Where do you host offsite servers?

[fukawi2]

Reading through the forums, it seems I'm not the only one with the idea to sync not only my files between Desktops and Laptops, but to add a read-only server somewhere to act as an off-site backup in the event that all my computers are in my house at the same time when it burns down

I'm just curious what hosting options people have found to do this? The best I have been able to find is a dedicated server from Hetzner (2x3tb HDD) or a "Kimsufi" from OVH (500gb HDD).

The Hetzner would be ideal, but is a bit of overkill (Core i7 + 16gb RAM) when I really just want the disk space, but I think I'd outgrow 500gb from OVH pretty quick.

Has anyone found a provider offering boatloads of disk on a low-spec machine?

[verloren]

Backupsy - $7 for 500GB (check lowendtalk for regular offers from them to get this), and they can offer more space if you contact them.

[Camaban]

THat one has been very good for me.

I will say take two though. I had some obscenely bad luck which resulted in my VM hitting a kernel bug. Uploading 330GB once is bad. Uploading it twice is just rude.

[Camaban]

And, seriously, two in separate locations for $14

It's very affordable.

[rusl]

Yes I have Backupsy as well. $5/month for 250gig storage with a promotional code found by searching lowendbox.com. Storage up to 2TB (I'm sure they can customise something with more storage if you submit a support ticket. Very fast and efficient tech support and they even downloaded my Linux distro of choice off a website and made it available on my VPS for me for no charge (I think it's usually only a $2 fee to do that anyway!). Recommended.

[rusl]

.... or strap a Rapsberry Pi to an external harddisk and a powered USB hub and leave it at your parents' house when you're next visiting. Just make sure they have the monthly bandwidth quota for whatever you're doing. Much cheaper than a commercial server.

[ChrisH]

I had two Hetzner servers running anyway with tons of free disk space, so I just installed BTSync on them.

[fukawi2]

Backupsy seems pretty damned popular! Thanks everyone.

.... or strap a Rapsberry Pi to an external harddisk and a powered USB hub and leave it at your parents' house when you're next visiting. Just make sure they have the monthly bandwidth quota for whatever you're doing. Much cheaper than a commercial server.

I wish; they live in a rural area and the best internet connection they can get is a pathetic Telstra 3G connection.

How do you find backupsy for speed from Perth? (I'm in Melbourne)

[Camaban]

Backupsy seems pretty damned popular! Thanks everyone.

I wish; they live in a rural area and the best internet connection they can get is a pathetic Telstra 3G connection.

How do you find backupsy for speed from Perth? (I'm in Melbourne)

Get a Los Angeles VPS with an Asian-optimised IP address. (As well as another one in another area... You really do NOT want to re-upload your entire backups if something goes wrong... I'd uploaded 700GB last month overall thanks to a kernel bug)

I had friends back home (Brisbane) test it and they were getting about 200ms. The link would have gone via Sydney.

As for actual transfer speed (which would be what you're actually interested in) I doubt the link to the server will be your bottleneck.

Australian net sucks. Although if you're one of the lucky few who are on the NBN I'd be interested in hearing how it goes.

[fukawi2]

Australian net sucks. Although if you're one of the lucky few who are on the NBN I'd be interested in hearing how it goes.

Yup.... I just found out today a friend is moving into a new house with NBN... Going to see if we can work out a deal

[Camaban]

Not a bad idea. He should be able to do the same to you quite easily. Australian upload sucks, download is..,.. Liveable (Although living in Cambridge, UK, it'll be hard to come down from 120/12Mbps completely fibre for about $50 a month. There's something about downloading at 15MBps that's just.... Awesome...)

[fukawi2]

Yeah; I had to upload a 1.3gb video to YouTube the other night.... Over ADSL... Took all night

I'm ordering me a 100/100 NBN connection as soon as I can.

