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Has anybody here ever gone down the line of using hosted services such as AWS or Rackspace to backup files off site?

Was thinking of using Duplicity setup on a server and enable backups using GnuPG to encrypt the data and SSH to connect.

Anybody have any comments or better ideas?

Thanks community

(Forgot to mention the server would be an Ubuntu instance)

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Yeah, the idea is sound. Encouraged, even. It can get a bit expensive if you're holding multiple copies and S3 (as one example) is itself pretty expensive compared to, for example, sticking a HP Microserver in another physical location. Weigh up the risk.

Onsite is okay if there's enough physical space between the two copies to lower the potential damage of fire. If you can push that to a secure, flood-safe outbuilding, all the better.

And duplicity can already handle a buttload of backends (as proofed by its --help argument):

Backends and their URL formats:
  cf+http://container_name
  file:///some_dir
  ftp://user[:password]@other.host[:port]/some_dir
  ftps://user[:password]@other.host[:port]/some_dir
  hsi://user[:password]@other.host[:port]/some_dir
  imap://user[:password]@other.host[:port]/some_dir
  rsync://user[:password]@other.host[:port]::/module/some_dir
  rsync://user[:password]@other.host[:port]/relative_path
  rsync://user[:password]@other.host[:port]//absolute_path
  s3://other.host/bucket_name[/prefix]
  s3+http://bucket_name[/prefix]
  scp://user[:password]@other.host[:port]/some_dir
  ssh://user[:password]@other.host[:port]/some_dir
  tahoe://alias/directory
  webdav://user[:password]@other.host/some_dir
  webdavs://user[:password]@other.host/some_dir
  gdocs://user[:password]@other.host/some_dir
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  • Thank you for the response Oli. I unfortunately do not have any spare hardware available to setup an on-site but distanced backup server. If I did would much rather do that and backup over The LAN.
    – user843521
    Feb 20, 2014 at 11:51
  • As I say, it's a balancing act. If your backup footprint is anywhere near a terabyte the outright cost of a small NAS is going to start looking appealing. Nearer the 10TB region you could afford failover/mirrored-NAS solution for less than the price S3 (even Glacier) would cost you over the year. It's really only at the short end where services like that make sense.
    – Oli
    Feb 20, 2014 at 12:00

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