I recently put a nice big hard drive in my file server.  I got a 1TB drive, which is kind of silly because I don’t have anywhere near that much data.  But, I figured that it’s better to be prepared.  I wanted to backup the data on the drive and Amazon’s S3 seemed like a good choice.  However, I wanted the ability to only send changed files across the wire, and a simple way to encrypt all of the data as well.  I chose to use Duplicity to manage the backups as it was able to only send changes as well as encrypt everything using GPG.

I decided to only backup a subset of my data since it didn’t seem necessary to backup Linux ISOs or the local copy of Wikipedia that I have on this drive.  So, I ended up backing up 31.2 GB of data.  Here’s the stats that duplicity produced:

--------------[ Backup Statistics ]--------------

StartTime 1244688149.16 (Wed Jun 10 22:42:29 2009)

EndTime 1244842521.31 (Fri Jun 12 17:35:21 2009)

ElapsedTime 154372.15 (42 hours 52 minutes 52.15 seconds)

SourceFiles 0

SourceFileSize 33486993762 (31.2 GB)

NewFiles 0

NewFileSize 0 (0 bytes)

DeletedFiles 0

ChangedFiles 0

ChangedFileSize 0 (0 bytes)

ChangedDeltaSize 0 (0 bytes)

DeltaEntries 0

RawDeltaSize 33484666346 (31.2 GB)

TotalDestinationSizeChange 32831751689 (30.6 GB)

Errors 0

-------------------------------------------------

Yeah, just in case you didn’t notice.  The elapsed time was nearly 43 hours.  That’s just under two full days.  The 15/2 service that I’m getting from Cablevision was clearly the limiting factor.  But, I don’t plan on doing full backups very often, and the incrementals will be considerably smaller.

Amazon charges for S3 by the amount of storage you actually use.  They charge $.15/GB/month.  So, for 31.2 GB I’ll be paying $4.68 per month.  Not bad for a remote, redundant backup.  They also charge for bandwidth which is usually $.10/GB, but it’s currently on sale for $.03/GB.  So, the upload only cost $.93.