[longisland6]

i'm looking for a nice, offsite file storage service. i'm on cable; any suggestions? something around 10 bucks/month would be fine. thanks.

[longisland6]

so does anybody use any offsite file storage services?

[EmmaPhlema]

no, sorry.

[Do Gooder]

I have an old chicken shed in Stewarton.

[fasterthanlight]

i just use a standard hosting plan ....

[Accurate]

You will find hosts out there offering one hundred and fifty trillion gigas. Try 'em out.

[Tom_E]

Originally Posted by Do Gooder

I have an old chicken shed in Stewarton.

[longisland6]

i see your point about hosting services, and it's a good option. the only issue i see is that you have to remember to upload all your changed files when you change them.

so, to the responders that say they don't use any off site file storage, how do you deal with the issue of making sure your recently modified files are backed-up and what would you do if say, a fire destroyed your studio where all your (electronic based) work was kept?

[Do Gooder]

Run an office of 4 macs... soon to be 8

1. for completed work I keep dual DVD archives. one in the office, one at home.

2. back up the sever hd weekly onto a portable firewire drive.... and take it home.

3. I also habitually keep files I am working on regularly backed up on a 4gb memory stick. easy.. Daily folders.. delete the oldest folder/s when the stick is full.

it seems a lot of faff.. it's not if you get in a routine. and it's never failed me yet.

looking forward to bluray getting cheaper though. DVD's are too small these days.

[Pugsley]

We. currently back up work to an external hard drive that gets locked in a firesafe. Soon to get an off site system that will back up each Mac to an off site location every night while we're out of the office. Well at least i think it's automatic. It may not be. Knowing my luck, being the junior it'll be my job to do all the backing up if it aint auto.

Do gooder's system sounds good, if you got into routine. I'd be useless at it.

[steveb]

I post my pix to myself on Gmail. 7 Gigs per account should be enough for most holiday photos.

[Do Gooder]

oh aye.. we use gmail for email back up.

every email we receive gets forwarded on to the poor saps at google.

have stopped it for a bit recently though... spot of bother with Be Broadband's mail servers not liking macs... need to get it back up and running.

[sub]

I need something similar myself. The CD thing worked for a while (until I got complacent) and automated back-up onto external drives was okay until one of them died. My problem is that I have about 800Gbs to store so I suppose a low cost on-line solution is out of the question.

[urban1977]

1) Use Subversion to keep track of changes with files on local or remote servers
2) Keep local copy of files on your computer and on local file server (live projects)
3) Keep a backup on portable HD or Tape (rotate x8) so you have 8 weeks worth of back ups do this every thursday or friday evening
4) off-site HD or tape in 16 - 32 week cycle so you have longer term back up
5) archive finished projects to DVD / Blu Ray or their own portable HD (50-80gb) twice just to make sure! smaller portable hd for smaller projects of course! Store 1 copy locally and 2nd copy off site in a secure location!

When it comes to protecting data there are no low cost solutions! especially if your project is worth £100k - £200k in value. Backup and recovery should be part of the price of the project!

[Shiro]

I suppose a low cost on-line solution is out of the question.

Bluehost is now USD$100/year, unlimited storage.

Been around about 14 years now, so they are pretty stable.

[Do Gooder]

at the moment - i don't trust auto back ups. it is too easy to just forget about them and assume you are all safe.

with the cd archives - it's keepin' on top of it so you don't end up with 800gb on the system. our client files are around 50gb. easy to back up that onto a hd.

[sub]

Originally Posted by haku

Bluehost is now USD$100/year, unlimited storage.

Thanks haku. Just had a quick look at the site site:

UNLIMITED Hosting Space (NEW!)
UNLIMITED File Transfer (NEW!)
24/7 Superb/Responsive Sales/Support

Would do the trick - but how the hell do they do that?

[Shiro]

Got me! They just switched to unlimited recently. Last year they were 300 gigs storage/3tb bandwidth. The year before that it was 50gigs storate/1tb bandwidth. They just keep increasing.

Maybe they have a deal with a server company so that they can get cheap servers. Or maybe servers are just getting cheap.

[Accurate]

Hosts that offer unlimited space and bandwidth have clauses in their TC's that stop you using a lot of space and bandwidth... it's a bit of a trick really. You can see how far you get though, but usually when you start to take use of the "unlimited", they shut you off.

[freelancr]

Yeah, there's no such thing as unlimited. Take Dreamhost for example, they offer stupid amounts of space and bandwidth, but will cancel your account if you dare to upload something that isn't part of a website, so you couldn't use it for backups.

Take a look at Amazon S3 if you want reliable offsite backups, this system fits exactly that niche as I think they backup your backups. Don't use a web host as most just use cheap servers with no drive redundancy or backups.