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Affordable and Safe Data Protection Practices?
cfreeze asks: "With the recent fire at the University of Twente, I started to think 'Are the steps I'm taking to backup my home network sufficient?'. The first thing going through my mind was the need to mail a set of recent backup discs to a family member. I feel this is a good first step, but due to the distances involved it may prove to be impractical. The second was a small hidden personal safe that is fireproof. What steps are you taking?" If you are interested in truly protecting your data, you have to realize that making backups is just a start. Next comes protecting those backups from floods, fires, and other catastrophes that might occur. What do you do to protect your backups?
but can the storage format your putting your data on stand up to the heat?
I keep my home backups at work, and vice versa... works for me...
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
I back them up of course.
Back up your data by posting it in slashdot comments. Sure it might have NOTHING to do with the story but who cares people poost goatcx.se links too.
ALso FP
Although I do it anyway, most tapes and CDs will melt inside a firesafe in a fire.
Why not do online backup? Many companies offer this fairly cheaply...
For instance NovaStor
Safety deposit box.
Your bank should make these available to you for next to nothing, and you don't have to worry about buying your own safe and making sure that it's secure, fireproof, etc.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Um, beware that many safes that advertise fire resistence are NOT useful for protecting many forms of computer media (magnetic and/or optical) but are meant to keep paper from burning. Long before paper burns, most media will have long since expired (melted, etc.). Also look for one that's waterproof/resistent. It would be a bummer to have your stuff survive the fire, but not the subsequent fire dept.'s deluge.
One fellow, who was paranoid about the permanence of magnetic media, even kept a copy of his raw data on punch cards (cartons of them).
Plain and simple.. hard drives are cheaper.. the USB/Firewire enclosures usually add $80 USD to the cost though. Thing is, you can plop that in to your briefcase or bookbag and take it with ya. Another option I was looking into was USB drives.. still costly though.
(1st sig) If this were a snappy sig, you'd be reading it right now. (2nd sig) I'm a karma whore. >Insert FUD here
I rarely back stuff up. I can MP3 my CD if I need to, and no one cares about pr0n anyway ... or do they?
For the stuff I *want* to save, I usually store them somewhere on my homepage (it's neatly backed up in 2 locations), and I burn it on CD.
I have a box at my local bank. I take a tape there every few weeks or so for my home machines. My father who works from home takes tapes there every week. Just have a set of tapes to rotate in to the bank every so often. Box is something like $35/year. Worth having for other non-computer valuables as well.
I have everything important -- not everything, just everything IMPORTANT -- backed up to DVD+RW and stored in a fireproof safe in the basement.
I also have the house inspected regularly to make sure there's nothing that can CAUSE a fire, such as bad wiring. A lot of people skip this step.
I'm not worried about losing my program settings or anything piddly like that. I'm worried about the artwork and novels and such that I could never replace under any circumstances.
DVD+RW, BTW, has an estimated media life of 100 years, so I don't feel too bad about trusting my stuff to it.
Those little fireproof safes aren't really fireproof - not the cheap ones available at office supply stores anyway. In a big fire the interior of those small safes will get hot enough to ruin CDR or DVD backup media.
I would suggest the following: store your data on disk in such a way that it is simple to backup, buy a DVD writer to blast the backup data to DVD media weekly (cheap, fast convenient), and store the backup DVDs away from your office - at home, out in the garage, in your car's glovebox, etc.
Hi!
I run CDRW backups monthly for all important information -- documents, e-mail, etc. I do not backup software (i.e. Office, Windows, etc.).
If I want to make a quick backup, I just ZIP a file and transfer it to the computer server 2 floors down (in the basement). I figure this will help in the case that my hard drive on my workstation fails.
I also store important CDRW + CDRs in a fireproof safe. I store this in the basement, thinking that a fire will most likely start on the main or second floor -- and that fire will travel up instead of down (my knowledge of fire is not too good).
I also used to run a script that would create backups on a daily basis, and copy files to ZIP or on the server. That way, if I ever had to go back and retrieve information from a specific day, I could.
I have ALSO used cheap web hosting that had lots of disk space available and FTP'd files to their server. Probably not the most secure method, but could be cost-effective.
I back everything up to large firewire hard drives on a rotating basis. I keep a set of near line that are in my house and turned off for emergency restores and then monthly copies offsite. Nothing fireproof or high security, just in another location where they aren't likely to get lost or stolen or to have both my house and the storage location both burn down at once. I have had one house fire in the past, even just the smoke from a small fire can do incredible damage to electronics (not to mention the rest of the house).
I've found that the bigger problem for me is how the heck to find some backup solution that is cheap enough for home usage and doesn't just involve using multiple hard drives and can handle around 500 GB of data in a timely manner. I think that is a lost game
Revolutions are never about freedom or justice. They're about who's going to be top dog. -- Kilgore Trout
What do you do to protect your backups?
:(
I use the squirrel method, hiding my data on the drives of unsuspecting dupes all over the internet.
Unfortunately, I can't remember where all of these bits are, so if my primary system gets messed up I am going to be dataless
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
I tend to post all my documents on discussion forums so I can retrieve them later.
:-)
Most of the rest of the stuff is readily available for download (patches, pics, etc.). It real easy to replace mp3s that are missing the end of the song anyway.
That's nothing compared to what happened to the Univeristy of One through the University of Nineteen. Let's hope they realize their mistakes with the release of the University of Twente-One
Home safes are only fire proof to a point. House fires can be hot enough to melt steel. I wouldn't want to take that chance with something that I could not replace. It sounds good for backups, but for data that you want to be extra careful with (code basically) a safe deposit box would be more appropriate. I have a professor who keeps CD-R backups of all of his code in a safe deposit box. I'm sure you could fit a couple magnetic tapes in there too if you want total backup.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
I have CowboyNeal hold on to my offsite backups.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Well, data protection is sort of an interesting topic, so I'm glad this story is running. I'm interested in what strategies people have to defend against Murphy. ;)
I am, however, a little curious as to what is so important on a home network that offsite backups and a fireproof safe (!!) would be considered. In the grand scheme of things, are your pornography collection and your high score in Lemmings really that important?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Bought one of those little Brinks home security boxes that are usually found at your local mall or general purpose department store (Sears). About 30 bucks and it keeps its contents protected during fire.
Put your backups to CD and you don't have to worry about floods. I once left a CD case out in the rain for a while. Didn't have any trouble with the CDs. Either air dry them or get a special cleaning cloth as tissues/paper towels will scratch.
If you're using other media, go to a local hardware store and pickup some rubber sealing compound and mod the security box by placing a thin layer along the inside edge of the cover or the top edge of the box the cover goes over. Works pretty well. And it's cheap.
just because you have a backup, doesn't mean it works.
We were backing up our Oracle database with the export-utility, and DIRECT=Y flag. Well, unfortunately, sometimes a direct backup is corrupted (a direct backup bypasses all the SQL parsing, and unloads it directy from the tablespace).
Now we restore our backups every few weeks to our development databases, to make sure they are working.
They come get the dupes of the backups, and then hide them in a big hole in the ground.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
I'm sure that most of us undervalue the data we have stored on our personal equipment.
Then again maybe not, usually when something gets degaused from one of my machines, I have it somewhere else on another.
But your point is well taken, what would the impact be if I lost all the machines on my LAN at the same time?
Is there a 'smart' way for me to back it up, or how would I even start to evaluate which amoung the folders of fodder were the ones to back up.
Financial stuff would be obvious and easy, but beyond that it starts to get real muddy real quick.
And then, how do I secure my backup?
I sleep in blissful peace because of this product: Connected Online Backup. All the files that change get backed up over the Internet every night on my system. It also does partial-file backups, so it figures out which part of a particular file actually changes, which works well for huge files like e-mail folders (my e-mail file is like 200 megabytes, and it typically moves about 20K every day). Of course, it automatically compresses the data when sending it.
Security? It encrypts your data BEFORE it leaves your PC, and the security password remains on your computer. They are careful to tell you that if you lose your password, they can't recover your data.
I've only had to restore a file a couple of times, but the few times I've done it seemed to work well. They also have a CD ordering option.
The last time I posted about these guys some people said that restoring a lot of data tended to be kind of slow, but I don't have experian with that.
Oh, the price? $14.95 a month, and I have several gigabytes backed up. Can't beat the price, can't beat the peace of mind. This service rocks.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I'm not just talking glass, I'm talking a veritable safe. Sort of like where banks store their money. In the event of a fire, all you would have to do is shut the door to the 'server safe' and voila, you're protected. This is assuming the room is fireproof. A more sophisticated safe may shut off the ventilation system, and maybe the servers themselves.
For the tapes themselves, usual backup rules apply. i.e., multiple physical locations, etc.
Again, this is just a neophyte's opinion.. feel free to flame me if I'm way off-base, but I think these ideas are pretty practical and safe.
- vmfedor
I like my women how I like my sugar.. granulated.
Why, I give them to CowboyNeal, of course.
He handles all my backups anyway.
Your data backup isn't complete unless you could be up and running after having all of your computer equipment seized, your safety deposit boxes frozen, and search warrants served on all of your known friends and family members.
Maybe there is some sort of "off-shore" backup service in business?
a nuclear bunker outside the house is the best way to keep your pr0n safe
Overuse of the Pumping Lemma causes blindness
Slashdot poll idea!
.Mac
How do you secure your data:
1: Remote offsite backups
2: CD/DVD/Floppy
3: I don't, I live on the wild side
4:
5: Cowboyneal is my remote backup system of choice
Get a corporate safe deposit box and use it.
If company records are at your home, you're open to arrest for intellectual theft and espionage, even if the boss signed off on it, which I hope he didn't. Why would you want the financial records of your employer at your house? Gaaaaaaaaaaaak.
Banks are fairly good at protecting these boxes. Its what they do best, right next to charging services fee's for servies that cost them nothing to provide. The trend these days seems to be 3rd party backup in a remote location. My box idea seems to serve that purpose well. There is a cost of course, but what form of backup isn't going to cost you in money and/or time?
--- its to bad about the monkey, I kinda liked them
If you are interested in truly protecting your data, you have to realize that making backups is just a start. Next comes protecting those backups from floods, fires, and other catastrophes that might occur. What do you do to protect your backups?
If you lose your backups to fire, flood, or whatever, just make new backups. The percentage of incidents where you would lose both your backups and the originals (given that they are stored in separate places) has to be so minimal that only someone who is either incredibly paranoid or has some really, really important would need to do anything more than create one set of backups.
