I've been meaning to setup an offsite online backup for some of my *nix /home dir as well as My Documents folder on windows and I was wondering what services any of my fellow Cemetech members have used/tried.

I know Carbonite has some restrictions on file size for their consumer plans that I wasn't a huge fan of but other than that they looked decent.

Tarsnap looks rather interesting and their pricing model seems to make a lot of sense as well as their use of AWS. The lack of a native windows client is a bit of a let down but I can always have windows mirror to my file server and then have tarsnap grab it from there.

Any other services people have tried and/or would recommend?

I run Crashplan. No file size limitations, and a flat subscription fee gets you "unlimited" storage. Network speeds are pretty reasonable (I recovered around two terabytes in about six days, basically just limited by my downstream connection).

Supports all three major operating systems, and it's possible to administer it remotely despite not having a command-line interface. It can also do peer-to-peer backups for free, which is pretty handy. I have my workstations back up to my storage server, and the server backs up to the cloud.

The price of crashplan seems almost too good to be true. But at the same time, for that price I can't say no. So I think that is what I shall go with for now.

That's seems extremely cheap indeed! I'm afraid that I don't really like to trust a company with all of my data if I'm not administering it myself, so all of my local and remote backups are on my own computers and servers. Said backups are not quite as geographically diverse as might be desired for resilience to catastrophic natural disasters, but it's not bad:

- My tablet PC (hereafter "laptop") holds the authoritative copies of my important documents. I mount its drive on my desktop when I use my desktop.
- My laptop backs up my vital documents to an 8GB SD card that I keep permanently in its SD card slot every hour. If I accidentally delete or overwrite a file, I can short-term pull it from there. This also came in handy a few summers ago when my hard drive crashed right after I did a major Doors CS code merge.
- Three of my desktop's hard drives each contains a copy of my documents: my laptop backs up to one using SyncBack nightly, then the desktop replicates the backup on the other drive. It keeps my two 2TB drives in sync so that if one of them fails, the other can take over. I really should have them in actual RAID 1.
- When my laptop comes with me to the office to be my home directory for my office desktop, it backs itself up to my office desktop every day around 2pmish.

You could still use Crashplan to simplify that with peer-to-peer backups and not even involve their servers (which you can do even without a subscription). The only negative thing I could say about their software is that it's written in Java and can be a bit picky to set up (mostly on Linux systems). You even get some versioning on the backups for free (and unlimited versioning with a license).

Hmm, that's not bad. My current backups use SyncBack on Windows and rsync on Linux, but none of that is versioned.