Use Streamload for big backups

Aug 18, '05 08:50:00AM

Contributed by: tinker

Seeing this hint on how to make a tarball on the fly while FTP'ing a backup of your home directory to a remote host reminded me of a complimentary hint that I've been using for a little while to provide a nice automated backup solution. It involves cron, tar, ftp, and a free account at streamload.com.

Streamload is a service with an interesting business model: They allow you to upload and store as much stuff as you want, no limit, for free, but charge you for download bandwidth when you want the stuff back. Upload is via web interface or FTP (in beta). Perfect, really, for a backup solution: Get a free account, upload your directory, and if you ever need it, you'll probably be more than willing to pay to get it back.

So the hint, simply, is to get a Streamload account, sign up for the FTP beta trial, and write a .command file based on the script in the previously-mentioned hint. Then set cron to execute the command file, say, every few days, or every week. The servers are always up, and the storage, as long as you don't need anything back, is free.

If you do this, conscience dictates signing on to Streamload once in a while to get rid of old backups. It's good of them to offer this sort of service; let's not clog their servers with terabytes of data.

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