I have a 1and1 linux business account which provides 250Gb of storage and more email accounts than I could ever need. The only restriction that I run into is the maximum number of files of 262,144. I'm nowhere near the 250Gb maximum file usage.
A few weeks ago I received an email from 1and1 saying that the price for the linux Business service would be going up from $9.99/mo to $13.99/mo in May. At the same time, there would now be unlimited web space, email accounts, MySQL database, subdomains, etc. However, the email made no mention about a change in the maximum number of files.
The cost of online storage options keeps going down whether it's 1and1, Google, Amazon S3, Dropbox or the new Amazon Cloud Drive .
It would be nice to have a simple backup utility that will backup via FTP to a storage service of your choosing. With 1and1, it would be great if that backup would be to a single file to bypass their file limit. In searching for ftp backup utilities, I found a lot of really old utilities but eventually came across Cobian Backup. I've spent a couple of days trying out Cobian backup and it works well and is free. The user interface isn't initially intuitive but watch this short YouTube video and you'll be using it in no time.
For my purposes, I've found a couple of other options that work well. Under the Archive setting, I select 7z compression because I had a problem with zip compression. I also set up the file to be split into DVD size (4.3Gb) files so that I can download the backup in reasonable size pieces and because Cobian compresses the files on local storage so you're going to need some amount of free space on the local hard drive if you use their compression option.
