I transferred my hosting to DreamHost a few weeks ago, and everything is working great.

I read the section about Files Forever, and I have a question. Can I use the "Files Forever" feature to back-up the hard drives on my desktop machine? I don't anticipate selling any of my files (or allowing anyone else to download them). I've been thinking of using an on-line back-up service like Carbonite, but I'd rather use DreamHost, since I have over 200 GB of storage in my account.

If Files Forever is appropriate for this use, can anyone point me in the right direction as to which software to use to automate back-ups, encrypt files, etc.? I have an old Windows 98 machine.

Thanks in advance for everyone's help.

--
Alex C.
Rochester, NY

Remember that Files Forever has cost-per-mb for the upload.

Free unique IP and $67 off with promo code FLENSFREEIP67 or use FLENS97 for $97 off. Click here for more options

Yeah, that's fine. I would only have about 10 GB, and probably less.

Actually, now that I think about it, I wouldn't need to pay for Files Forever, since I don't need the features, right? Could I just upload to my regular server space?

Edited by Alex_C on 05/27/07 11:01 AM (server time).

Why not simply use your regular DH account for this purpose ? You don't really need Files Forever and its accounting overhead. You can just set up an FTP account on your DH account that does not have a public website on it and use that as a drop for your backup (though I recommend using SFTP instead for obvious reasons, or rsync over SSH for mirror backups or duplicity + scp backend for secure incremental backups).

Most backup solutions come with a "backup to FTP" option that you can use this way. Some even encrypt stuff. You might also want to look into duplicity on windows (which would run under cygwin. Andre has made a tutorial for that some time ago on http://katastrophos.net/andre/blog/2006/04/03/duplicity-042-on-cygwin/ ... Maybe that'll help you :) (duplicity uses librsync and GPG ... basically you get a completely GPG-encrypted backup on a remote site that you can update incrementally, without ever having the files in the clear on the remote side).

I have done this on other hosting providers too and it has worked very well. Its almost 100% safe. Even better you can use some ghosting facility on your comp and upload the ghost files to your account for back-up.

- Simple Life -