external USB2/SATA/Firewire and leave it with someone you trust.

If you want an automated backup, then there is a possible alternative, if you have someone you trust that will storage a computer for you and allow you to use their bandwidth and electricity, would be something like Ahsay's backup software (see http://www.ahsay.com). You can install their software on a cheap NAS box and backup to that across the internet. As I understand it their software is free if you are backing up just 1 or 2 computers. (Haven't tried the free version, but this is the software we use at work.)