I backup onto an external HD weekly. I keep it in a fireproof safe/filing cabinet. The REALLY irreplacable stuff (digital pictures) I burn to CDs and bring a set to work in case the filing cabinet doesn't hold up.
I highly recommend the "Turtle" cabinets you can get at Office Depot. They're around $360 for a 2-drawer (and weigh about 260lbs), but they are far superior to those Sentry safes and most other brands. In the future I plan to get one of those huge fireproof gun safes so I can keep my data and valuables REALLY well protected.
This all just for a normal geek, I don't have any really sensitive data or anything...I just hate losing what I have.
--
I wish I could backup my brain.
Fireproof safes tend to do a poor job of defending backup tapes against fire or flood.
I would suggest taking a weekly full backup and storing it at your local bank. Safety deposit boxes are quite reasonable (they won't break the bank if you'll forgive the pun).
Online backups are also a popular option, but this suggestion might prove both economical and efficient.
I sometimes temporarily store small amounts of non-sensitive data on-line in an ftp account with my ISP. Also, you can usually add an additional e-mail account through your service provider - after that, encrypt, zip, pw and e-mail to yourself, but don't check that account for messages until you need to retrieve your backup data.
I thought about using BrightStor- but then I realized I could save $500,000 by using rsync to my parents' basement.
We're doing this in an enterprise environment, but it would be easy to co-ordinate between two friends as well.
--derek
gambitdesign.com
I work for a sports news tv station. If we had a Twente-caliber fire, we would be off the air for months. If your business relies completly on expensive and uncommon technology, how can you plan for this kind of disaster?
I just maintain two copies of everything that is not easily replaced, one at work and one at home. The 10mb or so that I need to save transfers fast enough over my cable modem that these "backups" can be done nightly. Everything else (OS, programs, settings, etc) are simple enough that I can reinstall everything in a few hours. Additionally, I burn my tax files onto a CD each year with the rest of these files and store it away in a fireproof safe. Sure it won't last through a major disaster, but then I think I'd have bigger things to worry about. :)
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
Well, to take the water/fire-proof safe a step further. How about placing a computer in the safe and have some sort of wireless setup. Then you would be able to have a backup of your info in a physically safe area. One problem that I can think of off the top of my head is how is the system going to get power to keep it running? How can we take this further?
We exchange weekly tapes with three other local businesses for storage in fireproof safes. It is highly unlikely that we would have a disaster that bad that all three businesses would be affected (barring nuclear holocaust - in which case, it won't be my problem) This all goes back to the multiple sites, multiple backup theory. Our daily tapes are stored in a fireproof safe here. So the most we could lose would be those daily tapes, and be forced to go back to a weekly tape from the previous week.
For instance:
Grocery list:
Pad your data into some porn movie and you will have loads of copies floated around the internet.
Once a week we send our backups to a secure offsite location. We chose a site that was built specifically for the purpose of data storage. It has safety measures to account for temperature, humidity, fire, hurricane, etc. We can have tapes delivered to us within one hour in case of an emergency.
Even as I was reading the fire article the other day I was surprised at how critical people think their data is. So I asked myself, if my computer were to go up in flames, what would I REALLY ABSOLUTELY miss? The only thing I could think of is a spreadsheet that contains some account information I use. Other than that, what is so damn critical that I can't either re-create it or live without it? Your pr0n? It's still on the internet. If you lose the archive, that just means you get to start over!! And mp3's? Kazaa still exists. WinMX still exists, pick your favorite and start again. Or better yet, go listen to some live music and start anew. Sure, some corporations may have trouble but how many of you would really not be able to live without the computer or the data it contains? (crap, I think I just asked a karma suicide question here on /.)
Google is your freind!
someone whose been burned before. The media must be stored offsite in a dark temp. controlled vault, media deteriorates so long term backups must be re-written to NEW media every 12-24 months according to vendor specs, and if the data is important you need to keep MULTIPLE generations on NEW media, and periodically PERFORM A RESTORE to verify readability and the fact that you are actually capturing what you think you are. If you are a linux/unix environment you are blessed with ufsdump, otherwise welcome to 3rd party HELL. Aix even has a bootable recovery image...mksysb i think
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
We use Iron Mountain for an off-site location for storing our backup tapes, but they're pricey and certainly overkill for home backups.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
Right now, CD-Rs (not -RWs) seem to be a great way to store moderate amounts of data. -RWs suffer from degradation pretty quickly despite their rewriteability (I've never seen one live up to the '1000 writes' standard they claim -- more like 3-7). For larger amounts, DVD-R may be the wave of the future, but high-quality tapes are probably as good if you can persuade your boss to let you replace them from year to year.
Periodically, it's important to store your backups offsite. A safe-deposit box works well, or perhaps a fireproof safe if you're worried about the confidentialness of your information. But yeah, I'd move that stuff offsite biweekly or monthly at a minimum.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
1) RAID 1 in my main system.
2) Weekly online save of changes via email to Yahoo account.
3) Monthly back-up to a removable HD I keep in the work data safe.
I was advised that a good fire-safe place to keep my will is in the freezer next to the ice cream :) I wonder how CDR's deal with cold? I would guess its ok.
I make backups of them of course.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
So far it's been excellent protection against acts of God.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
The first thing going through my mind was the need to mail a set of recent backup discs to a family member...
/. reader who doesn't devote much of his harddrive to pr0n! (or maybe not.... eww.....)
Amazing! The only
filter: +3. Hey, look! all the trolls went away!
I keep all my MP3s backed up on Kazaa.
Trolling is a art,
I presume the recovery after 9-11 was all over the board. Some companies did not have adequate backups of all their business records. While others, like the stock exchanges did fine.
It's not always the most practical thing to do, but keeping your backups offsite is probably the only way of avoiding problems like this.
You can always have a machine colocated in a seperate facility mirroring or backing up your data, depending on security level, etc. When you mail backup tapes, you're always at the mercy of UPS/FedEx/USPS or your local mail carrier
6.02x10^23, baby!
Seriously. If privatization of space continues to grow, and launches become more afforadable, I'm predicting we may see businesses offering to launch your media into space, where the only thing that will destroy your data is the occassional asteroid collision.
Might still be too expensive for the individual, but I can surely see a large multinational corporation thinking about this.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Anyway, I use removable HDDs for my network backup. I've got a little utility (Idem, shitty but it does what it needs to do) that is configured to make backups of the essential folders on my Win2k box:
This plus a little diligence in keeping all of my important files within this subset (including making local backups of program configuration files under 'My Docs') makes for a great backup strategy for me.
Then every Friday I switch the current backup rHDD with the one offsite. This way I have a current backup and a 'week ago' copy. So if I need an older version (though not more then a week older) or if my house is lost I've got my data that is no more then a week old.
I figure if both my home and the offsite location go down in flames (or what have you), I've got bigger problems to worry about.
"1984" was ment to be a warning, not a guidebook. You hear that Kim Jong-il!? BushCo?!
Get a $30-$50 home safe to keep onsite backups in. Most are fireproof for about 45 minutes. They are usually also waterproof. I don't know how well they'd stand up to your house colapsing on them.
Get a safe deposit box at your bank to keep offsite backups in. Most banks offer these to their members for free or a reasonable rate -- much cheaper than mailing tapes or disks. I keep my monthly backups there. Once a month rides the line between "current enough" and "so often it's annoying so I don't do it like I should".
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Why do o many people use physical back-up-tapes, so that it is boring and time-consuming, and so that they don't back-up that often, which they store near the computer, so that they all can burn at the same time, when they could make a cron-job that rsyncs their data to some remote site(s) (and yes, rsync, _not_ scp or something, that would take a hell lot of bandwidth)?
I back-up my system that way (it's about 10Gb), over a 1Mbit link. At the moment I just back it up that way to one remote site (about 5km away), but soon, I will probably back it up to one more site (about 2km away).
This is much safer (as it is done more often), and much easier (as it is fully automatic) that tapes or CDs or whatnot.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
mod parent up: a while ago I was thinking about getting a fireproof safe for my own backups, but fireproof (as defined by manufacturers) doesn't really mean 'compatible with magnetic media', since an inside temperature that doesn't make paper burn and/or plastic liquefy, is still a temperature that will probably cook your cdr dye and/or play havoc with other magnetic media.
I found that there were safes that were guaranteed to keep the inside at a temperature compatible with storage media, but their prices were not as affordable (obviously).
-- the cake is a lie
If I lost my home network in a fire, the data is the last thing I'd worry about losing. But assuming I still have a house and a network to use my data with...I would just skip backups and go with full reinstall/recreate, more fun that way.
You're new around here, aren't you?
A good alternitave is to put your backups in a safe in the back yard.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
scp * account@somewhere.else.than.your.neighborhood.
Years ago I did web work for Sentry (a company that makes fireproof safes). They have a "media safe" specifically for computer media.
From their description:
While paper chars at 450 F (232 C), damage to computer media can occur at temperatures as low as 125 F (52 C). The interior of a Fire-Safe Media Chest or File remains well below this damage level during an average fire.
If I remember correctly, they're only rated to keep the temperature in a safe range for about 30 or 60 minutes - hopefully enough for the firefighters to have done their work.
One thing about the fire safes - make sure to keep them locked. A lot of people don't think of this, because they're only worried about fire, not theft - but if the floor/table they're sitting on gives way and they drop and the door pops open, it doesn't really matter how good the container is at resisting fire.
I just burn all my MP3's to CD and give them to my friends to hold for safekeeping... they keep calling them Mix CD's for some reason. And don't get me started about my porn collection..
I just set up a cron job that copies newly changed files and database records to (and from) my colo box, and the colo box is several thousand miles away. If you haven't got a colo machine, see if a friend will share resources with you. In these days of DSL and cable modem, finding a way to get copies of your files off-site is fairly easy. "find" with its various "-*newer" options and "touch" make this rather easy.
You might want to use a safe deposit box for the keys you encrypt those files with, but geographically disparate repositories done automatically works for me.
Make three copies. Store two of them in anti-fire cabinets in separate buildings. Store the third one in an undisclosed location, to make sabotage difficult.
This has been used in Michelin for a long time.
I use my Speak 'n' Spell unit to ftp into Stephen Hawking's wetwired cybernetic chair implant. It is an extension of the calculating universe model.
-----
I also reply beneath your current threshold.I also reply below your current threshold.
I rsync over ssh home to office and office to home. The two sites are about 30km apart, so that should be fine. HDDs are cheaper and faster than any other method.
I back up my data by burning it to CD-R's and then using magnets to put them up on the refrigerator so I'll always know where it is! I haven't had to recover yet, but I'm satisfied knowing that if I ever loose my countless valuable configuration files and documents they will be right there to avert a catastrophe that otherwise would have cost me easily 100 hours of work!
