Re: Big initial upload

[Garance AE Drosehn <gadcode@earthlink.net>]

> On Jun 29, 2016, at 2:33 AM, Gregory Orange <gregory.orange@calorieking.com> wrote:
> 
> I'm considering tarsnap for our backups. I am mildly concerned about our Internet uplink speed to get the data to tarsnap on a nightly basis, ...
> 
> The numbers are in the order of 1TB of data over Australian ADSL at a maximum of 1 megabit per second uplink. By my reckoning, that might finish in 36 hours, but is more likely to be double that.

I've read several replies to this initial question, but let me add one more thought.

Two years ago I had a 1.5-TB drive, which had about 1.2-TB of data on it.  Without any warning, I lost the entire drive (after about two years of it working fine).  And out of that 1.2-TB of data, there was only about 200 hundred megabytes which was *really* painful to lose.  The rest of it was data that I could regenerate, or which I had copies of on my other computers, or which I was sad to lose but didn't really hurt all *that* much.

One thing you might consider is to select the most valuable few-hundred megabytes of data, and immediately start backing up that small subset.  There's an advantage to having at least some of your data saved to an off-site backup.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =  gadcode@earthlink.net
Senior Systems Programmer           or       gad@FreeBSD.org