[upcboy]

I have a Kimsufi server that I use for several other things I've been with them for close to 2 years and never had any issues (that I didn't create)

[fukawi2]

I've grabbed myself a $7 Backupsy host for the time being... I'll see how it goes. I'm wary of it being US based, and it would be nice if they had native IPv6 but they're young, we'll see what happens

[rusl]

I've grabbed myself a $7 Backupsy host for the time being... I'll see how it goes. I'm wary of it being US based, and it would be nice if they had native IPv6 but they're young, we'll see what happens

Backupsy now have servers in the Netherlands. Yes, the company seems to be USA based though. We live in a global world.

I over-reacted to the NSA thing too, and transferred my Backupsy from USA to Netherlands. After doing this I read an article about the Dutch government running their own program.. We're all stuffed...

I get upload speeds to my Netherlands Backupsy at about 1 Mbps. That's the upload speed I get to every internet service since it's the theoretical limit of my copper lines I ran speedtest.net from my server (through the console, graphical linux, firefox) and it was downloading between 200 and 400 Mbps. It's meant to be 1Gbps but I haven't seen that yet. Those sorts of speeds are purely academic for me anyway given the bottlenecks at my end.

[Shot2]

I'm just curious what hosting options people have found to do this? The best I have been able to find is a dedicated server from Hetzner (2x3tb HDD) or a "Kimsufi" from OVH (500gb HDD).

The Hetzner would be ideal, but is a bit of overkill (Core i7 + 16gb RAM) when I really just want the disk space, but I think I'd outgrow 500gb from OVH pretty quick.

Has anyone found a provider offering boatloads of disk on a low-spec machine?

What's wrong with the Kimsufi 2G plan? Double the specs (i.e. 1TB, 2-core CPU), for a few bucks more. And everything works on their servers, unlike other providers with uncanny setups... For larger storage needs, you could easily use any other *serious* cyberlocker as a means to expand storage (any "backup" plan should allow it, provided you encrypt everything so the company has no peek at your usage)

[fukawi2]

Backupsy now have servers in the Netherlands. Yes, the company seems to be USA based though. We live in a global world.

I over-reacted to the NSA thing too, and transferred my Backupsy from USA to Netherlands. After doing this I read an article about the Dutch government running their own program.. We're all stuffed...

It's still a US company, so the US govt are free to reach out to any server they control regardless of the actual US borders.

I consider it a proof of concept for now... If it all works according to plan, I'll ditch it and find (or make) something domestic.

[Andrew776]

.... or strap a Rapsberry Pi to an external harddisk and a powered USB hub and leave it at your parents' house when you're next visiting. Just make sure they have the monthly bandwidth quota for whatever you're doing. Much cheaper than a commercial server.

I set this up between 2 Raspberry Pi devices running Rasbpian and I now have around 200GB of movies synced between 2 locations. I live in the UK where residential ADSL speeds can be hopeless so I 'seeded' the remote on my own LAN before installing it at the remote location. Once installed at the remote end and after an initial rescan, which took a couple of days, it's all now running perfectly and syncing only changes to the files. To keep the remote host happy I added 'hd-idle' to spin down the HDD after 5 minutes and minimise power consumption. (I know, it's debatable whether this harms the HDD in the long run.).

I also installed samba server at the remote end and my host is able to view the movies on the HDD from his Smart TV using its DLNA client. When either of us rips a new DVD it syncs with the 'other' end and is added to both libraries.

Happy to share some more details if anyone is interested.

Andrew

[rusl]

It's still a US company, so the US govt are free to reach out to any server they control regardless of the actual US borders.

I live in Australia and I have no doubt that our government could reach out and grab anything they wanted, too. Although they don't say it publicly.

If you have a need for serious privacy and security and you really need an off-site backup and can't make your own server in a friend's house then you should be putting everything in TrueCrypt containers (or similar) which should be as good as bullet-proof even if the snoops have a peek.

There is, however, a practical limit to how well you can protect your stuff. I refer to xkcd.com's classic cryptanalysis comic: http://xkcd.com/538/

[rusl]

Happy to share some more details if anyone is interested.