I backup my data @ work to go home and my data @ home to go to work. It's always in my hands (or the car) too.
:)
A RAID-1 Linux system with a couple of 120G 'el cheapo IDE hard drives can do a lot of damage...
Of course with all my data here and there with me in-between I rarely know where the hell I am.
When I was in the final stages of writing my thesis, I had backups on ZIP disks:
One set in the same room as my computer - generally a day or two old.
One set in another room in the house - a bit older.
One set in another house in the same city.
One set (a few weeks old) in my brother's house about 500 km away.
This gave me a good lifeline to sanity when I accidentally deleted my partition table a week before finishing. (In fact, I didn't need the backup - I had the partition table info in hardcopy and just reentered it.)
Now I use my computer mostly for games, so my only backup is that my parents have copies of all my photos.
"Paranoia is good".
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
What about all the people who used the "Nimda Distributed Backup Plan"? Infect all your machines with Nimda and let it send your files out to dozens of people around the world on a regular basis.
handles all my backups!
Oops, thought this was a poll.
Thats about it,
Alex
I just stack all my 3.5" floppies on my 21" monitor so I can run out with my data in a hurry. I also store all my CDs face up in the greenhouse outside so I can't miss them in the bright sun.
I backup all my pr0n to /dev/null. It never fills, never needs a change of media, and is amazingly fast. I rest assured that my pr0n will be of the same quality coming from /dev/null that it was going into it.
How about having a plan to saving your family and yourself incase of fire?
Really who cares about your email's you sent out announcing a party in the long run?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
A Cicero 8.1 GB PC card drive? Its tough to get more portable than that, and that ought to be enough to accommodate most home users data that can't be easily replicated (apps, mp3 burned from cd). Failing that, a 40-80 GB USB 2.0 external drive is certainly cheap enough to be practical. Or, depending on your OS, and the level of firewall protection, and free space, how about using a native backup tool and ftp'ing the image to an alternate place (i.e. work...!) DVD doesn't appeal to me just because of the expense of the drive, but blue-ray (27 GB devices) could definitely change my mind if they were sub $200. Thats a bunch of thoughts, there ought to be something there that can satisfy your requirements. Unless of course you have 200+ GB, in which case there is no way to do it fast or cheap... get a tape drive, and try to be a little bit discriminating in what you back up.
Real men don't need backups, just upload your your files to an ftp server and let everyone else mirror it.
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!
I backup to floppies, and stick them to the
cabinet with a magnet.
Mommy. What's a karma whore?
What do I do with my backups? I upload them to "backup servers", and in exchange for the service, I backup the server admins stuff from the backup servers. With a little bit of time and effort, and if you have good stuff to back up, you can have it mirrored at hundreds of hotsites all over the globe, making it virtually indistructable!
Personally, I burn my backups to cd. Then, I duplicate the cd(s), and store one copy in my safety deposit box at my bank. I figure that if they can protect their oh so beloved money, my cds are most likely to be safe there. - stephane
Ordinary restores could be a real pain though.
Ok here's what I do for my small (about 12 persons) company:
You need two server machines, one to be the primary server, and one to hold a backup drive. (having the primary and backup drives on seperate machines prevents total loss through several faliure modes right off the bat, like a power supply malfunction on one machine)
These machines can be affordable and inexpensive Pentium II or III machines.
For this example, I'll tell you exactly what I used.
I went to newegg.com and bought three identical hard drives, 80 GB maxtors. I also purchased a lian-li removable IDE hard drive bay plus an extra cartridge for it.
I put one of the maxtors in the primary server machine, and made it the primary drive.
I put the other two maxtors in lian-li removable carts, and labeled them Backup drive A and Backup Drive B.
I put backup drive A in the lian li bay on the backup computer.
On the primary server, I made two tasks with windows task scheduler:
The first task does a full backup every monday night to the backup drive over the network.
The second task does a nightly incremental backup, on every night of the week except monday night.
When I come in on Monday morning, I remove the current backup drive, take it down to our safe deposit box at our bank, and swap it for the other drive, which has been sitting there for a week. in the evening, task scheduler runs a full backup on the drive.
So at all times, there is at least a week of incremental backups in case a deleted file needs to be retrieved, and there is an offsite backup that is never more than a week old, and there are nightly incremental backups on-site. All you have to do is swap the drives once a week and take them to your favorite off-site location for storage.
I've been doing this for a few months now and it's been good. I also put the server and backup machine on UPS, and the primary server has control of it through USB, and shuts itself down before the power dies.
--Mike
...there you go.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
No need for big backup tape drives or burners, and no hassle once you have it up and running. (Of course, the usual "test your backups" mantra still applies - no sense backing things up if you're not doing it right).
You can also use a dynamic DNS service and client apps so you don't have to constantly updating IP addresses when the ISPs change them.
Just mail your backup CDs to me. I need some more frisbees.
I just make backups of my backup data. with enough copies, you are bound to find one laying around somewhere...under the bed, in your car, on the fireplace, etc...
Sig- http://www.dreamhost.com/rewards.cgi?ayefly
Create a VPN with a series of trusted friends. Each person 'donates' a few hundred megs to the project.
Critical data can then be PGP encrypted and stored on the virtual network drives manually or by backup software. This way no one can tamper with the archives.
This works for me as I'm mostly concerned with backing up source code. It's useless for backing up digital video, but I usually don't worry about those assets too much after a given project has been completed.
Won't work for everyone, but I think it's handy. Oh, and backup your PGP keys and keep them in a safety deposite box or something... otherwise you'll really be screwed.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
Encrypt your files and name them something like "Hot Goat Sex", and share them on Kazaa/Gnutella/eDonkey/etc. Then, when you lose your data, you just go cruising the the net for your files again! The only problem will be sorting out your files from the real goatse.cx files!
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
I bring work backup tapes home and home backup tapes to work. A set of each occasionally go to a safe deposit box. (i am pretty lazy about it)
There are services that will store your data offsite. Some are expensive, some are not. I have been planning on setting up an FTP server at work and have my data go there.
As long as the data is on my work machine and home machine, something would have to go wrong at each machine for me to have a problem.
Also, the process will be automated so I don't have to remember to back-up.
For smaller amounts of data, like key documents, quicken files, and the sort, online backup could work. I just archive my most important files, compress/encrypt them, and then regularly ftp the files up to my ISP. This wouldn't work too well for an MP3 collection or anything, but for the stuff you REALLY need to be able to access, it can be a lifesaver. One of the nice benefits of uploading it to an ISP account, is that you can then reach it from anywhere in the world that you have access to the net.
I know it may not be the most secure method, but I am willing to accept the risk of someone being willing and able to hack the ecryption on my files.
Casca
Of course, it's always a good idea to keep backups stored on rewritable CDs, since they can store more data. But having data stored in many remote locations would be a good idea if you want to ensure that your data is safe from disasters. I'd say that the more backups you have, and the more different locations they are stored in, the better.
I use my backup cd's as coaster, then I don't have to worry about people stealing them.
The question I really want answered is, what is a good free windows backup program that does incremental backups to any cd burner? I found one once, but it required I have easy cd creator, which is $100 alone. I have Nero, paid for it any everything, but I can't find anything to serve me.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
Documentation of projects I'm working on for employers etc. is on their disks, and so not my problem.
All my financial records are at my accountant's offices; again, usually not my problem.
About the only data I have on my personal computers worth saving are my .*rc, config files and so forth, and game saves, which really aren't all that important.
Super-compress your small important stuff and send it to like yahoo.com mail account you own with an expanded 100MB mailbox. You can parasiticly use their implicit distributed backups
(all over the nation?) to take care of your data. These technique has a cost of some security comforts though.
Backups don't do you any good if you can't restore the data in the event of an emergency. I constantly run up against this at work. People are constanly focused on backups, but when I ask questions about restores, I get blank looks and a mumbled "I dunno". You can backup as often as you like, but until you have tested and proved that you can recover, it is a waste of effort IMO. It amazes me that people can be so short-sighted. Oh well, it helps to keep me working :-)
I store my data at work, but more importantly I know I can recover.
"Give a woman two glasses of wine and some pad thai, and they'll agree to just about anything." the Sports Guy
I've rewritten CD-RW with no degredation hundreds of times. Well, at least dozens. Not even the expensive ones, the moderately priced Digital Research branded ones at CompUSA.
I would use it to archive my projects at work and take home every night, and back in again the next morn, until the powers that be finally allowed me to setup a VPN for myself.
The key is to handle them extra gingerly.. Move them from the case to the drive quickly, and take extra caution not to get any shmutz or fingerprints on the back of them.
Oh, and burn slow. The longer the laser stays focused on a given point on the disc, the more clearly its going to 'burn' it. (Makes sense to me at least, though I'm sure some try-hard jackass will jump in with some idiotic chemistry lesson about why I'm wrong.)
All the same, while they make for good short-term or incremental backups, a one-time write on a *quality, branded* media is the best for archival.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
1) Create false identity
2) Buy plot of land in extremely rural area close to Canadian border. Use false identity, pay cash.
3) Build small, subterranean concrete bunker (10' x 10'). Install water-tight safe in bunker. Camouflage bunker, make it tamper-evident.
4) Visit with data periodically.
You now have a safe place to store things. Safe from fire, flood, and most importantly from the government. Since you bought the land with false identification, they can't shake you down for what you have stored there, unless they know about it. It's close to the border, so you should be able to get the contents fairly easily from the other side of the border -- or get the data as you go OVER the border.
OK, so its not convenient and illegal, but hasn't true safety and privacy always been that way?
Most CD-Rs data material (not CD-RWs), especially cheap ones, are made from a substance that does break down over time. Its like 20-50 years or something, but if you are interested in LONG term storage, CD-Rs are not the way to go.
I contract for customers that need long term storage and they usually go for either microfilm or optical disk. Optical disks are made of glass and they can survive all but the hottest fires. That would be what I would recommend for the article poster... (they're up to 10gigs a disk so far)
Use good media and use good burners. I'm using Verbatim 4x-10X CD-Rw high speed discs with a top-of-the-line Plextor 40x12x40 drive and the most commonly written one is up to about 20 writes with no loss of data integrity.
And when the backup really matters, burn at the minimum speed. This will also reduce the chance of loss of data integrity.
I keep my home backups in my Franklin planner, which is always with me. Keeping backups in a safe deposit box or other hard-to-reach location is guaranteed to fail, as it's too hard to stop by the bank daily. Eventually, I think those USB key rings will be the way to go when their storage capacity increases. You keep your wallet and credit cards safe by keeping them on your body, so why not keep your data on your person too?
