Ask YC: Large Hosted Backup Solutions?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=239736

by Poleris • 18 years ago

1 4 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

With hard drives becoming ever cheaper, it looks more and more attractive to host backups in the clouds or at least off-site. The problem is I can't find a solution for my own needs:

* 200 gigs of data across 10 computers.

* Would prefer simple shell/cli access (scp/rsync/etc.)

Here are the major suggestions from browsing old discussions and why they don't work for me:

Amazon S3 - Would cost too much at $.15 per gig.

Mozy - No cli, costs too much at 5.95 per computer. Would also rather blur distinctions between computers.

Dreamhost - Pursuing those breaking TOS.

A solution such as Dreamhost would be perfect for me, but I can't find a shared host that allows using their services for backups/persistent storage. And Slicehost doesn't support expanding hard drive space (although I'm sure it would cost too much if they did.)

Am I stuck with my brick at home I currently use to do backups?

cperciva• 18 years ago

Amazon S3 - Would cost too much at $.15 per gig.

You're really not likely to do much better than this if you care about making sure that you don't lose data. Go around to hosting companies and price out servers with 1TB drives, and keep in mind that you need some sort of RAID to avoid losing data when a drive dies... you might get down to $0.10/GB/month, but I doubt you can get below that.

In the long run, any company which is selling you storage for less than what it costs them is either going to go bankrupt or throw up TOS roadblocks (like dreamhost). There really is no free lunch.

noodle2• 18 years ago

i agree with this. if the OP thinks S3 is too expensive, you probably need a reality check. or you could continue to host your own stuff.

Poleris• 18 years ago

I'm less worried about reliability and more worried about having easy access to my stuff when on the road. With 10 computers, I inevitably have copies of my important data distributed everywhere -- it would just be nice to have a cheap canonical source I can pull from occasionally.

I'd also be okay with paying a large upfront cost (say $500) to buy hard drives and then paying small monthly fees for bandwidth/electricity/support. It doesn't seem to be too hard to make a profit doing something like this.

The last solution I can see is to make upfront and ongoing fees cheap but make me pay through the nose for downloads. I'd be willing to pay $50 per gig to download if it were free to upload/store. (I have really low usage requirements asides from storage.)

So I feel an entrepreneurial company would be able to make a profit in this realm (correct me if I'm mistaken) -- I'm just not sure where one is.