This brings up a great practical question. What's the state of the art of this sort of thing for more modest but still modern data storage requirements?
Context: For the last five years, my backup system has been to have Time Machine do hourly backups on my MBP (main development machine, just shy of 1TB data), with key spots on my Linux server (3TB data at the moment) backed up daily to my in-laws' house using cron and rsync, and spot directories on the MBP backed up there as well.
But the hard drive on the Time Capsule I've used seems to have gotten unreliable, and the external USB drive I bought to replace it has not worked reliably for more than a day or two at a time. And even when it was all working properly, I was never really verifying my backups.
Do people have suggestions for secure, reliable, verifiable, easy backup systems capable of handling 4+ TB of data? I don't mind if it takes work or money to set it up; the important thing is once it's working I can mostly forget about it.
For an offsite backup, Backblaze is fantastic. Unlimited storage for $5/month and the client works perfectly. It's not highly-redundant or anything, so use it in addition to a local backup.
CrashPlan is the next-best option if you need Linux support, but the client isn't as good.
I replaced my Time Capsule with a Synology NAS. Backups are still handled by Time Machine on the Mac (so they're still mostly unobtrusive and idiot-proof), but now they're stored on a mirrored RAID of cheap 3.5" disks.
The Synology box is basically just an ARM Linux machine, SSH/root is not locked out if you want it, so if you want to get fancy with off-site backups, you can set up rsync or whatever you want on it. They even ship with some GUIs for mirroring to Dropbox, S3, rsync, another remote Synology NAS, etc.
How long have you been using this? When I search online for solutions to the Time Capsule problems I have been having, they are full of "Time Machine does not work backing up to non-Apple products" warnings.
A couple months now. And yeah, I've tested restores of files as well.
Synology has specific support for Time Machine, in fact in their recent software update they added support for Time Machine over SMB since Apple is deprecating AFP.
Context: For the last five years, my backup system has been to have Time Machine do hourly backups on my MBP (main development machine, just shy of 1TB data), with key spots on my Linux server (3TB data at the moment) backed up daily to my in-laws' house using cron and rsync, and spot directories on the MBP backed up there as well.
But the hard drive on the Time Capsule I've used seems to have gotten unreliable, and the external USB drive I bought to replace it has not worked reliably for more than a day or two at a time. And even when it was all working properly, I was never really verifying my backups.
Do people have suggestions for secure, reliable, verifiable, easy backup systems capable of handling 4+ TB of data? I don't mind if it takes work or money to set it up; the important thing is once it's working I can mostly forget about it.