It’s hard to sleep when I know that all of my video, from all my different shows, could forever disappear with just a small fire. I have 4 hard drives in my Mac Pro, and they’re nearly full of data, most of it video. Three terabytes of data. I also have external hard drives which I’ve been using to backup, but I’ve now arrived at that point where I no longer have room on my external drives, or on my internal hard drives.

I am almost out of space. I clearly need to go bigger. But that’s just part of my problem.

At the same time, I want to back up the data off site as well.

For the local backup solution, I’ve been looking at the Drobo with four individual terabyte drives in it. It’s an expensive solution though. All together, the package would run around $1,500 with all the drives in it. Still, most of the reviews rave about what a great backup tool the Drobo is. I can’t help salivate over the thought of the Drobo and Time Machine working in combination.

But what about the off site solution? At first I tried Mozy, an online service that would upload my data onto the internet, to store it “in the cloud” as it were. I started the backup, and after 3 days of uploading, I hadn’t even completed 1% of the data uploaded. At this rate, it would take more than a year to backup my one computer. That wasn’t feasible, so I canceled the service. Then I registered for JungleDisk which uses Amazon’s S3 service. At 15 cents per gigabyte, how could I go wrong? I started uploading, and at my upload rate, it was much faster than Mozy, but it was still going to take about 5 months. And, once you add up all the gigabytes, it was going to be an expensive solution as well. And that leaves me…

Well, I don’t know. I’m thinking that at this point, I’m better off simply copying my backups onto hard drives and storying them at a friend’s house. Maybe once per month we could swap. I’ll store their data, and they can store mine. I guess that means I’ll also have to secure my data with some sort of encryption.

What do you do for backup? Do you have any recommendations for me?