Question

Storing backup files for personal archival purposes

Posted January 10, 2015 5.6k views

I am thinking of signing up for your hosting service but I wanted to ask first if I would be able to store files on the server that I am storing primarily for backup purposes. For example, I would like to save some of my mp3 albums, videos, and other content so that I may retrieve them at anytime. These are all legally acceptable files I have the rights to as an owner and would like to archive in an off-site storage for redundancy purposes as part of my fair use rights over content I own. (While this would have seemed like a silly question to me a while ago, I am asking because my current hosting service, Dreamhost, has switched to a policy whereby its users are no longer allowed to use their servers for anything other than pure web hosting. I can only assume that they see profit opportunities to make money by contextually classifying content stored on their servers since they offer additional plans for archival purposes now. As one of their oldest customers - over 10 tens - I have stayed with them through thick and thin but I cannot tolerate such bald greed so I am now shopping for a new service. I am using this feature as a sort of litmus test of the service before diving deeper.)

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jamesingoth
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jamesingoth
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2 comments
  • gndo January 10, 2015
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    The terms of agreement link has the plain english on the right side and the legal jargon on the left side of the page. It’s a standard looking agreement that most members in this public forum glanced at and agreed to when we signed up. You’ll probably want to concentrate on section 2.

    From your usage, though, I would think you would want something like a Dropbox for storage, as oppose to a VPS. The former is more of a turn-key system, while the latter requires more involvement (and more fun from my techie perspective).

  • jamesingoth January 10, 2015
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    Thanks for the link and your thoughts. I can’t see anything on the legal side (left) that prohibits archiving as such. I use dropbox for active things but I’d rather pay less per byte to archive stuff that I may want at some point down the road but, in the meantime, just know where to find it and that it’s ok. Beyond that, though, I’d want to actually host a bunch of web sites - the archival thing is just a secondary feature I’ve always used.

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sierracircle January 10, 2015

Greetings. I am also a refugee from DreamHost, who now uses DigitalOcean for all webhosting (but for different reasons than you).

Having said that, DreamHost does have a really great fee for DreamObjects storage. DreamObjects buckets can be mounted on your DigitalOcean droplet as a folder.

This gives you virtually unlimited storage for pennies per GB. Also, as far as I understand it, there are not limitations on DreamObjects like there are on DreamHost’s web-hosting plans…so basically you can store whatever you want.

I wrote up a tutorial on how to mount a bucket:

https://firefli.de/tutorials/s3fs-and-dreamobjects.html

But if you really hate DreamHost, you can do the same thing with Amazon storage…but they are a tad more expensive

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  • jamesingoth January 10, 2015

    Thanks for the answer! I’m a bit confused, though: When you say DreamObjects can be mounted on DigitalOcean, do you mean I should stay with Dreamhost but simply offload my archival material into their DreamObjects which I would then mount onto DigitalOcean? But then why would I want DigitalOcean if I can store things into Dreamhost’s DreamObjects?

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  • sierracircle January 10, 2015

    Because a digital ocean droplet costs less, loads faster and lets you manage your own server exactly how you want.

    I use Dreamhost for registering my domains and DreamObjects. I use DigitalOcean for spinning up VPS’s for webhosting.

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  • jamesingoth January 10, 2015

    Is there a reason you don’t just completely leave Dreamhost? Registration can be done by a number of services but DreamObjects - is there no good counterpart to that? Just storing stuff on DigitalOcean isn’t an attractive option? I’m just thinking I’d like to minimize the number of services I use.

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  • sierracircle January 10, 2015

    I could probably switch to a different registrar, but honestly DreamHost has never given me any problems when it comes to domains, and I like their control panel. They also have decent prices for SSL certs.

    DigitialOcean does not offer much storage with each droplet. DreamObjects solves that for me. I mainly use DreamObjects for backup, so it is nice to have my backups in an alternative location…meaning if DigitalOcean suddenly went belly up, all of my backups are elsewhere so I would not have a panic attack.

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  • jamesingoth January 10, 2015

    It sounds like a good strategy - thanks for the explanation!

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sierracircle January 10, 2015

My total bill for last month from Dreamhost for backing up 7 different websites on a daily basis: $0.70

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  • jamesingoth January 10, 2015

    Was that your total bill overall or were there overheads on top of the $0.70 that were necessary to get that along with other things you may want?

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  • sierracircle January 11, 2015

    that was my total bill. You just pay for what you use, rather than paying for blocks of space like you would with Drop-Box or similar services.

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  • jamesingoth January 11, 2015

    How much total space does your backup take? (That is, how much space are you getting for $0.70?)

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  • sierracircle January 11, 2015

    Looks like I am currently at 22.85 GB of space, and 0.35 GB of downloading from that.
    There is no charge for uploading.

    what I like about it is that it is expandable for as much room as I want. No worrying about running out of space.
    Downside is it is not very speedy, so I probably would not get good performance if I was trying to use that storage for running an application.
    However, I only use it for archiving and backups…which it works perfectly for that purpose.

    I run backups every night at midnight for every website I manage…and then monthly backups of each website into a separate monthly folder.

    I occasionally have to access those backups to retrieve files or code.

    Here is the fee:
    2.5¢/GB Storage
    5¢/GB Download

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