In a discussion about online storage in a Linux mailing list I read, there was a great comment about how to get more efficient backups than pushing hundreds of gigabytes of data to the web:
I think just backing up to /dev/null is probably cheaper and quite a bit faster, since it will all be local data transfer and not over the internet. /dev/null seems to have quite a bit of space in it, from what I can tell. Haven’t tested my backups yet, though. Probably ought to do that some time. I believe that /dev/random is the proper read device for that. They say restores take a while, but I’m sure I can live with that.
Okay, I admit, you have to know what Linux device files are to get the joke, but trust me that if you do, it’s really funny.