This thread has moved away from commercial servers and more toward home-brew DIY rigs. I like it. Tell me more about this hd-idle thing. I actually stopped using the HDD with my Raspberry Pi because it was sitting there spinning away 24/7 and I thought that might be bad for it (especially since it's a self-powered 2.5" portable drive). Is that a line of code you put in a config file somewhere?

Also, are you running your Pi with a wifi dongle or the ethernet cable? I'm using a wifi dongle (because I don't have ethernet in the other room) and the transfer rates are terrible (2 megabytes/sec). Is the ethernet any faster using BTSync?

Once I get a satisfactory RasPi rig running I'll be seeding it at home and then taking it over to my parents' house. They just upped their internet plan to a quota which is 10x their actual use. Brilliant.. Unfortunately we still don't quite have fast enough internet here to make movie sharing practical, but if we ever do I'll be doing that for sure. Currently we rely on carrying harddisks around sneakernet style.

edit: legal moving sharing of course.

[tenjaa]

HDD spindown: take a look here: http://forums.storag...-bad-for-drive/ its a forum for storage specially furthermore google made a study but i dont remember the results

they say if you spin it down severel times (some say 10, others 100) it's fine. you must look if you only sync once per week you should spin it down for powersavings

Speed on Lan: 6GB iso -> 2.4 MB/s from SSD of my computer to an external 2.5HDD from the RPi

[Xanza]

Has anyone found a provider offering boatloads of disk on a low-spec machine?

I currently have a contact with OVH and many other dedicated server providers to provide mass storage, however, I'm waiting for either multi user support or for BTSync to drop from alpha.

[Disappointed Cat]

Backupsy provides custom $5 plans with 100G storage (in NL too). Can you beat that?

Although I'll wait for encrypted nodes before I trust anybody with my sync shares.

I'm considering renting a VPS mainly for BTSync but also for a low-traffic webserver which currently runs on a company server but I have no root access. So I'm really going for a cheap VPS - preferably in EU with good bandwith - because I could set up multiple sync servers with friends instead and already have a webserver for free.

[Andrew776]

This thread has moved away from commercial servers and more toward home-brew DIY rigs. I like it. Tell me more about this hd-idle thing. I actually stopped using the HDD with my Raspberry Pi because it was sitting there spinning away 24/7 and I thought that might be bad for it (especially since it's a self-powered 2.5" portable drive). Is that a line of code you put in a config file somewhere?

Also, are you running your Pi with a wifi dongle or the ethernet cable? I'm using a wifi dongle (because I don't have ethernet in the other room) and the transfer rates are terrible (2 megabytes/sec). Is the ethernet any faster using BTSync?

Once I get a satisfactory RasPi rig running I'll be seeding it at home and then taking it over to my parents' house. They just upped their internet plan to a quota which is 10x their actual use. Brilliant.. Unfortunately we still don't quite have fast enough internet here to make movie sharing practical, but if we ever do I'll be doing that for sure. Currently we rely on carrying harddisks around sneakernet style.

edit: legal moving sharing of course.

Hi,

The Raspberry Pi is not the fastest thing around. My purpose was to 'slowly' sync the libraries. If a movie of, say, 2GB takes a week to sync then so what? I have one end where the target directory is a share on my Windows network and it's Ethernet connected while the other end is wifi connected and has the HDD on one of the USB ports. I have not really measured the relative speeds but transfer rates are at around 40kB per second (ADSL upload speed peaks atabout 344k where I live).

hd-idle is described at http://blog.is-a-gee...ver-mit-hd-idle which is in German, but Google Chrome will translate this for you. Beware, the translation screws some of the commands up so you need to swap back and forth between the original German and the English translation. I attach the commands I used to get this working on my Pi. (No responsibility for accuracy accepted, I'm a noob to Linux.)

Andrew

hd-idle Commands.txt