1. use “duplicity” and your backups will be stored remotely on FTP, SFTP, S3 or otherwise and in full/incremental backup format.

2. Stack an encrypting filesystem on top of SSH for remote/encrypted backups (encfs+sshfs).

3. Some file archivers support the creation of archives with chunks that can also be encrypted with standalone GPG (like DAR), but this way you aren’t encrypting/decrypting a 100G file at once.

I’ve been using OS X’s Disk Utility to create encrypted .dmg files, but it’s kind of a pain.

This backup service uses Iron Mountain/Connected software which is simply the best in the industry and which usually sells for 10x more. The software is paired with some of the best data centers around and there are no unreasonable limits on uploads downloads. The catch is that it is Windows platform only AND it tops out at 50GB. Does not do server, database backups.

I admire your diligence to stray onto the corners of cyberspace to respond to my quest. Indeed, I realize the long time that backups and restore will take (from a failure event). In a previous experience, it took longer than a week to restore a comparatively small amount of data (we’ve taken lots of photos and video since 2004). Given that I’m not looking for this to be my primary source of backups in the event I do something errant or have a disk failure, but rather in case the house burns down, a hurricane levels it, or my whole machine fries from a power surge (including the disks). The last of which has actually occurred including the frying of both my hard disks (RAID 1) through my UPS.

All of these are fair, and I commend you for reaffirming the commitment to “unlimited” storage for your clients. The main challenge, however, remains that all of my data exists on my Linux server and I haven’t “always-on” Windows machine on which to host these backups. Is there anything in the Carbonite pipeline to address this?

Finally, I would love to know if you have a Google alert, or a trackback handler on the website to alert of you my post last night.

I work for Carbonite. Just a quick comment – Carbonite’s backups really ARE unlimited (at $49.95 per year), and although our average customer doesn’t back up more than 15-20gb (and usually a lot less), quite a few of our customers have backups of 100gb or more. Rather than some hidden upper limit, we let common sense be the limiting factor: the more you back up, the longer it will take to back up and restore.

For example, the 80gb or so that you mentioned in your post could take over three weeks to back up initially (although keeping it up to date afterwards is very speedy due to block-level incremental backups). Restoring tends to go much faster (particularly since ISPs give you faster download rates than upload rates), but 80gb could still take 5-7 days to restore completely.

For $49.95 a year, you can have a full, up-to-date, secure offsite backup. It certainly beats lugging a portable device back and forth between the office, or setting up a wireless remote backup with a neighbor.

Sincerely,

Len Pallazola
Manager, Customer Support Services
Carbonite, Inc.
http://www.carbonite.com

The guy in the cube next to me uses and likes Mozy, but he’s only got a few weeks experience with it. I like having the only key to my data so I’ll stick with the firewire drive.