Always backup to at least one off site resource, whether it's taking a burnt cd home with you or simultaneously scp'ing data across a corporate WAN to several locations.
If your data is absolute mission critical, consider investing in some sort of solid state media for backup, as it is normally more reliable than magnetic media.
But the most important advice I could give to anyone would be..
NEVER EVER TRUST A FLOPPY
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
I use a hosting company that gives me 500MB of space for $14.95 per month. Gives me space plenty of space to wget things back and forth with, and someone else that will handle doing tape backups.
I use a piece of paper and a pencil to copy down all the 0's and 1's
eMelody Web Directory add your site today!
I periodically broadcast all my data to Vega. That way, if I ever have a catastrophic destruction of all the data, I only need to send a faster than light ship towards Vega far enough to recieve the last broadcast. If someone ever gets a sleeping virus into the system... I just send the ship a little futher and get an older backup.
M@
Krispy Cream is people
One thing that is overlooked alot when creating a network/server backup strategy is documentation of the process.
Almost every backup plan revolves around two or three key people knowing where exsisting offsite backups/SAN data structures are (and what to do with them), but what happens if those two or three people were caught in the fire that destroyed the facility to begin with?
It's something that I've seen overlooked time and time again, but the potential loss of key people could cripple a company moreso than a server room going up in flames. It's something to think about, and can be compensated for by developing detailed documentation within your catastropic failure backup plan to compensate.
"Powers. I have them."
The problem I see with things like safety deposit boxes etc are the hassle of actually getting the there etc. Assuming things haven't changed since I had to worry about backing up large amounts of data, the accepted practices were things like weekly full, daily incrementals etc. Well the question then becomes efficiently and easily getting the data offsite on that scedule.
So what about mirrors? This even sounds like a biz opportunity. If you trust your data in a bank safety deposit box, why not built physical safety deposit boxes that are conneted to the internet that you can VPN into. You can choose your own encryption, or none, allow others to also mirror data there.
The actual specifics can depend on the exact needs. Maybe a box big enough for a PC that you build and put in there. Plugged into the "banks" supplied power to include power conditioning and UPS back up. Or just a server in a bank safe that is connected to hard drives actually in a safety deposit box. Make them hot swap-able so you could walk in there and remove the HD your self, just like your jewlery.
Or how about wirelessly creating mirrors at neigbors houses with the distance determined by the likelyhood of a distaster actually taking both out. Just put high gain antennas up on the roofs for good distance.
the final part of course being the need for some level of liability insurance. The nice part about that is the insurance company might just be motivated to occasionally audit the company to ensure they are using best practices for data assurance both in the physical and electronic realm. Afterall it is the Ins Co that would have to pay out for loss. There would of course have to be some good logging of traffic to ensure a user doesnt croak their data on purpose to collect on the claim.
Finally for a small collective of friends around the country you could of course all set ftp servers on your machines where each person has their own share of a specifica data drive (to avoid problems when the OS has to be hacked on) and then you could even do a form of riading so that the data is spread amounst all the drives so that if any one drive goes out then all data isn't lost. With enough redundancy you could even lose a drive and lose no data.
If you can't be good, be good at it!
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My customers need LONG term storage, like over 100 years. My customers use glass optical disks. They hold 10 gigs a piece, do not break down over time like CD-Rs, and being made out of glass they can survive all but the hottest fires.
Made by Sony and Plasmon
Something forms itself from the silent void of the empty mailing lists and the noisy chaos of the crowded mailing lists. It shapes and protects us, it entertains and challenges us, it aids us in our journey through the ether world of software. It is mysterious; it is at once source code and yet object code. I do not know the name, thus I will call it the Tao of Linux.
If the Tao is great, then the box is stable. If the box is stable, then the server is secure. If the server is secure, then the data is safe. If the data is safe, then the users are happy.
In the beginning there was chaos in Unix.
Tanenbaum gave birth to MINIX. MINIX did not have the Tao.
MINIX gave birth to Linux 0.1 and it had promise.
Linux gave birth to v1.3 and it was good.
v1.3 gave birth to v2.0 and it was better.
Linux has evolved greatly from its distant cousins of the old. Linux is embodied by the Tao.
The wise user is told about the Tao and contributes to it. The average user is told about the Tao and compiles it. The foolish user is told about the Tao and laughs and asks who needs it.
If it were not for laughter, there would be no Tao.
Wisdom leads to good code, but experience leads to good use of that code.
The master Cox once dreamed that he was a Kernel. When he awoke he exclaimed: "I don't know whether I am Cox dreaming that I am a Kernel, or a Kernel dreaming that I am Cox!"
The master Linus then said: "The Tao envelopes you. You shall create great code for Linux."
"On the contrary," said Cox, "The Tao has already created the code, I will only have to find it and write it down."
A master was explaining the nature of the Tao to one of his students:
"Is the Tao in the VM subsystem?" he asked. "Yes," replied the master.
"Is the Tao in the scheduler?" he queried again. "The Tao is in the scheduler."
"Is the Tao even in the modules?". "It is even in the modules," said the master.
"Is the Tao in the Low-Latency Patch?"
The master frowned and was silent for much time.
"You fail to understand the Tao. Go away."
The Tao is the yin and the yang. It is the good and the evil, it is everything and yet it is nothing, it is the beginning and the end.
The Tao was there at the kernel compile, and it will be there when the kernel panics.
A novice user once asked a master: "Why compile in C when C++ is more popular?"
"Why a monolythic kernel when Mach is more popular?"
"And why use ReiserFS when ext2 is more popular?"
The master sighed and replied: "Why run Unix when NT is more popular?"
The user was enlightened.
A frustrated user once asked a master: "My kernel has panicked, should I post to lkml?"
"No," replied the master, "You will only bother the Tao."
"Should I rm -rf?"
"No, you will have wasted the Tao's time."
"Well should I search the web?"
"You will search for all eternity," said the master.
"Perhaps I should try FreeBSD?"
"Then you will have disgraced the Tao."
"I suppose I could try gdb," said the user.
The master smiled and replied: "Then you will have made the Tao stronger."
A stubborn user once told a master: "I run version 2.2. I always have, and I always will."
The master replied: "You are foolish and do not understand the Tao. The Tao is dynamic and ever changing. Linux strives for the perfection that is the Tao. It flows from version to version with peace."
"So my Linux does not have the Tao, so what?" said the foolish user. "Oh your Linux is of the Tao," said the master. "However, the Tao of Linux follows the Tao of the C library. One day the C library will change, and your Linux will be left behind." The user was silent.
An angry user once yelled at a master:
"My Linux has panicked! What lousy software it is, I hate it so!"
"You are insulting the Tao," said the master. "The Tao is everywhere bringing order to hundreds of networks, aiding thousands of users, and fighting that of which we call the 'lame.' Do not disrespect the Tao; however, the Tao will forgive you."
"I apologize," said the user, "And I will be more forgiving the next time the Tao fails me."
"The Tao has not failed you, it is you that has failed the Tao," said the master. "The Tao is perfect."
The Tao decides if a kernel shall compile, or if it shall abort.
The Tao decides if a kernel shall boot, or if it shall freeze.
The Tao decides if a kernel shall run, or if it shall panic.
But, the Tao does not decide if a box will have no hardware failures. That is a mystery to everyone.
A young master once approached an old master: "I have a LUG for Linux help. But, I fail to answer my students' problems; they are above me."
The master replied: "Have you taught them of the Tao?" he asked. "How it brings together man and software, yet how it distances them apart; how if flows throughout Linux and transcends its essence?"
"No," exclaimed the apprentice, "These people cannot even get the source untarred."
"Oh, said the master, "In that case, tell them to RTFM."
A master watched as an ambitious user reconstructed his Linux.
"I shall make every bit encrypted," the user said. "I shall use 2048 bit keys, three different algorithms, and make multiple passes."
The master replied: "I think it is unwise."
"Why?" asked the user. "Will my encryption harm the mighty Tao, which gives Linux life and creates the balance between kernel and processes? The mighty Tao, which is the thread that binds the modules and links them with the core? The mighty Tao, which safely guides the TCP/IP packets to and from the network card?"
"No," said the master, "It will hog too much cpu."
The core is like the part of the mind that is static. It is programmed at a child's creation and cannot be changed unless a new child is made; unless a new kernel is compiled.
The modules are like the part of the mind that is dynamic. It is reprogrammed every time one learns new knowledge; every time one learns better code.
One is yin, the other yang. Each is nothing without the other.
A novice came to lkml and inquired to all the masters there: "I wish to become a master. Must I memorize the Linux header files?"
"No," replied a master.
"Must I submit code to Bitkeeper?"
"No," replied the master.
"Must I meditate daily and dedicate my life to Linux?"
"No," replied the master again.
"Must I go on a quest to ponder the meaning of the Tao?"
"No. A master is nothing more than a student who knows something of which he can teach to other students."
The novice understood.
And thus said the master:
"It is the way of the Tao."
A user came to a master who had great status in lkml. The user asked the master: "Which is easier: implementing new features to the kernel or documenting them?"
"Implementing new features," replied the master.
The confused user then exclaimed:
"Surely it is easier to write a few sentences in the man page than it is to write pages of code without error?"
"Not so," said the master. "When coding, the Tao of Linux opens my eyes wide and allows me to see beyond the code, to let the source flow from my fingers, to implement without flaw. When documenting, however, all I have to work with is a C in high school English."
He who compiles from the stable tree is stubborn
and unwilling to change, but is guaranteed reliability.
He who compiles from the current tree is wise but perhaps too conformist, but is guaranteed steadiness.
He who compiles from the unstable tree is adventurous and is guaranteed new innovations: some good, some bad.
He who compiles straight from Bitkeeper is brave but guaranteed turbulence.
They are all of the Tao. One shall respect the old, and debug the new; none shall argue over which is greatest.
There once was a user who scripted in Perl: "Look at what I have to work with here," he said to a master of core, "My code is interpreted dynamically, the syntax is unique and simple, I have sockets, strings, arrays, and everything I could ever need. Why don't you stop meddling in C and come join me?"
The C programmer described his reasoning to the scripter: "Script is to C as ebonics is to Latin. If the scripter does not grow beyond that of which he scripts, he will surely [die]. Besides, without C, how can there be script?"
The scripter was enlightened, and the two became close friends.
As they say, 'Jesus saves, and he uses offsite backup'
Cuchullain
"If sharing a thing in no way diminishes it, it is not rightly owned if it is not shared." -St. Augustine
I make sure our backups are done nightly, one tape for each night, with tapes stored in a "fireproof" safe. I take additional measures as well, such as regularly copying important files to other computers in a different area of the facility, and once a month, making a special tape backup and keeping it offsite.
