Hello! With now having ~1.5 TB of PJ live music, videos, etc, I'm really worried about having my external HD failing and losing everything. I can back it up on another HD, but then I would have to store that in a separate physical location in case our place (god forbid) got broken into, fire, whatever. I figure the best solution would be to upload all my files to an online ftp site. That way, I could manage the files just like any other folder, ie, drag and drop, and they would be accessible anywhere. I have tried two different hosts, and both deleted my files after a while because they did not allow commercial media to be included on member sites.

How does everyone else handle this? I'm sure other people have this same concern...

Thanks!
Greg

You could try something that uses amazon's S3 or a similar service, but it's going to be expensive. some clients listed here: http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/007641.html

its $0.15 per gb per month (plus some fees for upload/download). So if you have 1.5 terabytes stored there, that's $225 per month.

Amazon S3 is a huge enterprise and I doubt you'll find anything cheaper for the long term.
Web hosts that let you store "unlimited" data will probably remove all your data for the same reasons they did already.

You'd probably be better off cloning the HD and keeping one offsite.

Honestly though, in the event you lost all your live PJ, I guarantee someone on here will fill up a HD for you. In that way the data is quite replaceable. I'm much more worried about the digital things I can't replace -- photos and stuff

Which is why you'll be happy to learn that I've surreptitiously hacked into your PC and backed all of that shit up.

Thanks so much for the info! $0.15/gb/month is definitely the cheapest I've seen, and you're right, I would probably back up the "irreplaceable" things rather than every single PJ video/boot. Plus, at least this sounds like a "stable" service...I don't trust some of the other sites out there.

Thanks again!!
Greg

Have you looked at http://www.carbonite.com. It's a flat rate of $55 a year and they state that it has unlimited storage.

I've been using it for about a year now for my parent's business and although we've never had to use it to restore files yet, it's backed everything up without a problem.

What do you do when those sites decide to stop providing their service? I would just back your files up to DVD and/or another hard drive. It may take some time but you'll be happy you did. I took the time to backup all my PJ stuff to DVD and I am happy I did. My external with everything decided not to work ever again and my backup drive did the same (I have no idea why). The DVD backups saved me. 1.5TB will take a while, but do a little every night. Good luck!

You are correct...when the site stops, you lose everything and have to find another site, re-upload, etc. Which is why I'm in the quandry I'm in...I had everything up on an ftp site, which was absolutely perfect because I could access all my files anywhere in a drag-and-drop folder format, only to see it all get deleted.

However, physical back-ups certainly aren't perfect either, as you illustrate. Even if you take the time to back everything up on DVDs, where the heck do you keep them? Sure, the odds of someone breaking into my place or a fire ruining everything are very small, but the point of a back-up is to insure against those odds.

TAR23, thanks for the carbonite suggestion...it looks amazing from the face of things, I'll just have to double-check with them that copyrighted music is allowed. That's been the sticking point with the ftp sites I've seen.