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Is Storage Capacity Outstriping Backup Capability?
Kzip asks: "On my modest home LAN we have four computers with around 300Gb of storage. A lot of this is used, but not a lot of it is backed up (certainly not on a regular basis). When I started looking for a backup solution I found that most of the affordable tape backup was way to small (DAT 12/24 is just too small now a days) or too slow (Onstream do 50Gb but on IDE it's only ~1MB/s ... so 6 tapes over 80+ hours!) or just too expensive (HP Ultrium is great, but at £3000 for a drive and £120 per tape it's a little pricey). So I'd like to ask the /. community: Does anyone know of a fast and affordable backup system for home/small office use." After a quick scan of Pricewatch and other sites, it seems that backup solutions >99G are expensive (all the ones I could find were more than $1000US). How long will it be before these and
terabyte-backup solutions become affordable for SOHO ? use?
I realize you are looking for a nice removable backup medium but you can't have it. Not with today's cheap harddrives. It'll be much much cheaper for you to build a backup machine with enough GBs to hold your data. The risk is what are the odds that two disks fail at the same time? (Hey! That's the gamble with RAID too!)
:)
The other alternative is to only have data that is crap, like this post, which isn't worth backing up.
Here before all but 8486 of you.
At my university, our college of engineering bought a StorageTek Powderhorn for interdepartmental backup. The model we have currently has 100 TB of storage capacity and can be expanded to 300 TB. Its host is a massive Sun server connected to the core network switch via two gigE links and and one ATM link. At the server level in various departments and groups we are mostly doing RAID as disks have become so darn cheap. A simple script dumps data onto the Powderhorn across the street once a week in the event of a major malfunction (RAID recoveries don't always go smoothly), theft, or fire.
a CD-RW drive with a write speed of at least 20x and alot of CD-R/CD-RW discs ;)
It can be slow but it's the best back up system I have at home.
I've run in to the same problem. You can buy a 100GB drive for cheap, but good luck backing it up. The only real solution I've come up with is to just buy extra drives and mirror or RAID them.
I still think it's crazy to pay $140/tape for SDLT at the office....
Yes.
You're welcome. Any time. Glad I could help.
Democracy. Whiskey. Sexy. Pick any two.
I got to thinking once again about how fragile my current backup scheme is.
I have three machines -- one laptop for MS Office, games, and browsing the rare website I can't use with Opera on Linux, one ancient Linux box doing NAT and email, and one modern Linux workstation that I use for my daily work. My backup sets from these machines total about 15 gigabytes compressed. About five gigabytes are irreplaceable data, and replacing the rest would be several days' work.
I take backups every night. The two linux boxes cpio, gzip, and cp new and changed files off their relevant filesystems to a separate backup drive on the workstation, while the built-in backup applet on the Win2k box takes a full backup onto the same drive via SMB. An additional cron job on the workstation renames the windows backup file each night so the new one doesn't.
This scheme protects me from any single drive failure, as well as accidental deletion of any file or directory except the root directory on the Linux workstation. Which means that if, for example, if I were to install a poorly constructed RPM that did rm -rf $DIRECTORY/ in a script while $DIRECTORY was unset, I would lose all my data. While I do have the most critical stuff on CD's, those are usually weeks out of date. And even those would be susceptible to a housefire or a burglary (well, I don't know if burglars typically bother to steal stacks of CD-R's -- anyone with experience in this regard?).
In any case, offsite backups would be the way to go. CDR's are a pain to automate when your backup set is large, and a pain to drag off site, and they can get quite expensive in the long run, so I've looked into various online backup services. Unfortunately, at the volumes I'm looking at, the commercial services will typically charge you several times the one-time cost of the hard drive space each month, which seems somewhat excessive.
In fact, if I could just find two or three random guys with DSL or cable, each with a server that's always on and has 20GB to spare, I'd be quite happy to give them each 20 gigs on my box in return. A 15-minute search on Google didn't turn up any backup exchange rings on the web -- is someone doing this kind of thing, either privately with friends or through a more open group? What kind of software do you use? While I would be perfectly happy with cpio | gzip | gpg | ssh cat to stash my own stuff, I would be hesitant to give random strangers full shell accounts on my box. And I would prefer not to let them turn my workstation into a warez server, either, although I suppose IP address restrictions and monitoring would pretty much take care of that. Something that runs on windows would also increase the user base nicely.
