Let's do the Time Warp again! Offsite Time Machine backups

However, there was one very big, hairy fly floating in the soup of backup contentment -- if your backup drive was destroyed or stolen, your backup was gone. Many of us who are paranoid about backups started doing a second level of backups to offsite services such as Mozy, Carbonite, or my personal favorite, BackBlaze.
There's a new kid on the block with a different approach to offsite backup -- Time Warp. This US$25 Mac application (free during the beta period) takes your Time Machine backups, compresses and encrypts them with 256-bit AES encryption, and then uploads them to your personal Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) account.
How does the cost of storage on Amazon S3 compare with the other services? The current costs are $0.15 per GB per month for storage, $0.10 per GB to backup data into S3, and $0.17 per GB to restore data from S3. The Jumping Bean Software team says that backup up 20 GB of personal data would cost about $1.50 per month, which is in line with costs for the other services. Time Warp does intelligent filtering to keep "dumb files" like cache, trash, and temporary files from being uploaded and costing you money.
If you take a glance at the sample screenshot at the top of this post, you'll notice that Time Warp does its best to give you a handle on your storage costs, so there's no guesswork involved. Leopard users who have been on the fence about whether or not to invest in an offsite backup solution might want to take advantage of the Time Warp beta.
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Source: http://jumpingbeansoftware.com/
Apple did the world a great service when they introduced Time Machine backups to OS X. Suddenly, anyone could attach an external disk...
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This is great to automatically backup documents to dropbox !
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I currently have a webhost that allows "unlimited" storage on their server. Is there any software solution like this that would allow me to back up to my own server. (Since I'm already paying them for the storage space, I might as well make use of it.)
July 21 2009 at 3:41 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyCheck your TOS. Most, if not all, hosting companies don't allow this.
July 21 2009 at 6:44 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplySure enough. "Unlimited space" refers to the hosting of a website, not to "archiving digital files." Thanks for setting me straight on that one.
July 21 2009 at 9:43 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplySteven, why do you prefer BackBlaze (apart from them setting a PC on fire ;) )?
It seems its only Intel compatible, I'm PPC.
I would also like to know why you prefer BackBlaze. I was thinking about going with Carbonite. I am not set on a company yet and I am open to hearing any testimonials or reasons why I should go with BackBlaze or any other company.
If you're this concerned about data loss, why would you trust an application that's still in beta?
July 20 2009 at 3:32 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyHaving looked at this I don't see the Time Machine integration at all. I have two Macs backing up to TM. I've installed TIme Warp and it appears that I have to load it and specify backup folders etc on both Macs. And my MacBook needs to be on before it will backup - so in what way is this different from any other backup solution?
July 20 2009 at 2:48 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyWow, great thread. I've been pondering this solution for months now. What I ended up doing was using Mozy for my daily work flow, being a web designer I usually have 10 gigs or so of stuff I need access to immediately in case of theft, fire etc.
For everything else that isn't as critical, I bought a 750 Gig drive that I keep at a friends house in a safe place and once every few months or so I'll get it and add any new movies, music, photos, etc.
Certainly not ideal but it works for now.
I do currently have 46 gigs backed up on mozy, I got paranoid and let my Iphoto library backup for 7 days straight while on vacation, so now it just does nightly backups of just the photos that I have added that day if any. It also nightly backups my critical work files, all my system info and a few other items.
It's just a jump to the left!...
July 20 2009 at 1:12 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply@William:
You hit the nail on the head. Maybe someday online storage of large quantities of data will be practical. Right now, it's a painful proposition. Personally, I just keep a hard disk backup at another location. It's not a perfect solution, but it does protect me against catastrophic data loss.
I think the first problem for many people with cloud-based backup/storage is bandwidth, particularly the agonizingly slow upload speeds most people have at home. On my "elite" DSL from AT&T, my upload speed is capped at 768kbps, and I'm lucky if I come close to that advertised speed. For the 250GB of important data [music, pictures, home videos, etc...] I have, the initial upload would take 758.5 hours. And that's assuming I get full upload speed, 24 hours a day for 31 straight days. And that doesn't include the other 2TB of data I have that I would also like to back up. That would take another 258.9 days to upload.
July 20 2009 at 11:28 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyWhere do you live that someone will steal, not only your main machine, but your external HD as well? That's just cruel.
July 20 2009 at 10:38 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyA fire could certainly destroy both.
July 20 2009 at 11:28 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyAbout a year ago, my apartment in Dallas was burglarized. We think a FedEx delivery interrupted them and scared them off. They got all of my computers and one external drive.
The day before, another apartment in the same building was burglarized in the same way, but this time with no interruptions. They took *everything*. Clothes. Furniture. Dishes. Everything was gone. If you ignored the broken door, it looked like the people had moved out.
So yeah. Burglars are dicks.
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