Crazy Idea

[Ryan Anderson]

So, I was looking at S3 pricing and had a wholly unexpected idea for a cheap backup method. USPS PO Box.

Set one up, put in a big encrypted disk with the initial backup and send the diffs on DVDs in CD mailer envelopes... terrible latency, but with a transfer cost of 9 cents per GB, it's not terrible.

You could probably even skip mailing them if you wanted to make more trips. At less than $100/year, it'd quickly beat any other remote backup pricing.

I recognize the cons being manual cleanup and a lack of receipt verification... otherwise, is this dumb in any other ways? (I haven't looked at safe deposit boxes, you can't mail to a safe deposit box in another city)

--
Ryan

[Warren Turkal]

You might consider burning bluray instead of DVDs. You can fit a lot
more data on one disk.

Another gotcha may be that the PO Box might get full or something may
happen if the PO folks think it's been abandoned. It seems like an
interesting idea though.

Another similar idea might be to do a backup exchange with a friend
and do the same thing.

wt

[Joe Bielli]

Don't forget that your time is also (sometimes) worth money. While
you could of course automate the burning of DVD with a cron job or
similar means, the time it takes to mail the cd can add up. 5 minutes
here and there, etc. Not to mention availability of your backup in
the event of an emergency (I personally like to have it readily
accessible). The cloud is as awesome as it is terrifying.

There are also tons of cheap alternatives such as Dropbox if it's just
for your own data and a few gigs. Through the referral program I
think they just increased free storage to 10gigs with max (free)
referrals.

Pogoplug is also pretty awesome, just smuggle one into a friend's
datacenter with a 500gigger attached. (just kidding) :-).

Joe

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[Be Netritious]

For companies that still use tape pickup (my previous employer still
uses tape) a PO Box and BD-RE wouldn't be a bad investment in time or
money. The price is static regardless of data volume, and transfer rates
do not apply. It's an interesting idea.

It just depends on your RTO, type of disaster, and data size. For small
amounts of data a cloud is reasonable, but for bare metal restorations
with large data sets I don't see any advantage in time with remote
cloud storage over a run across town to a PO Box, especially if it's for
an intranet resource and internet resources are unavailable, and your
local backups are unavailable for whatever reason -- corrupted, stolen,
damaged, misconfigured, etc.

This could also be an idea for a new type of service where instead of
paying a company for media pickup, storage, and delivery -- just storage
and delivery. Maybe this new service would even pop the disc in a drive
and provide remote access.

It just so happens my building has a new USPS storefront and is adding
PO Boxes in the next few weeks. Anyone interested in investing and/or
testing a start-up venture?

Rich