I’ve been looking into all sorts of backup solutions lately, including BackBlaze, Dropbox, s3 and SugarSync.

My top level goals are:

• Ridiculously easy to backup so I do it often
• Syncing – I don’t want to have to deal with figuring out which files to back up and duplicate files.
• Remote – I have a 1TB drive which I use to back up, but am trying to prevent against the fire/theft scenario and losing all my data
• Low cost, I don’t want to pay an arm and a leg monthly for data which doesn’t frequently get accessed.
• Attached network drive backup – I use a 1TB drive to house all the data which I need to backup remotely.

BackBlaze seems too cheap to be true, I used it for the 14 day trial and it seemed to work fine and at $5 a month for unlimited data it seems like a steal. I am just a little worried about the company in general, be good to hear someone recommend them.

Dropbox is handy for sharing files but doesn’t fit my bill for my backup goals. It works well for a dropbox folder but becomes a little tricky if you want to backup your entire drive.

s3 is definitely a great service, but it is a little pricey for me. SugarSync is also a bit more money than what I was hoping to pay.

After trying all these services it dawned on me that I am getting 10GB on my Slicehost account which I am not really using. So I got to work writing an rsync back up solution which would backup to my slicehost slice.

rsync -vaz --delete-excluded --delete --exclude-from=/Users/michael/.rsync_exclude Documents code mik:~/backup/'

This script when run from my home directory will rsync my Documents and code directories onto my slicehost slice (I have setup my .ssh/config to use the alias mik as my slicehost slice). I can also have a file .rsync_exclude in my home directory which can contain patterns of files which I want to exclude from these directories.

So far this has worked really well for me, with this command I can just set up a cron job on my local machine which will do the backups in the background, or just create a backup alias which can be run manually whenever I want to backup.