What I'd REALLY like is cheap online storage. I've checked into it, but our group just can't afford what offsite storage people are asking. It'd be so much easier to just be able to copy our data over a secure connection to another site every night. If the building goes up in flames, hey, last night's data is waiting for you offsite, no problem.
Oh well. It's GOOD to want things...
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I don't do backups, so i avoid this problem all entirely.
You know, sometimes you slashdot geeks make things way to complicated.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
Interesting to see someone thinking beyond the actual act of making the backup. All to often, the sysadmin thinks that getting a backup system up and going, and changing a tape each day, is the end of it. They forget that purpose of a backup is a restore. I've seen it happen over and over that the restore fails because of bad media, corruption, etc.
Home networks definitely get short shrift. I must admit I don't do an offsite of my home network, but I do burn to CD pretty regularly. Haven't played with the Net backup services. Is there one that folks recommend?
"Conserve data, backup with a friend." I regularly back up to a second hard drive and to CD-R. Every month or so I swap backup CDs with my girlfriend on the concept that it is unlikely both of our apartments burn down on the same day. It's an easy low-tech solution to offsite backup as long as you have someone you can trust that you see regularly. Do it with a co-worker or family member.
Actually, since she doesn't have a burner, she FTPs it to my machine and I burn it, which is another alternative in these days of broadband. Even with capped cable upload speeds she can send a few gigs overnight. Set up an FTP server and swap files.
If you are just backing up the same stuff, get the old media back each time so you can destroy it yourself.
Of course you should put some sort of encryption or other protection on your offsite data. Definitely do not include naked pictures of an ex-girlfriend on a backup you are keeping at your girlfriend's house. Just a suggestion.
We backup to an offsite backup server over a 3Mb link, we back up to on-site tape and central backup, and we keep off-site archives (1 per week, stored for 1 year at a different off-site location.)
The entire city would have to blow up.
When you test your restore, be sure you test it on a machine and tape drive other then the one you used to create the backup. Tape drives easily fall out of alignment. An out of alignment tape drive will generate an out of alignment tape. A mis-aligned tape may work fine in the drive that created it, but may not be readable on any other tape drive. This does you no good if the only tape drive that can read the tape is in a melted ruin.
If you are in a Microsoft network environment or any other environment that uses a central security or configuration database, (domain controller, directory server, etc.) don't forget to have a backup plan for that as well. Recovering the data is only part of the battle; you also have to recover the logins, security rights, and all other configuration aspects of your network.
Did you remember to store a copy of the install media and license codes for your backup software at your off-site location along with your backup media? How about written copies of your hardware and software configurations?
As others have noted, a safe-deposit box at a bank not too physically close to your computers is an economical option. I use this option for my home network. A down side to this is you can only get to your backup media during the bank's operating hours. If you need better access, a professional off-site storage company may be a better option. Many will pick up, deliver, and manage rotations for you.
Finally, don't forget that there are other things then fire and flood and natural disasters that can keep you from your physical equipment. Your data may be safe on your servers, but you might not be able to get to your servers if there is a chemical spill, civil unrest, or some other police action happening between you and your equipment.
My friend in another dorm room keeps a small server there for me hitched up to the network. My computer sends file diffs there every night. The server maintains at least five levels of backups of every file, so they can be rolled back.
(We've got sprinklers, so it's a good idea that they be in separate rooms. If the whole place goes up in smoke... well, I imagine I could probably get an extension on my term papers.)
I send it all through an ssh tunnel so it's all nicely encrypted end-to-end. Server runs OpenBSD so (hopefully) it's damned difficult for somebody to crack into.
Well, for a start, my backups include:
- the last 7 years accounts as required by my taxation authorities
- correspdondence relating to contracts. One never knows when those pesky lawyers may drop by.
- work in progress. I get paid by the hour, and I don't get paid by the hour to start from scratch again because I lost what I'd already done.
- completed projects - I can't guarantee my customers keep secured copies, and I can make it available to them. For a price, of course.
- snippets of my own code that I can reuse
- disk images so I can rebuild the server quickly, reduce downtime and kickstart the other machines across the network.
and that's a two person plus a few staff operation.When you're running a business of nay size- and certainly in this jurisdiction- backups are almost mandatory. Data loss - by act of god or shredder - isn't an excuse.
He is spamming me and not removing me from his fucking list.
KEN@IBA-COMPUTERS.COM
AKBER@IBA-COMPUTERS.COM
The quick and dirty way is to just setup a cron job on your work machine that just rsync's all your important stuff (such /home /etc) into a directory strucuture called /machinename_backup (where machine name is your hostname). The inital sync will be very painful depending on your connection and the ammount of data you need to move, but after that it'll be probably under a minute. The trick is todo it often so you suddenly don't just have 3 gigs of new data on your drive all the sudden. I'd recommend doing it every 3 hours or something like that. Also if you want to get fancy and you've got the space you can also setup an aged system, where your script just makes a copy of the previous backup and then syncs to the copy and have a set of 7 of these so it's incremental, so if you screw something up, you can regress. Just ideas...
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Scientist: The asteroid's almost here; if we don't determine the function of synecdoche as utilized in Shakespeare's Hamlet and The Tempest, humanity's doomed.
You: If only I'd made an offset backup before the tornado of '97...
Scientist: What's that?
You: Nothing.
Scientist: May God have mercy on our souls.
You: (spinning around) Ow! Hey, what the fuck?
CmdrTaco: Just thought you might not want to die a virgin.
(explosion, fade to black, roll credits)
We have an accounting clerk take the tape on a daily basis to the bank next door. He also has to sign on a log saying he did it and then someone else comes by, verifies he did it, and then signs next to him on the log.
quis custodiet ipsos custodes - Juvenal
Because tapes are cheap and reliable.
What the fuck...? You think people actually sit there during the backups, watching the blinkenlights? Backups are automated.
*shrug* Maybe they're stupid, but all of that applies to any other backup method too.
As for "remote site" backups, that only works with small-medium amounts of data, and the more data there is, the less remote the site can be before it no longer is worth it. I'm looking into this option for my home systems, but not for work.
For several hundred gigabytes, for example, remote sites are just not an option. Hence the nice, fast, automated, reliable tape backups.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Offsite.
There we go. Ruined my only good joke of the day.
I give up...I'm worthless...I'll never be a great trolley like my father.
If your backup media are small enough and your pockets are big enough, a reasonable place to keep off-site backups is in your pocket. I can fit CD's into a pocket of the fishing vest I habitually wear, for example. Encrypt any data that you want to stay secret if you're mugged.
Every six months, I burn everything to CD - TWICE. One copy stays at my current location, the other is sent off to a distant land in case of "catastrophic failure". Those Athlons get pretty hot, ya know. Got a DVD burner ? Even easier.
I alternate between posting +5 and -1 Comments. Karma: +53 -47 = 6
This is the safest place I know. No woman (unfortunately) or man (thankfully) will ever venture there.
If Connected had a *nix client, they might be worth invetigating. Seriously.
As it is, I'd have to do a local tar/dump/something of my data, copy the dump file to a Windows partition, boot into Windows, run the Connected program to chunk across this dump file, then reboot back into something useful.
Thanks, I'll stick with rsync. :-)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I currently am using a external USB2 to 5 1/4 IDE bay, with 2 60G drives in removable bays mounted in the external case. This allows me to easily hot plug the backup device without taking down the server. Every two weeks the Hard drives are switched and the off cycle hard drive is put in the safety deposit box in the bank. We got hit by a flood last night, and so far this system is pulling through (Restore is running as I type this). Luckily the hard drive in the backup unit was ok, so we didn't have to get the older backup from the bank, but its nice to know its there if the drive was toasted.
Often, banks have safe storage for you to rent. Some banks even give you a slot for free with a premium checking account.
Otherwise, maybe keep a set of (encrypted!) disks in your car, so at least it's out of the house. Time to get a DVD-R drive!
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
Hurricane.
Can you tell I live in Florida?
The backup at your house, the running version on your lan, and the bank all go the way of the Dodo when that terribly inconvenient Category 5 slams down on top of you. (And no, that's not a roll of network cable I'm talking about.)
Different branches doesn't help, if they are in the same city. If it's that important, get a safe deposit box at a branch in a city a couple hundred miles away or more. Say, somewhere a good friend or family member lives, so you can stop in when you visit them anyway. No, the backups there won't be updated as often, but they'll be safer from city-level disasters.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
I recomend rectal storage.
Here's a shop that does remote backups using nothing but opensource tools: open5 Open5(ource).
They do an O'Reilly site.
Source code for various projects I've done. I personally have shipped two major commercial applications in my spare time. I have about 3 others that I've started and then abandoned for various reasons. This is in addition to what I do at my job. I want to keep the source code around for this.
Also, emails related to my side businesses. Financial data. Spec documents for projects that I've created business plans for which may someday be funded.
Sure, if all you have is pr0n and napstered mp3s then you don't have that much to lose. Some people actually have important stuff on their computers. (Imagine that!)
Restoring and reburning to dvdr (which I don't have yet) is going to be a BITCH. I don't see it possible to do it all, ever. And even if it is possible, restoring cds takes forever.
When I lost my (60+G/12000) mp3s it took me 8 hours using 3 computers simultaneously to restore the 80 or so cds.... Yuck.
I need those 200G optical disks they talked about on slashdot awhile ago... when the hell are those going to cme out?
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
I absolutely understand backups at work. I must not have differentiated appropriately. What I meant was, what do you have AT HOME (assuming you're not running a business at home) that you can't live without. I couldn't think of anything on my home computer that would require super-duper-titanium-never-gonna-break backup. So I was just curious what you all think is that damn important that requires multiple backups including offsite.
-j
just about any semi-urban city in america has some company that offers off site record storage. this problem isn't new to computers - people have been storing accounting and business records offsite for decades. our service comes to our building every day in a van, carts off a boatload of tapes from the tape library, and returns a month old case to be cycled back into the library. check your local yellow pages, it should be easy to find.
I slapped a removable drive bay into my computer and picked up two 40gb drives to go with it. Every two weeks I swap them and make a full backup of vital data (pr0n, etc. is always replacable ;-).
;-)
The data is encrypted with public key encryption on the fly as it is copied to the backup drive by piping it through a shell script and other software. I keep the private key on a USB keychain storage unit, whereupon it is also (more weakly) encrypted with a password I ingenuiously store in my brain.
