Preface: I use to use rsync.net for my offsite backup needs. They offer a nice solution, especially with the F/OSS contributor discount, but my needs were lesser than their offerings and I didn’t quite feel comfortable paying monthly for such needs. That is, get my critical (but small) backups off my host, MySQL, a few important files, etc. Most of my online world is now externally hosted (cloud) or easily rebuilt with key pieces of info.

My current free 5G offsite backup solution is with box.com. I don’t really use box.com as intended – ‘a collaborative file sharing platform’ but instead take advantage of the [WebDAV][3] access that they provide. So, a quick walk-through:

1. emerge davfs2 (I pushed fixes in version >=1.4.7 in Gentoo Linux, I recommend that version)
2. echo "https://www.box.com/dav /mnt/box.com davfs rw,user,noauto 0 0" >> /etc/fstab
3. Mount the mountpoint as your user (enter your box.com credentials), copy files to the mounted filesystem.

(There are some finer details, like modifying $HOME/.davfs2/secrets and turning off use_locks, but I’m sure you smart people can figure that out via google.)

Personally, I have a simple cron job that mounts, rsyncs, umounts that runs daily. Now, I have an accessible location to restore critical files as needed, just don’t look at the webui since it doesn’t understand compressed tarballs that well and is useless, heh.

[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webdav