What is HDD colocation at HDD-Housing?

HDD-Housing is an online colocation service for hard disk drives (HDDs). Your own hard drive is installed in a server with ECC RAM and Proxmox, and made available as an offsite backup target via S3 or Syncthing.

What does the service cost?

20€ per HDD per month, no TB limit, no minimum contract duration. Paying one year in advance gets you 2 months free.

How secure is the backup against ransomware?

Server-side snapshots with individually configurable retention policies, combined with client-side encryption, provide strong ransomware and data security.

Is there a free test account?

Yes, a free test account with 5GB storage is available for 30 days, requestable by email or via the contact form on the website.

Managed Offsite Backup on Your Own Hard Drive | HDD Colocation Europe

Managed offsite backup on your own hard drives: you send us your HDD or SSD, we run the server in the Graz area, Austria. No TB limit, with snapshot protection against ransomware.

Price · How it works · Service · Advantages · Technical details · Contact & Testaccount

What is HDD-Housing (HDD colocation)?

HDD-Housing e.U. is a managed offsite backup service: you send us your own hard drive (HDD or SSD), we run it in our server in the Graz area, Austria, and you back up to it via S3 or Syncthing. You don’t need a server of your own. Multiple drives can be combined into any ZFS pool, e.g. mirror or RAIDZ.
This is neither a hard drive enclosure nor classic server colocation.
We bill per drive instead of per terabyte, also for pools. For large amounts of data this is much cheaper, especially for restores: we clone your data onto a new drive that you send us at no extra cost. This is also safer than shipping the original drive, because the original data stays with us.

We offer two options to access your offsite backup (for a custom solution, please contact us):

S3 (S3-compatible via VersityGW)
Syncthing

Price

⚠ 2 months free when paying 1 year in advance ⚠
€18 per HDD per month
Price per HDD, also with multiple drives in a ZFS pool
You pay for shipping
No minimum contract duration
Payment options: bank transfer (IBAN) or PayPal
Free return shipping in the first month if you are not happy with the service
No VAT because of the “Kleinunternehmerregelung” (small business exemption) in Austria

How it works: set up offsite backup with your own hard drive

Create the initial backup: You create the initial backup on your HDDs locally (or over the internet).
Send us your HDDs: You send us your HDDs.
We run them in the Graz area: We operate your HDDs as your offsite backup.

What if an HDD fails?
Just send us a new HDD so that we can resilver the pool. Your offsite backup keeps running.

How do I restore?
You send us new HDDs with enough space for your data. We clone your data onto them while your offsite backup keeps running. Then we send the HDDs containing the copy back to you for restoring.

What happens if I quit?
We send your HDDs back to you and stop your offsite backup. You can use the drives for whatever you want.

How it works: send your HDDs and we run them as your offsite backup, replace a failed HDD, restore onto new HDDs, get your HDDs back when you quit

Service

The HDD will be installed in a server with ECC RAM on which Proxmox is running, in an air-conditioned environment. Server location: Graz area, Austria
Possible file systems
- ZFS (any pool layout, e.g. mirror or RAIDZ)
- BTRFS (since ZFS bug 15526)
- For other free file systems, please contact us
S.M.A.R.T. values and disk space usage for the last 365 days can be viewed on a Grafana dashboard
Email alerts on HDD errors
Backup up to 1 Gbit/s, restore currently limited to about 100 Mbit/s. In case of disaster recovery, mailing HDDs is currently the fastest option
Supported drives: HDD and SSD, 3.5” & 2.5”, SATA & SAS, no TB limit

Advantages

You can prepare your drive(s) locally, so the initial backup doesn’t have to go over the internet
For a restore, you send new HDDs and we clone your data onto them at no extra cost. You only pay shipping both ways according to the Post.at calculator
High ransomware protection due to server-side snapshots
Snapshot retention can be individually defined
High data security due to client-side encryption

Example software that supports local encryption

Screenshots

Grafana

Technical details

Please see Technical details of Service in our wiki.

Contact & Testaccount

Free test account

A free test account is available for 30 days with 5 GB of storage.
By email to support@hdd-housing.at or via the contact form at the top of this page.
Please include your name and address in the request. The contact form at the top of this page is already encrypted and doesn’t require PGP. For email requests, you can optionally encrypt with PGP: PGP. Template Email
More information in the setup guide and in your registration confirmation.
Billing starts in the month in which the HDD(s) are installed. Drives are usually installed and removed on the first of the month.

Questions? Get in touch!

Email support@hdd-housing.at
Signal Messenger +43 681 81547424
Signal Username HDD_Housing.22
For telephone consultations, please arrange an appointment in writing via email, Signal or our contact form.