The keychain unit is on me at all times. I also have a hard copy of the private key encrypted (more weakly, but with a different password) and uuencoded in a safe deposit box. It'll be a bore to type the page out, if ever necessary, but it'll do the job, and while a piece of paper can be folded/spindled/mutiliated and still be usable, a CD is unusable when broken, and a keychain unit is unusable if magnetic decay visits.
What do I do with the two drives? Every two weeks I have to fly to a remote office. I drop off the drive with the latest backup with a trusted buddy, and pick up the other drive from him, and the cycle begins anew.
It's all pretty simple, really.
At work we have a very simple method of backup. We keep two copies in different buildings. This method is only really useful if what you want to backup doesn't change very often. Or if you have a very geographically diverse and fast network. For home use we generally only backup data which we generate ourselves (if we downloaded something it is effectively already backed up). Then I put the backup in the trnk of my car.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
Is it floodproof?
Do your incremental backup at least once a day. Do a full backup once a week on two media. Keep one on site and the second offsite at a records retention service like iron mountain. Change out media at least once a year. I have seen sites that have been using the same tape backup tapes for years religously and have literally worn out their tapes. Make sure that you also backup your security keys for your data to a safe deposit box or that offsite data retention company. It is too easy for the key to be safely stored online on an admin station or server that gets burned in the fire.
Some companies that have very large enterprise data centers will even go so far as to have mirrored backup facilities. These companies effecticely have an entire redundant NOC that is at another physically seperate facility. Treat this much as you would your Internet servers in that you want to make sure that this facility has redundant internet and phone connectivity. Some firms that were wiped out by 9/11 had such facilities available in dedicated host sites and were able to seamlessly transition over within the day. The other firms quickly discovered that such space and facilities were taken by other WTC firms that beat them to the puch. This is by far the most expensive option there is, and is also the most survivable. For a company of sufficeint size though, even a single day down would easily exceed the millions this option can cost. Recommended only for very large operations.
Another option if you have a campus type facility is to lay underground redundant fiber between buildings. Have your redundant servers and tape backups there. This is very expensive if you have to dig up the ground. However once implemented this is probably one of the cheapest to maintain. Many uni's do this as a matter of course. They have enough data to make the occasional tape back up to offsite facilities impractical. This also allows for much higher speed operations that an internet backup. I have worked with (very large) banking facilities and techs from the various vegas casinos, and this practice is fairly widespread there.
I have also had a number of facilities that had mirroring in use and never realized that the primary disk had failed and that they had been living off their mirror for some time. So check your mirror every now and then to make sure it isn't running off backup. Also, if you have a raid array, make you have a hot swap
Last and most important. Test your backup! I can't tell you how many times I have worked with people that had backups that were worthless. I have probably referred at least one hundred facilities over the years to ontrack for data recovery when their tape backups, hard disks or raid facilities failed.
Fire proof safes? Off site backup services? Storing data in SPACE? What are you guys doing on your home machines? I back up the essentials, and only the essentials, onto a CD and keep an extra copy at my parent's house.
I have a friend who backs up absolutely everything (like a few gigs of personal e-mail, which he admits he has never once needed to refer to, and all his downloaded mp3s and videos). As a result, he rarely bothers doing his massive multi hundred gb backups at all. Guess who will be better off if their house burns down.
Home users just generally don't have that much important data. Unless you consider "Happy New Year" emails from 1998 or your collection of comedy animated GIFs to be critical, I guess.
There is your first problem. To prevent stuff like this going through your mind you need a
Tin foil hat
All the data in my head is safe. Is the data in YOUR head safe?
1) when placing your media in the fireproof safe pack so that it'd survive a good fall.
2) put the fireproof safe in a blasting shell of sorts surrounded by some explosives with a high ignition temp...
3) you're done! when the fire engulfs the shell your safe is in, the safe itself will be shot outside... your media/backups will be safe & unmelted!
I use CFS on /home, so its just easy to tar up my whole home directory in its encrypted form, and then put it on a CD where I can take it into work, etc. No one will never have any idea what it is. It just looks like jibberish files with jibberish data. Hell, I could put 700Meg of p0rn on it, and keep it in the office at work :)
Oddly enough, I was just looking into these earlier today. They make media fireproof safes. Most of them I saw say that they will keep the internal temperature uner 125 degrees F, and under 80% humidity. 125 degrees is the melting point of most portable media. They seemed pretty costly, but if you are going to get a fireproof box, why not spend the extra $100 to get one that is media friendly? I saw some decent, albeit small, ones for around $250.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
There is a book where a computer program (an AI) is converted in to fractal images that are then turned into tattoos. The tattoos are then sold, or given away for free, to lots of people (mainly homeless people because they don't move around much). When the computer gets fried, they go around scanning in as many tattoos they can find and then fill in the missing parts by hand.
;)
;)
Almost off-topic, but entertaining.
Me, I find a good data disaster is like a forest fire. It is necessary otherwise I collect too much data. P2P, news, mailing groups, chat logs, mp3, divx, 3GB games (with save files). I'm running out of room faster then my computer is crashing. Maybe I need to return to using Windows98?
"The Electronic Telegraph has an interesting editorial about this, but I guess the truly paranoid would never dare to click on that link... "
My, aren't you the diligent little troll. First MSNBC, now this!
For more than a year now I have been using the "web folders" feature of MS-Windows to drag/drop selected files to my online backup at mydocsonline.com.
True, mydocsonline is really intended for collaboration, so I'm not making use of that part of what I bought. On the other hand, the basic 100mb plan is enough for me, and it is only $15.00 quarterly. SO for a modest end-user type with some files which can be password-protected-zipped, this can make sense.
I just saw a Microsoft banner on /. (promoting Visual Studio .NET). Not sure if this has happened/been posted before, but I found this quite funny and couldn't resist to mention ;-)
What would Jesus use to do his backups? I mean, I already asked myself "What would Jesus drive?" this morning, so it was a logical next step.
You'd be amazed at what you can discover by just asking yourself what Jesus would do!
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
Basically what we are doing is a SECURE internet backup. Hell I can't even get into your files on the backup array unless I have your passcode that YOU create for the encryption on your backup.
I think the coolest part of the program we are using to do this, it does it all by checksums or some shit. You can go back to any date of your backup and get the stuff you backed up that day even if you have changed it on the backup. You might be thinking it would take forever to upload all the shit you want to backup. The first time it would take more time, yes. But after you have your stuff uploaded once, when you goto back it up again, all it uploads is the changes, it doesn't upload the whole thing. I do not claim to know exactly how it works, but it does, and it works perfectly.
We still have a couple things to finish up on the page and such, but we should be ready for 'public' consumption sometime in the next month. We are already working with some companies and doing their backup, but we still have some QA stuff to do for the internet signup stuff.
If you are interested in being a 'test' customer please contact me @ ibs@acesdomain.com (this is NOT my company's email address or URL just personal site) with a subject of "Test customer".
I used to work for a credit union and we had to restore the mission-critical server (HP/UX for those that care) from a tape and teh tape was hosed. We ended up having to restore from a three-day old tape and we had to re-enter three days worth of transactions, on top of having the front line staff deal with live transactions. Very, very not fun.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
First off, don't bother backing up your whole PC. Just backup the data you really need to keep (individual documents, financial info, source code, etc). This generally amounts to a small amount of data for most people. Compress it, and then encrypt it with a passphrase you can remember. Try not to forget the key.
Cheap public storage for bytes of computer data abounds. Once your small data is encrypted, you can essentially store it "publicly", all over the place. Open a junk hotmail account, set the password to something trivial you'll remember, and email as an attachment to that hotmail account. Do the same with a couple other free webmail systems. Mail a copy to a couple freinds, say "please save this file somewhere on your harddrive, in case I need it later" and leave it at that. Drop it in some public ftp upload area somewhere. Etc... etc...
Once you find a list of placse to drop your data off at, make the delivery part of your backup script, just automate sending the emails, etc...
11*43+456^2
At work, I've implemented an automatic nightly backup. It uses rsync to back the fileserver's files to another machine in the office, and it also rsyncs these files over SSH to one of our remote branches - so we've actually got two backups. The amount of data we have is only a couple of hundred megs (which is a good thing because whilst we have ADSL at the main office, the remote branch only has a 64K ISDN link - and this is why I also keep a local backup as well as a remote. The remote is a disaster recovery backup, the local is so we can recover from 'oh shit I shouldn't have deleted that file' moments without having to retrieve the file over the 64K link). /home and all the machine's configuration files (smb.conf, squid.conf, everything in /var/named, /etc/passwd and all the usual files). Basically, in the event of our swerver biting the dust, I just want to be able to re-install the OS then untar the backups and go. I've tested it, too - when I put in a new machine for our server, I used the backups to create the new server after installing the OS.
This is all done by a cron job when everyone's gone home. No need to mess with physical media and having to remember to do the backups. The cron job makes tarfiles of everything in
I do the same thing for home, too (except it backs up over ADSL to my webserver which is a continent away).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Get a friend who has a server a few hundred kilometers (or more) away from yours.
Install rdiff-backup (http://rdiff-backup.stanford.edu/). Create a cron job that backs up your critical data.
Enjoy nightly, incremental, versioned backups. Wanna restore the latest? Easy. Wanna restore last Tuesday's? No Problem.
Thus, if you're left with a network connection and a machine after the disaster, you can restore the data as fast as your network will allow.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
Of course, this is the kind of post that makes moderators overjoyed.
Many years ago I was at a seminar on disaster recovery (this was back in the 80's) where a group of competent local IT auditors were discussing this issue.
One of the horror stories was of an organisation that went and purchased a top of the line fire rated safe for their backups. True to form, they had a fire and the tapes were perfectly protected.
The only problem was the fire service cordoned the building off while they were investigating the incident, and the occupants were unable to gain access for two weeks. They got their tapes back, perfectly preserved, once the debris was removed, but by that point their business went bust.
At work we have an arrangement with another business in a different suburb. We store their tapes on site, they store our tapes 'off site', and we have contact details in case we need access to them out of hours.
It's cheap (we do this as a favour), and short of someone nuking our building and taking out the adjascent suburbs it's effective.
I would suggest that if you are a serious home user, burn your data onto CD-ROMs, and ask a friend to hold the disks. Encode them if you are concerned about security.
If you are a SME, there are commercial services that will pickup, store, and return tapes for a fee (here in Australia, Brambles offer such a service along with payroll distribution and the usual gun toting cash transfer business).
If you are a large organisation, mirror your data to your backup hot site.
well..i have : : :
important home stuff
copies of articles ive written.
copies of my thesis and various projects.
stuff ive been working on.
pictures and video digitized from several travel places.
