Everyone uses Amazon S3, its a great platform, it's very reliable. $20 for 2TB of storage per month is pretty decent, that does sound ideal for most people's backup solutions.

it sounds good for things like photos etc...

but £130 a year for 2TB is a bit steep.... might as well just buy the drives for that...

I can see his point though, buy two 2TB drives (although they aren't quite cheaper than the cost) and already you've got a redundant backup to lock away somewhere.

Depends how much the data means to you. I was talking about this with a mate at work....

Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Skydrive - These services give enough data for most people to backup documents / important information.
Flickr Pro ($24 p/year) gives you unlimited photo storage (normal peoples photos aren't over 50mb each).
YouTube will allow most people to backup any home video in a quality they are happy with.

So that leaves movies/tv shows/music/games which take up the majority of space on peoples computers/devices... no matter how they were obtained (legally or illegally) they can easily be downloaded again - even if you uploaded to a cloud service somewhere you would still need to download them again from that so why bother?

In terms of hardware performance you should be fine for whatever you need to throw at it once you have a good enough graphics card in to do the decoding. Maybe you'd want to stick in an extra 1GB of RAM, but in terms of processor power it should be fine.

Does snapraid work in the same type of parity based RAID as unRAID? I might look into it, although I'm pretty happy with unRAID to be honest.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/aufsRootFileSystemOnUsbFlash - Gonna follow that to create a Lubuntu install on a USB stick and make it read only. Nothing, in theory, will need to be written to the system if everything is set up correctly. Media file serving with parity drive and some other little bits and pieces like sabnzbd that seem to be making UnRAID fall over at the moment.

It'll also means I should be able to do things like automated backup easier because ubuntu is well supported and there are loads of guides for idiots about. RAM size will be the thing I need to be careful of though, as its currently the shipped standard I think I'm gonna have to increase that to the max 8GB if I'm to essentially run everything off RAM.

Acquired a UPS too, so I'll have that set up to ensure any power failure will make it shutdown nice and safely. Of course, a read only OS means it'll boot up perfectly following a shut down anyway, just means I'll keep the hard drives safe from a sudden power outage.

However, I'm not too sure XBMC will like running on a read only memory stick, so this could turn out to just be a replacement of unRAID at the moment. I'll have to see how much RAM SnapRAID and all the other stuff takes up before I commit to transferring XBMC over.

Also, my other concern with UnRAID is the limit on the number of drives. Obviously you can pay for more but at £100 or so for the full version it isn't cheap, and I'd much rather spend that money on a hard drive at the moment. SnapRAID should hopefully do everything I need without having to pay out and by the sounds of it, its very reliable.

Do you have to port data over to it? Surely with the data on the hard drives it'll just be a matter of calculating the parity again? It might take a bit of time but it shouldn't be that bad. Unless I'm mistaken...

I'll have to look into it more anyhow. Got a few others things to look at too, such as my router and satellite set ups.

If you've got a rooted Android phone, I can hook you up with a 50gb dropbox account for 2 years