Where to get a cost effective 500GB of durable cloud storage?

Posted by ra on Wednesday April 13, 2011 @09:50PM
from the self-post dept.

I am consolidating my personal backup strategy and am looking for the best deal in durable offsite storage.

The best deal I've found so far is Amazon EBS mounted on a spot priced micro EC2, which is about $55 / month in total for 500GB.

Given the cost of raw HDD storage, I'm sure I can do a lot better than this.

What good alternatives do others use?

NB1: I have OSX and Linux servers to backup

NB2: Backblaze would be awesome, but it doesn't support Linux or have an API yet.

( 6 comments | 3 points | on HN )

Re:Where to get a cost effective 500GB of durable cloud stor... by noonespecial on Wednesday April 13, 2011 @10:03PM (#2445192)

I just lease a dedicated atom based server from interserver with a 1.5 TB sata drive in it. It comes to $49/month.

I end up using it for lots of other stuff like a vpn host so that I have an american IP when overseas, a small web server for personal projects, an always on VOIP switchbox to route from one number to all my cell phones, and a git host with gitolite for code.

For backup, I just use a bunch of rsync scripts that dump onto the big disk.

IMHO, everyone should have a personal server in some datacenter somewhere.

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Re:Where to get a cost effective 500GB of durable cloud stor... by ra on Wednesday April 13, 2011 @10:55PM (#2445364)

That's a great idea! Not quite durable storage but I do see they offer a second HDD for an extra $20.

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Re:Where to get a cost effective 500GB of durable cloud stor... by msw_w on Wednesday April 13, 2011 @10:13PM (#2445228)

Amazon S3 with reduced redundancy will cost about $45.00 per month plus the cost of the initial data transfer in. EC2 with a reserved Linux micro instance and 500 GB of EBS storage will cost more at about $60.00 plus the cost of the initial data transfer in.

A couple of months agao, I went through the same research as you and it is hard to beat S3 storage costs and ease of use. My requirements are more modest at about 100 GB per month though.

There is a handy Amazon calculator here: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html

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Re:Where to get a cost effective 500GB of durable cloud stor... by ra on Wednesday April 13, 2011 @11:00PM (#2445382)

Thanks. Yeah I use EC2 for other things, and you're right. Reduced redundancy S3 is at least as good as a RAID1 dedicated server, possibly even better[1].

1. Amazon S3 standard storage is designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities, while RRS is designed to provide 99.99% durability and to sustain the loss of data in a single facility.

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Re:Where to get a cost effective 500GB of durable cloud stor... by eklovlfjkeos on Thursday April 14, 2011 @10:15AM (#2446865)

Rackspace Cloud Files.

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Re:Where to get a cost effective 500GB of durable cloud stor... by ra on Thursday April 14, 2011 @08:10PM (#2448974)

At 15c/GB/mo Rackspace Cloud is the most expensive option at $75/month

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