CVs and letters and tax records.
total over 8-10 gigs in all.
not-so important but still backed up stuff
backups of game cdroms
digitally recorded movies and TV shows (i have a Hauppage card) i want to keep.
mp3 copies of my cd audio
mp3s recorded from FM radio (i have a hauppage)
total over 50-60 gigs in all.
oh and it grows by a coupla gigs every year.
i just burn it to DVD-R and forget about it. the important stuff gets burned multiple times. the really important stuff gets burned, tarred, gpg'ed and zipped before being dumped to two separate hard drives and scp'ed to an ISPs unix server.
...for my personal data, I just burn it to CDs every now & then, and then throw the CDs into the glove compartment of my car. Of course, I'm not backing up pr0n, so all my data fits onto 2 CDs, and since I've already got a few music CDs in the glove compartment, might as well drop the other CDs there too. My car is enough "off site" (I don't park in my house's garage) that the data will be fine if my house burns down. I've never had the summer heat bake the CDs into oblivion, they've always been fine. Low end, sure. But it's good enough for home use.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
- First dig a hole ~6 ft deep in the backyard and a small trench leading to it.
-
Then lay a pipe with network and power cables in the trench.
-
Cut a waterproof air vent in the top of the safe: A tube with one of those mushroom hats would be sufficent
- In the safe have a laptop with a 3 HD RAID-1 (complete mirroring) and a DVD-RW drive.
- The laptop constantly updates your data on the hard disk, and write your misison critical files to the DVD
This would be sufficent in my mind barring major EMP Shock/Flooding. (Hopefully the DVD would survive flooding and the safe would be a Faraday cage.Just my $0.02
Family pictures. It is hard to replace even smoke damaged albums.
I work for a company that may be of interest on this topic. We provide managed data storage. Among other things, we provide tape backup storage solutions that include offsite data vaulting.
Arsenal Digital Solutions
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
Data protection measures should be comensurate with the risk.
Is it 100Gb of a.b.p.e or will your livelyhood be destroyed?
If your house burns down, making sure you still have copies of your "disgusted from Tunbridge Wells" complaints to Channel 5 will be the least of your worries.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Many small business owners work from home.
Therefore
if(home==work)
{
useGoodBackupSystem(myData, outsideStoreage);
}
I have an unusual situation, but which can be modified to work for others. We own the house next to ours (low-income neighborhood, $20k house) in which we have offices. The server room is the basement of that house. Since we wanted to share the office DSL line with the home PC's, we buried a cat5 cable between the two buildings, connecting their networks. In addition to providing internet connectivity, it also allowed us to host a backup server at home. All data is stored on the servers in the office, and the backup server (two 120G HD's in a RAID array) backs up all of the computers on a nightly basis.
Depending on how much you trust your neighbors, you could do something similar, though you'd probably want to use wifi instead of a cable. Take an older PC, install Linux on it, put a large enough hard drive in it, and copy files via SSH, negating the need for any kind of wifi "security." A great product to do this automatically is BackupPC. It supports both Windows and *nix clients, though it uses the unencrypted SMB protocol for Windows boxes. This is what I've been using, and it works great.
The easiest backup practice to implement that I am using is to make sure that you have a 2 copies of each media that you own, original + copy. Store one at home the other one at a friend's house.
As for the data. There are many offsite virtual drive sites that allow you to upload data and store it there. By compressing and uploading your data once a week on to a third party drive you're actully storing off-site. Which means that if something happens you will have a copy of the media. Once the system is up you will be able to access your off-site stored data also.
Fraud. My bank requires a signature and a date/time be written on a form each time that the box is opened.
OTOH, my wife would probably have little to lose by committing a little fraud after my murder.
FreeSpeech.org
Flamebait? Give me a break. The moderator is seriously lacking a decent sense of humor.
6) ?????????
7) PROFIT !!!!
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Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
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There is nothing on my computer that I can't afford to lose; I don't consider the computer to be that secure of a medium so I don't use the computer for the truly important. It'd be a huge pain to replace the mp3's, etc., but nothing important would be lost.
But if I did require my backups to be kept safe (ie. I had a small business that operated out of the house), I'd have an offsite storage company keep a set for me. AND keep a set in a safe deposit box.
As a "normal" home user, I have to wonder why other people in my situation are trying to go out of their way to ensure that their porn is backed up properly. Anything that's actually important gets stored on a network fileserver to begin with, and that's really all the backing up I need.
The fileserver is running a redundant RAID1 hard drive with 20GB of storage, and anything that I value gets stored on that. As an added bonus, the RAID in the fileserver is purely storage, and can be disconnected without affecting the system at all. (If I have to reinstall, for example.) I don't backup that RAID because I don't need to. Frankly, if my house burns down, I'll have bigger things to worry about than preserving my MP3 collection.
Likewise, my main box, and all my other boxes, use the network fileserver for storing anything important. If I have to, I just wipe the hard drive and reinstall without thinking twice.
It amazes me, though, that so many people want to have 15 dozen redundant backups stored at 5 different locations, so that they don't lose their english paper. Don't get me wrong. I mean, I'd rather they back up their important data somehow than leave it without backup, but it's bordering on ridiculous to think that your average joe needs anything more than a network fileserver to store the important stuff on. And that's all that really needs to be backed up. You don't need a recursive backup of the last five days of (800MB Office suite), (Operating System), etc.
Such fileservers exist on the Internet, and price range varies. I'm reasonably sure you could get by with something like Geocities for your backup if you really need to, but there's also stuff like XDrive (www.xdrive.com), and failing all that, who among us doesn't know at least one geek with highspeed internet and a Linux or BSD box to set up an FTP/filespace?
If you're really in a position where your life will end if you lose a certain file, then you can afford the 5 bucks a month for XDrive.
As for a small company, toss a removable hard drive in the network fileserver. Back up the RAID onto that hard drive every night at closing, or every 24 hours for a 24/7 operation and put it in a fireproof safe, or better yet take it to a different location. It's not rocket science, and the whole thing can be set up for less than $1,000 with pennies a month maintenance.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
The good point is also that when visiting another university or a conference I can quickly set up all the personal config files correctly just by doing cvs up and then running an installation script in the right directory.
For home use, you can't beat an external exclosure with a whopping great hard drive. NewEgg has a great one for $76 that's USB2 and Firewire. Keep it in your office and take it home with you once a week, and back up changed files.
It's offsite, it's fast, it's reasonably cheap, it's easy, you'll know if there's a problem with the media, you can plug it in anywhere and read your files with no special drives or drivers, and you can easily upgrade as you need more space.
Sure, it's more ghetto than 'leet, but it'll do the trick...
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it."
-- Linus
... it's the only way to be sure. *grin*
This is the thinking I like to see on Slashdot. If the feds ever storm your house you can set off an EMP wave Matrix-style and your home data will be destroyed.
But you have to have secret backup location that are hiden in a public area. I have a hard drive buried in a park(woods) in Michigan. It is sealed up tight in a ammo box, and I am the only person that knows where it is. It is also locked and linux formated so if it got into someone's hands they won't be able to read it easily.
To backup data, I print all my files as a binary string. Adding a decimal to the left I get number like:. .
0.110010101101010110100011010101011101010.
Then I make a mark on an inanimate carbon rod such that the ratio of the length of one segment of the rod to the length of the other segment is a fraction equivalent to my binary string.
To restore data, I simply accurately measure the segments on either side of the mark, calculate the fraction, and type in the binary string.
What could be easier?
Stuff I need to back up at home that requires rock solid, offsite storage? A lot of stuff...
1) I'm a fairly rabid railroad enthusiast/photographer in my off-work hours. A decent number good enough for publication, several actually published. I shoot about 20-30k images a year, and I keep everything. I do mean everything. Bad stuff gets sorted out, but kept anyway just in case it comes in useful in the future. Losing it would mean losing several thousand hours of time, tens of thousands of dollars in vehicle wear, gas, food, lodging, airfare, and good photos of some never-to-be-seen-again shots. A huge chunk of the last six years of my life down the drain if it was to get lost. Not counting the railroad stuff, also included are several thousand shots of family events, people and places I've known, scans of old historical documents, etc.
2) Schematics/source code/misc design files for numerous electronic devices I've designed and built over the years. Included would be a Microchip PIC/IDE hard disk MP3 player, a 2kW solar array maximum power point tracker, an ultrasonic pump cavitation sensor for bulk liquid tractor-trailer rigs, a completely modular and networked model railroad signalling system, and a whole pile of things I can't think of right now. Again, more countless hundreds of hours of effort that I'd lose.
3) The usual personal stuff - tax records, email discussions with people/companies I've contracted with (not to mention jobs I've done for free for those that have asked), email records of purchases, bank statements, and all manner of other goodies. Also included are numerous whitepapers, articles, two small (under 30 pages each) undergrad thesis papers from college, personal letters, hours upon hours of website work, etc.
My backup solutions?
As far as photos, everything's burned to CD in duplicate once it's sorted and named. One copy stays at my house, one is migrated across town to a friend's place. Oh yeah, and 75% of it is all accessible online with a very liberal license, so hopefully other people have picked up and saved the good stuff.
Same goes for much of the electronics information - I've posted a good chunk of it (or at least what I think will be useful to others) online with open and free licensing (GPL or BSD for software, GPL or other open hardware license for hardware, typically). However, since my webserver alternately serves as a nice warm footrest while I'm sitting at my desk, the redundancy of the machine alone won't really help me in event of a disaster at my house.
The main strategy I've got is an IDE drive in a firewire case (120Gb) that I leave at work. Once a week I take it home and mirror my data drive onto it. However, with the 120Gb data drive approaching full, I've got a dilemma.
That said, I've also got a few friends starting an online storage company. However, my main problem is getting the archive loaded in the first place. My data's nearly static, but by the sheer volume and my hideously slow DSL (IDSL, if you're wondering) connection, it would take months to get it all transferred the first time.
It's cheaper, easier, and faster to just haul an external drive back and forth from the office every week. Of course this obviously leaves me vulnerable for 8-10 hours every week (the time when the backup drive is at home), but since I'm in the house too it seems like a reasonable risk.
ND
Every so often, it's a good idea to do a dry-run of a recovery (on a blank system - NOT your main system). Too many times I've seen people who have current backups that a) are on bad media that was not flagged by the backup procedure or b) only parts are recoverable (e.g., database backups that can only be loaded onto the original system).
Sadly, I've also seen backup software with bugs that make a full (sometimes even a partial) recovery impossible. Most people just assume that since the computer says it's backed up, it is.. riiight.
