Crashplan or backblaze are very user-friendly, but rather expensive, too. As a cheaper alternative, you can use Amazon Glacier. It costs mere pennies a month. ($0.18 in my case, where I would spend over $5.00 a month at crashplan/backblaze). However, AWS will charge you a lot more if you ever need to get your data back in a hurry. As a last resort solution (for instance my house burns down and my off-site external harddisk gets stolen) it's excellent, though.

Crashplan and backblaze are not rather expensive, they're cheap. Five bucks a month and you don't have to do any complicated calculations when you want your data restored.

... and at $5/month, if you're a photographer with many terabytes of data, it is 1/10 the cost of amazon glacier, last time I checked!

Okay, "expensive" might be stretching it a bit... But in my specific case it's a lot cheaper. If you have several TB of data/photos and/or want an impeccable UI, by all means, go for one of these!

With how the new AWS S3/Glacier storage works, you no longer have to do any calculations for restoring from AWS either

I considered the same thing. But when you are backing up several terabytes of photos and home movies collected over many years the cost of storing them on Glacier isn't as cheap as using the unlimited service of Crashplan or Backblaze ($10 a month vs $5-6 month). Furthermore, Crashplan and Backblaze don't charge you to retrieve your data unlike Glacier, which is where it gets very expensive.

Absolutely. After messing around with various combinations of rsync/ssh/unison/s3/glacier/etc for a few years, I bit the bullet and paid for Crashplan. It's cheap - the family plan is ~150 USD/year for up to ten computers, unlimited.

It's a lifesaver. I've installed it on my parents/wifes/siblings computers and the piece of mind it gives me is immense - when I get the inevitable phone calls about the damn computer deleting that important file, I can either tell them how to recover it, or do it myself.

I'd like to use the Crashplan Family option to cover everyone but since it's all shared and there's seemingly no way to silo the data per-computer, that's a total non-starter. Which is a shame because I'd love to give them my cash.

Just get an individual account for that purpose?

Doesn't really solve the problem of backing up multiple machines spread over multiple sites for multiple people though.

Yea. Backblaze is pretty rad. I work there. We just got polo shirts today!

Has anyone created a backup app that interfaces with glacier?

Arq works quite nicely with Glacier: http://www.haystacksoftware.com/blog/2012/11/arq-cloud-backu...

And they have a special discount for Arq 4 today.

https://store.haystacksoftware.com/?product=arq4&c=YAH4KD2AT...

I'd been thinking about buying Arq for the last month or so, thank you for posting this link, it made buying Arq a no brainer.

How come it isn't advertised anywhere on their site or blog? I checked for one this morning!

Just on Mac OS X, alas.

Does anyone have an open implementation of the glacier api? I'd like to add support for it to my backup tool, but I don't want to have to take on the financial risk of a large bill from Amazon if I happen to mis-use the api. So I'd like to try it out on a local server first, to project what the cost would be after a few months of use.

Amazon has official, open source SDKs in most major languages that cover all of the AWS service APIs.

https://aws.amazon.com/tools/?nc1=h_d_dl

Actually, I meant is there an open project where I can put something on my own server, to provide the same API that glacier uses? That way I can development / test my code against it instead of testing against Amazon directly.