Callum Macdonald » Online-Backup

Rsync.net gets cheaper

Callum — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 07:57:26 +0000

My online backup service, rsync.net, has just dropped their prices. They’re now $1.20 per GB per month, unlimited bandwidth. Pretty reasonable I reckon. Plus they’ve added a couple of Windows clients to make things easier for poor souls not yet enlightened to the power of Linux. :-p

While others are talking doom and gloom it would seem rsync.net are on the up and up. Glad to be with them.

Staying with rsync.net

Callum — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 23:18:06 +0000

Have said I was going to ditch rsync.net as my backup provider, I’ve decided to change my mind. The eventually got back to me today having finally fixed my problem a whole month after I reported it, and a full 14 days after they last were in touch.

However, my problem was very specific, very random, hard to reproduce, and not a major problem, just a small feature that wasn’t working. They did resolve it in the end, and every message I received was intelligent.

So, I’ve decided to stay put. I’m still keen to use S3 for media storage, but rsync.net are a better option for incremental, automated, nightly backups.

Amazon S3

Callum — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 14:40:48 +0000

Amazon S3 is a static file hosting service from Amazon. Storage costs $0.15 USD per Gb and data transfer (outgoing) costs $0.18 USD per GB up to 10TB. As an online backup solution, it would cost less than $20 / month to store 100Gb, assuming you’re not uploading / downloading more than 20% every month.

That’s pretty cheap by backup standards. But for commercial static file hosting, it’s insanely cheap. Particularly given the fact that it will scale from a few GBs today, to several TBs tomorrow.

I currently spend $5.40 / month for 3Gb of online backup with rsync.net. I might consider switching to Amazon S3, although probably not for my daily backups because I get unlimited bandwidth on rsync.net and top notch support. For image archiving on the other hand, it looks very tempting.

The best thing, there’s no minimum spend. You don’t have to commit to spend hundreds of dollars to benefit from enterprise class storage.