Has anyone been thinking carefully about a peer-to-peer online backup system, or should I?
There are a lot of businesses bigger than the SOHO type - here in New Zealand, 1-100 employees is the norm. They need serious backup within their smaller budget.
:)
If I was a more enterprising geek....
Prisoner #655321
There is a backup solution by a company in Seattle called InterVault. It allows you to backup your data to their servers via the Internet. They use encryption to protect your data, so don't lose your password. Their is no backdoor. Check them out at www.intervault.net.
-> Capt Cosmic <-
... just follow the link in my .sig
I have one of those and it's plain cool.
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
Just use a smart backup-strategy.
/usr when you
... has something equal)
/home with the last
You just don't have to backup
can just reinstall them from the CDs they came on.
-> Just save a list of your installed RPMs
(redhat has a script for that purpose, I'm sure
debian, slackware,
And your 50GM collection of MP3s doesn't change either. So just save them to CDr, which you can
stick in your cheap DVD-player for easy listening
on your home-stereo.
So just make some permanent backup of things
that will not change and incrementally backup
only things that are changing.
I doubt that your current programming project,
your mailfolder and other things that change
often are more than you can fit on a DDS3 DAT Tape...
And if your computer breaks, you just reinstall
your OS from your saved config (insert the CD,
wait 15 Minutes, you can make yourself a pot
of cofee in the meantime), when it's done
you add your CDs (which of course have the
proper location the data on them wents stored!)
while the DAT fills your
backup and your'e set.
But to answer the question: Yes - storage is overtaking backup capacity. A new approach is required. Some sort of writable DVD is probably the solution.
So you think you're pretty smart by buying two big HDs and doing a nightly copy of one to the other? Just think what happens when the source disk fails in the middle of the nightly backup. You have a failed source disk. And a half-baked backup disk. With a possibly unrecoverable file system. You just lost all your data.
I think if you want to do backups to HD you need three of them!
pricewatch.org seems to be some commercial dental products site. pricewatch.com is, I hope, what he meant.
Since you've several computer connected to the network, reserve some place on the hard-drive to backup information from the other computers (a folder or a partition, whatever). Decide what you need to backup (ini files,...) and write a script to do it for you (in bash under Linux, or a .bat file under windoze). Write the script so that it erases the previous backup only after the current one is finished. Just start this script when you feel a need to back up. ;) (almost did once)
I've done this for my email archive. I wouldn't want to lose it in a crash.
This solution is the best for you in your current network configuration. If one computer fails, you'll still have your data available on one of the others.
For those with only one computer, if you have two HDs (not 2 partitions on the same drive), the solution is to use the second drive to backup (data from) the first, and the first drive to backup the second (you usually don't install programs only on the first one).
My last tip: use zip or rar to reduce the size of the backup (and the number of files). It's a little longer to do, but you'll backup more in less space.
All the Unix backup tools can backup to disk as easily as to tape. Carriers to make ATA/100 disks removable cost about $10 each. ATA/100 disks are cheap per megabyte.
There are techniques to make the disks hot swappable, or use a dedicated backup machine that can be easily powered down to swap disks.
Most importantly! It's a restore system, not a backup system.
Nobody cares how great your backups are, if you can't do a restore when you need it.
The backup solution I use for my work machines is this:
Build PC with 3+ partitions (c:=system d:=apps e:=data f:=MP3/misc g:=games)
I make sure that c: is a relatively small partition (2GB or less). I run Norton Ghost to make an image of the C drive. Typically, the C image will fit onto a CD. I do the same with the D drive, assuming it's not too big. E I just burn straight onto a CD, F I mostly have on CD already, so I just burn the additions every 600MB or so. G I don't worry about.
In the event of a disaster, I just use the C and D images to restore those two partitions, and start copying CDs to restore the others.
This space for rent.
You don't have enough data to ask that question. Tape backup is still the cheap way to store a lot of data in a small amount of space. however if your tapes don't take up a football field then the need for small cheap storage doesn't really hit you.
Backups have several advantages byond the above: timed snap shots. You generally keep several copies of your data from different times, realize you made a mistake several days ago, you can go back to before that mistake.
Tapes are easy to move off site. Critical data must be moved offsite. Preferably several copies.
