I've been looking at online storage solutions to do my own backups for a while. I immediately ruled out various backup providers such as Mozy because I fundamentally don't trust anyone to do my backups for me. Every backup provider I've looked at has had some horror story and I have no intention of being the 1 in 100,000 customer whose backups were lost when s/he most needed them.
I started off with a simple backup strategy - create a 80GB TrueCrypt drive, and using Cygwin and rsync I'd mirror my important data to this drive once a week. The problem then was finding an offsite location to store this sucker.
I used DreamHost's almost unlimited storage for some time before they informed me that storing backups on their service was not allowed. They're not the only ones of course - I looked at HostGator, Bluehost and a bunch of other budget hosts who offer ridiculous amounts of disk space only to find that all of them disallow storage of backups. I find this really lame and scam-like - basically they say "you have all this diskspace but don't you dare try to use it". If I were less scrupulous I might just take my 80GB file, chunk them into 128kB JPGs and say good luck to them in proving that they aren't legitimate web content.
Anyway I went searching for alternative webhosts and settled on a Budget VPS Hosting. I've got a VPS running CentOS with 100Mhz of CPU, 100MB of RAM, and 80GB of disk for $12/month. The CPU & RAM may seem slow/small by today's standards but I recall that just 13-14 years ago I would have been running Linux on a 386DX40, and then on a Pentium 90 which was more than capable of running XWindows. So really, 100Mhz of CPU on some quad core host is more than adequate for a bit of rsync.
As I'm a tightarse I continued thinking of cheaper solutions. One idea that sprang to mind was to use USENET. The larger USENET premium providers today have retention rates of 100-200 days. I wonder if its feasible to post my encrypted backup files to USENET every 30 days, and rely on their 100-200 day retention as an offsite backup mechanism. The gating factor here is upstream bandwidth - I only have 1Mbps upload from home so it would take me roughly 10 days to upload 80GB. This may not save any money since the typical USENET provider costs about $15/month but if you're on an ISP like Internode which provides free premium USENET, or already have a USENET subscription for intense discussion of Linux ISOs then the marginal cost of doing this is zero.
