I have been using a combination of sftp drive and Syncback with a level 1 dreamhost account for about a week (took advantage of the anniversary special to buy 200gigs for one year for 20 bucks).
My experience has been that uploading my backup to dreamhost is SLOW to the nth degree (limited by my pathetic Comcast upstream speed). Syncback, since it isn’t Rsync, requires the sftp drive software to maintain a minimum level of security (never use plain FTP for anything important) but it will do an excellent job of backing up or syncing files across locations (even zipping each file on the destination). Sftp drive is not free software, but it works VERY well.
I had a scare last night when my dreamhost server just quit responding for about 30 minutes (what can I expect on a shared “overselling” host), but fortunately that occured AFTER a test backup session.
Perfect world would be native rSync in windows (just like my Mac!!!) and complete faith that dreamhost won’t implode again… neither of these 2 conditions seems likely. Barring all that, I’m looking into using true crypt on the data at the backup destination combined with my current workflow. We’ll see how it scales to using the full 200gigs (since I’ve only tried around 10gigs so far).
Here are some blog discussions related to the same idea:
Replacing my home backup server with Amazon’s S3
Some random bits scribbled by Jeremy Zawodny
Not too long ago, Amazon released their Simple Storage Service (or “S3″ for short). It provides a hosted storage platform which developers can build all sorts of applications on top of. Smugmug, a popular photo sharing web site, is using it to store and host pictures.
And
Amazon S3 vs DreamHost
Tue 3 Oct 2006 @ 9:34:59 pmDreamHost recently increased the disk storage and bandwidth on their shared hosting plans. This got me wondering how it compares to the storage specific service of Amazon S3. To make things easy we’ll use the most expensive month to month costs for DreamHost and ignore the setup fee (there are plenty of coupon codes that will waive that for you). The S3 amounts are constant at $0.15 per GB of storage and $0.20 per GB transferred.
Posted in Internet, enlightenment, technology, tip
