Moving away from Mozy to ?

[Zipperhead]

I've been using mozy for a few (3?) years now to keep my photos safe. They are stored on a PC at home and synchronised to my NAS (to guard against hardware failure) and mozy then backs them up from the PC (which gives me protection against my stupidity in deleting them, changing etc.)

When I get home tonight I'm expecting to find an email from Mozy telling me that when my current annual unlimited subscription runs out I will have to change to another account type and pay more - a rough calculation shows that I will need to pay around $700pa* instead of $55 - and that's just for the amount that I currently have.

So it's time to rethink things.

I could find another online backup service, but I don't know if any others offer either unlimited storage, or low enough rates to make it worthwhile. Plus, if I switch to another the first thing that I will have to do is wait for 650+ GB to upload, which will take a while.

Also, I had been thinking about moving away from online storage because I'm now generating data 3 times quicker, so going out taking pictures for a day can easily mean that it takes all week to upload them.

I'm thinking that I either need to find a (hopefully) free backup program, and use that to capture changes (and make sure that the hardware is replicated) or perhaps run subversion and have and write a script to find any changes and check them in. That would also give me protection against accidental deletions as I roll back to earlier directory revisions. I could then rsync the svn repository onto another machine to protect against hardware failures.

Or, does anyone have any simpler ideas?

[modified to add]
* just checked, it would be around $1500 a year.

[DaveJ]

Carbonite still looks to be unlimited.  £40 something for a year or just over £100 for three years.

I've been using it for a couple of years.  The only time I needed to get stuff back it was fine, 30Gb took a day or so to restore.  Its now backing up about 70Gb for me I think.

I use Second Copy for local backups.  Not free, but its not expensive either and its got the stuff to protect against accidental overwrites/deletion.

For free try Karen's replicator.  Backs files up OK, you can choose whether deletes get replicated to the backup, but accidental overwrites would be a problem.

Dave

[marcusjb]

+1 for Carbonite

Seems to work well. Though (touch wood) I have not had the need to try getting stuff back from them in the event of failure.

[Zipperhead]

Thanks. I was looking at carbonite last night, my only concern would be that with my current archive size, and a growth rate of perhaps 30Gb per month (that's how much I added in January), how long would it take to get it all uploaded and up to date?

Still, it's not too expensive. I also checked how much longer my mozy contract runs for, I've got another 3 months left.

I'll look a bit more at carbonite, but I'm also going to install subversion onto my NAS (and tortoise onto my PC's) and see how well it copes with the large amounts of data.

[Zipperhead]

I've been thinking about it some more. I'll give Carbonite a try - it's cheap enough to be worth a try, and as I've got 3 months until my mozy contract runs out then a good chunk might get uploaded in that time.

Meantime I'll also look at Second copy (I've already got replication software).

I installed svn on the nas last night and tortoise on my pc, so I can see how well it copes with large amounts of data.

In 3 months time I can always add some more hardware replication to the mix as well.