Best backup / sync option out there? [closed]

Question

I'm thinking of having a home backup/sync for about 200GB of data (documents, photos, etc). I'm searching not only for a reliable space on a server (a company that doesn't go away and take all my data..) but also a sync tool to avoid having to do a full upload everytime i want to backup the data.

(Upload and replace doesn't work.. just think if i delete a file, rename a file etc..).

I've been searching for the best option out there, I really like Dropbox but after 100GB it gets really expensive.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

"Best" is very subjective.

I use rsync for all my backups, with a method similar to this tutorial to maintain many snapshots efficiently (though this latter part is optional). rsync when used correctly is impressively efficient at not transferring more than it needs to in order to update a remote copy.

To use rsync all you need is a server with ssh and rsync installed. There are some backup services specifically geared around rsync (like rsync.net) but for the size of data you are looking at you might find a cheap dedicated server to be more cost effective (though of course you'll have to manage that yourself). You may still have the problem of the provider vanishing overnight if you take a cheap dedicated server. I get around this by instead using a couple of cheap VPS providers with the same data backed up on each (so if one dies, I still have the other). The data I have that I care enough about to maintain offsite backups of (the rest I can re-obtain if it is lost/corrupt) is smaller than yours at more like 25Gb (including the multiple snapshots) so you'll need something bigger than the $6/month VPSs I'm using.