Backups for purposes of dealing with yesterday's mistakes are better delt with via good version controll. Get and use version controll on all your documents.
Now you only need to protect against hard drive crashes, and nateral disasters. I recomend a good insurance policy. Don't protect jut the equipment, protect the income lost tryign to re-create your data. A $100,000 disaster insurance policy isn't that expensive (but you should seriously consider more!), and you need it anyway, along with thief protection.
Hard drive crashes in small systems are best protected againsts by mirroring. Copy all your data to anouther harddrive, they are cheap enough that this solves most of the hardware failure problems. I recomend a small computer locked in a basement closet, so that theives don't get it.
Once a month or so decide what is really critical and copy that to CDROMs (DVDrom?), which you store at your parents. You can get your MP3s again. You can take anouther picture of the leaning tower, so don't save it. (unless your kid is in the picture, since you can't get anouther picture of your kid at that age) Buisness data doesn't all have to be kept. Just enough that you can reconstruct your buisness. Your suppliers will be happy to send you a new price list. Linux (or whoever is now maintainign the stable kernel) will be happy to give you a new kernel.
It takes a lot of data to make a $10,000 tape drive doing 50GB at $20/tape pay for itself, and you really should seriously consider a robotic library for even more $$$. You can do the math. If you are in that crowd, StorkageTek (the company I work for) will be happy to sell you such a system. We admit freely that when you have less then 30 terabytes of data tape backup often isn't the solution.
In the future, please include links in your message in addition to sig. I (and I suspect many others) have sigs turned off, so we can't see your link unless we change our /. prefs.
Actually, if someone who has sigs turned on would please follow up with the link for the rest of us, it would be nice.
And most of it is used!? What the hell do you have on those machines - a ton of MP3s and porn?
Seriously - I couldn't care less what you had, but you need to ask some serious questions here. You talk about four computers with 300 gig of storage, so that is around an 80 gig drive per machine. What you first need to do is consolidate and eliminate duplicate material - ie, build a fileserver, and eliminate redundant data.
How many of those MP3s are kept local on each machine, as copies, etc - when there should only be one copy? Same with those mpegs and jpegs, and any other kind of data.
When and where possible, drop as much of that data to CDs, and remove it off the hard drives - in fact, if I was in your position, I would build a machine with four of those 80 gig drives, then drop small 8 gig drives in each local machine. Partition that 8 gig drive into a 2 gig system partition a four gig application partition, and a 2 gig data partition. Give each user space as well on the fileserver. Put all the MP3s on the fileserver, and hook everyone and the fileserver up through a 100Mb switch. Also, each user can backup their data on their data partition to whatever medium suits them (to the fileserver, to a floppy, to a CD - whatever suits the amount of data they have), and forget the rest (in the event of a real problem, it can be reinstalled from the original disks, or from a backup on the fileserver).
You may also want to partition the fileserver, depending on the type of data being stored (or simply keep certain data on certain drives). Then, decide what is important, and what isn't (is an MP3 important - or is that 300 page dissertation important), and backup the important stuff to CD. Perhaps build a second machine to act as a "mirror" of some sort.
None of these suggestions should substitute for a real backup solution - so you can only do what you can with the money and stuff you have. But there is a way to keep most of what you have safe enough...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I have SCA drives that are Hot-Swappable.
They are in Aluminum Removable Caddies. I turn the key, (which powers the drive down) turn the handle, and remove. I pop in a different drive, turn the key, and w.2000 thinks a few seconds, and accepts the new drive.
This is a good removable backup solution. (As long as you don't drop the drive on your way to the fire safe)
Has anyone seen or heard of a removable IDE system? That would be much more affordable...
Even at a few hundred $ per drive, it beats tape on all counts.
-Speed
-Price per MB
-User Friendly (No multiple tape backups, one drive does it all...)
He didn't seem overly concerned with performance. Why not save a few bucks with a software RAID? Under win2k it's almost trivial to setup, and probably possible with linux too. Then there is the matter of what all he wants to back up. I'd personally do images of the systems installed with whatever software I wanted them to have, maybe 1 image if they're sufficently similar on CD, the data I'd put in a software raid in a file server I'd build out of scraps. To the raid I'd throw off occasional system state backups. It depends, but in his particular boat I'd lean towards a software raid.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.