[X4U] Back up ideas/suggestions needed....

[Stroller]

On 14 Mar 2008, at 17:02, Ed Gould wrote:
> ...
> My plan to hand carry my backup drive as I leave my place is a big  
> hole in my system. I have severe memory issues due to a stroke and  
> I am afraid I will forget to unhook my drive and carry it out with  
> me in an emergency.

This is the most significant item of information in your post, IMO.
Because humans are where most computer bugs occur.

I was kinda surprised at how long your backups are taking - how does  
it take 3 hours to delete a bunch of files?
I'm dealing with full backups of Windows PCs this week, copying them  
to a folder on my Mac's desktop before zipping them up & burning them  
to DVD. I'm fairly confident that I'm getting 8gig - 16gig -  
typically including tens of thousands of small files - deleted in a  
few minutes (I don't watch it) using `rm -rf`.
But with your medical difficulty, I can't help wondering if a backup  
regime that takes 8 hours to process is beneficial because it's  
difficult to overlook!!

Finally, in terms of general points about your situation, you haven't  
told us what you feel is wrong with your current backup plan. It's  
really easy to do this when making a post - I'm a really verbose  
bastard myself, and so I spend ages explaining all the little details  
of my situation and vacillating over the pros and cons. Perhaps I  
don't have sufficient attention as a reader, but I don't see what  
your problem is - can you summarise again in less than 5 bullet  
points, please? By this I mean "sentences of less than 10 words" not  
"paragraphs". You can always ramble on afterwards, but I think I'll  
now make it a rule to make bullet points at the start of the message  
when posting a technical issue of my own.


> I really don't have any good way to send to an offsite place my  
> backup drive. I need a reasonably inexpensive solution. I thought  
> about asking a neighbor to "care" for my drive but this is not  
> doable (I won't go into reasons), I have friends but don't  
> necessarily see them once a week.
>
> I have thought about buying remote site backup space but my friend  
> says that COMCAST throttles upload speed to approx 100Mb sec making  
> backup time extremely poor.

I always have problems converting between pounds, ounces and data-per- 
time, myself, but 100Mb sec seems a lot, to me. Maybe you mean 100k.

Anyway, whatever, I would look at http://rsync.net myself. If your  
requirements are automated, off-site and cheap then they may well be  
the way to go. As you have ascertained, the best backup plans in the  
world fail if the secretary forgets to put the tape in her handbag  
when she leaves the office (or worst, still, she forgets to push the  
tape back in the machine (because they never rotate or change the  
tapes!)). Rsync only uploads the differences & is a fairly bandwidth- 
efficient protocol; there's no reason why you shouldn't run it every  
night.

Stroller.