Dropbox will do you a 2Gb account for free, as will folks like SugarSync or box.net.
Nobody sells a couple of hundred Gb for peanuts, though. If you're looking at 100Gb you're going to be paying $100-200 per year, if not more. (I'm paying dropbox $100/year for 50Gb. On the other hand, I particularly like the way dropbox works, and it's cross-platform.)
The cheapest option is to buy a pair of 1Tb external drives and find a friend who lives across town. Back up via Time Machine onto a drive and every month (or week, whenever it suits you) swap the drive you've been backing up onto with the drive in your friend's apartment. Do it on a reciprocal basis, ideally, so you're each covering one another's ass: that way it's not an imposition and they've got an incentive to meet up frequently to swap drives.
Alternatively, if you have a PO box, you can stash your spare drive in your box.
I knew you would have an answer for me, Charlie. :-)
$100/year for 50Gb might do the trick, actually. It's tax deductible for me, as the backing-up is for business. I can Stuff the deep archives--tiffs compact well--and that would cover my butt.
Your two-different-drives option is a good one, and my best swap-friend is my mum in NYC, about 100 miles away. I visit her roughly once a month. (If NYC gets sufficiently borked at the same time as Philly, I figure I've got bigger problems than whether my freelance work is trash.)
I just last week uploaded a password-protected zip file of my writing folder to Dropbox. I also e-mail a copy of my work in progress to my gmail account every Friday.
Between the occasional full backup and the incremental e-mail backup, I should be able to pretty well retrieve most or all of my writing if my house burned down and took out both computer and thumb drive.
I have friends who are artists, and they back up stuff to physical CD/DVD discs, label them carefully and clearly, and have trusted family members or friends store them in addition to keeping copies for themselves.
One friend of mine had his home broken into and his computers stolen (among other things... the place was trashed, too) as he was putting together a book. His dad had backups of all his comic pages in the original nice big high quality format, so he was able to get the book finished on time without having to rescan, clean up, re-letter, etc things.
I think CDs might be the best long-term arrangement for art and photos, since those are permanent archive type thingies. Much like I make a CD backup of every music purchase. (It's a lot of CDs now....)
We keep a safety deposit box at the bank for safekeeping the mortgage papers, vehicle registrations, etc. In between jobs, I exchange CD-Rs (old days) or flash drives with the box. These days I have an office and my own machines there, so I update files there every day. When I am on the road, I email ZIP files to another gmail account.
Pretty low tech, but any useful backup system involves: (a) more than one type of media, (b) more than one physical location (so that fire you worry about doesn't take both original and backup), and (c) be so butt easy that you actually MAKE the backup very, very regularly. (grin)
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Nobody sells a couple of hundred Gb for peanuts, though. If you're looking at 100Gb you're going to be paying $100-200 per year, if not more. (I'm paying dropbox $100/year for 50Gb. On the other hand, I particularly like the way dropbox works, and it's cross-platform.)
The cheapest option is to buy a pair of 1Tb external drives and find a friend who lives across town. Back up via Time Machine onto a drive and every month (or week, whenever it suits you) swap the drive you've been backing up onto with the drive in your friend's apartment. Do it on a reciprocal basis, ideally, so you're each covering one another's ass: that way it's not an imposition and they've got an incentive to meet up frequently to swap drives.
Alternatively, if you have a PO box, you can stash your spare drive in your box.
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$100/year for 50Gb might do the trick, actually. It's tax deductible for me, as the backing-up is for business. I can Stuff the deep archives--tiffs compact well--and that would cover my butt.
Your two-different-drives option is a good one, and my best swap-friend is my mum in NYC, about 100 miles away. I visit her roughly once a month. (If NYC gets sufficiently borked at the same time as Philly, I figure I've got bigger problems than whether my freelance work is trash.)
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Between the occasional full backup and the incremental e-mail backup, I should be able to pretty well retrieve most or all of my writing if my house burned down and took out both computer and thumb drive.
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One friend of mine had his home broken into and his computers stolen (among other things... the place was trashed, too) as he was putting together a book. His dad had backups of all his comic pages in the original nice big high quality format, so he was able to get the book finished on time without having to rescan, clean up, re-letter, etc things.
Reply
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Pretty low tech, but any useful backup system involves: (a) more than one type of media, (b) more than one physical location (so that fire you worry about doesn't take both original and backup), and (c) be so butt easy that you actually MAKE the backup very, very regularly. (grin)
Dr. Phil
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