Phoenix_SEC
E-mail correspondance with friends for start. Address book information. Sucks to lose everyone's e-mail address and phone number at the same time. (Yeah, I shouldn't be so digitally-enslaved, but my handwriting sucks. Anyway, a paper copy of that info is essentially a backup for me.) I have short stories and programming ideas going back over a decade that I'd hate to lose. Digital pictures of family, my sister's wedding, friends, vacations, etc, that cannot be replaced. Financial records.
I can backup almost everything important to me onto a single zip disk or a few floppies so long as I don't include digital pictures. With those I need a few CDs for a complete backup.
It would hurt to lose my MP3s to something like a hard drive crash since it took me a few months to rip all of my CDs, but it would really hurt to lose all of my CDs to a fire. Augh! Perhaps it's time to invest in a DVD burner...
You should already have a backup of your mp3s... The original disc :)
A friend & I have reciprocal online backups. He has space on my server to scp files, & I have space on his. I trust his security much more than I trust my ISPs.
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
Put your most important data on your iPod and grab it on your way out the door.
Given that this is for a home network, the storage needs shouldn't be greater than can fit on something like an iPod, and if an event happens that messes up both your desktop and something on your person, your problems are bigger than a backup can solve. Oh, and an encrypted disk image is your friend!
But since I do not necessarily believe our stuff to be interesting enough for the world, I also rsync it to a central backup server that keeps cp-al's for past seven days, plus four weekly ones. (yes, it has a big disk, even if it is only selected files...). Every night this backup server rsyncs the recent stuff to my home box over ssl for off-site backup. We don't have hurricanes or earthquakes here in Denmark, so I believe 2km must be sufficient distance. We are also setting me up as a secondary DNS, so if the office goes, I can host our website or at least point to it.
And yes, we have tested the procedures, and recovered accidentally deleted files (but we haven't burned down the office just to see if that works...). All seems to work quite well. And the company pays me a good fat ADSL pipe and some extra disks.
In Murphy We Turst
Basically my system is for the cheap and really lazy average user, but it still works fairly well. You'll need to spend some money, but that's just comes with the territory.
You need either a cdrom burner or tape drive on your server. You should be able to get a used 4/8GB DAT tape drive and scsi card off ebay for $100 max or a 48X burner for around $60. Then you'll need to get some 4/8 dat tapes which are dirt cheap at like $3-5 per tape, or some 50 packs of cdr discs which cost around $15. You'll of course need a hard drive big enough to store all your stuff, but considering you can get a 80GB one off pricewatch for under $100 that shouldn't be a problem. Also I personally use software RAID 1, which is nice, but if your short on funds you can do without it.
Basically on your server either linux or windows 2000, you have two shares or volumes dedicated just to your data. One is your read-only permenant share of mp3's,docs and crap you've downloaded. This share is readonly as an extra precaution. You can just pull what you need off it and copy it to your temp share if the file has been changed and needs to be backed up. The other is a read/write "temp" share which besides being a area to store New data you've downloaded, is for files you've worked on from your readonly share and as a result now need to be backed up. After they are backed up, you will then move them back to the readonly share.
On the temp share you will be using a quota system that should come with your OS. You will set this quote for say 650MB for cdrbackup and say 3.75GB if your backing up to a 4/8GB tape drive.
Now what this system does is stops the most common problem for backups. Since most people A) don't remember to backup and B) just stuff file after file on their server, is stop them cold if they exceed their temp storage space, which now is the same exact size as their backup media. At that point you HAVE to backup, and then you can move those files to your read-only share for further safe keeping. I constantly see people who put off backing up and then realize they have 25 GB that need to be backup up to Cdr. One additional step which although like RAID 1 most people won't due, is to make 2 copies everytime you backup. This is actually really easy and it then allows you to keep one set of backups offsite and one onsite. Offsite can be anywhere, that isn't in your same dwelling.
This system isn't one I would ever use at a client, but it works well enough, is cheap, and doesn't let the user's datasize grow widly unless they override the quota, which at that point nothing can help them.
Hopes this helps.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Out of all my data, I only consider about 200 MB of it irreplaceable, or don't want to bother reproducing. My emails, PGP keys, certain preference settings, etc.
Every week, or as situations warrant, I run a script that copies files and folders that need to be backed up from all corners of my system to a folder, then I copy it to a disk image on my 5 GB iPod (the image is encrypted, so if the iPod's lost or stolen they'll need to spend quite a bit of effort getting at my data).
It's not as good as tape or burning a CD and putting it in a safe deposit box, but since the iPod goes everywhere I go, the backups are reasonably safe. It's not like the data's life and death for a company.
Go to your local bank and get a safety deposit box. Best offsite/fireproof solution.
cd-r/rw represents the most cost effective means of backup coverage for the home/small business user. some good places to store disaster-recovery copies of important backups are OFFSITE locations like a safety deposit box at your local bank, buried in a box in the backyard, etc. as others have pointed out, a "fireproof" safe in the same location as the computer is NOT a good place. important tips: VERIFY important backups -- if you haven't actually tried to read the media, it hasn't been verified. also, burn more than one copy of any important backup and verify all of them.
get a grip. How could a person possibly have non-work related data that was truely THAT important that was more than, say, a meg? You know how much TEXT is in a freakin meg? That's right - a million characters :P
I'm just as paranoid as the next unix admin...ABOUT IMPORTANT DATA...you know, like the data at work that my company has many millions of dollars coming up with. The research equiptment can be replaced, and the public databases can be recovered eventually, but there's some sets of data that is ultra important. But that's REAL data. Just because your computer has a 120Gb drive now doesn't mean you really have backup issues.
can anyone actually justify this nonsense? Can someone please enlighten me as to why a person would have more than 5 megs of data that they'd need to save in case of emergency? You know...data that you'd be worried about melting? Birth certificates can be replaced fairly easily really, especially when the government knows your house was swallowed by a 500' gorilla that ate your whole town. When that happens, the last thing that you'll need to worry about is your freakin bank statements. Your bank doesn't exist anymore, remember?
yeesh
I back up all of my data from my two boxes to a second HD on one of the boxes in case of OS or disk failure, but what do I do in case of fire?
Simple I printed out all of my important files. Now you're thinking, "that must be reams of paper how do you organize it?" Simple as well, I scan it all in and store it on my PC. So now if something goes wrong with my PC, I just grab the scans off of my...oh crap...I think I discovered a problem.
I work in the IT Dept. for a large company and I just piggy back my backup tapes and or CD's with the ones from my employer.
I do this with my Boss's permission of course and the offsite company that stores our data is very nice, I've taken a tour of the facility. The vault is water/fire proof, climate controlled and insured out the wahzoo. Best of all, I don't have to pay for it even though I did offer.
Those of you that work for companies that use an offsite storage vendor may want to look into something similair to what I did. Even for a small fee it's well worth it.
I also keep a duplicate set close to home so that I can get to them in a major emergency.
Trying to be different, just like everyone else.
who ftp'd a tarball somewhere after browsing this thread.
Evil is the money of root.
Yes! My tagline *finally* comes in handy!
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
A friend and I have swapped a disk partition at each others' place. We VPN/FTP files over, encrypted just because.
Simple and cheap.
You have friends right? Online at least. find yourself a newbie or two on a decent connection. Fix their box every once in a while so you don't lose your data and rsync your inportant stuff to you homedir on their box.
Does anyone know of an automated ftp backup utility, free or commercial? something where you can specify the files or directories you want backed up and the destination ftp server, possibly supporting compression and/or file restore capabilities??
...as Linus said, they have the last version of their work mirrored :)
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
I store them on excess capacity that nobody is using, sees, or even cares about, and keep a copy online. Really really handy.
%df -h / /usr /var /proc /media
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/da0s1a 504M 320M 143M 69%
/dev/da0s1e 2.0G 1.2G 646M 65%
/dev/da0s1f 1.2G 3.5M 1.1G 0%
procfs 4.0K 4.0K 0B 100%
/dev/vinum/media 1328G 716G 604G 54%
I keep my backups in a Granite vault inside of a nearby mountain. The media de jour is actually redundant scsi drives packed in silica to keep out moisture. This allows for easy access in an emergency, and planned access when said drives are deemed replaceable by the NEWMEDIA.
this sig is deprecated
I have an 8gig external SCSI drive which holds copies of all my "essential" stuff. Then I periodically spend a few hours writing these files onto cd's.
Of course if there was ever a fire which destroyed my apartment I guess these would be pretty moot
so 100 megs of some "select" files get put in a temp folde ron my website - whihc is hosted by some company somewhere out in space.
Ave Molech Setting
My firesafe came with a large packet of dessicant for just that reason. If you open the safe on a regular basis, this shouldn't be much of a problem.
Silica gel is the most common type of dessicant. That's the little packet labeled "DO NOT EAT" in just about any consumer electronics packaging. I've saved the little packets in a jar for years, but I'm sure you can also buy them directly.
I recommended to a friend who wanted to save some backup CDRs that they put a small firesafe (the kind with a handle) inside a larger firesafe. Put CDRs and silica gel in the smaller one; put hanging folders in the remaining space in the larger one. (The moderate moisture is fine for paper storage when the temperature is rising, but not as good for the CDRs.)
[
Putting CD-R media in a fireproof safe is probably not very good insurance. A fireproof safe is designed to prevent paper from burning. Paper burns at 451 degrees F. A CD-R can be rendered useless from sitting in your car in the summer - it would be completely melted even in a fireproof safe.
On this same train of thought however, you could store a monthly backup on CD-R or DVD-R at a bank in a safe deposit box.
Another small bit of backup I've been using is one of those small cigarette-lighter sized USB flash storage devices. It holds 256 MB - enough for all my most important documents, and I carry it everywhere. If you do this, you'll very much want to make sure your data is encrypted (I use GPG) incase you misplace the device and someone else should find it.
Just my 2 cents.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
I have key data that I want to have backed up..."My Documents" on a W2k machine...various data files for "key apps" (buddy lists, messages, bookmarks, Palm Backup, etc)...I have automated this process by having my Linux box tar and (get this...) RAR the files from the network. I have found that the Linux version of RAR seems to compress these files much better than BZip/GZip...
I wrote a small script that compresses all of these files (~20M/day...compressed) every day (with the name of the day in the filename) and once a month (first of the month) it copies the newest file to a filename with the date in it...when my "LanBackup" directory has ~650M of data in it...it sends an instant message to me (ICQ) notifying me that it is time to do a complete backup.
For more frequent backups I use a CD-RW that I keep in my car (I don't have a garage).
I'm sure that this process could be changed to weekly if need be...but at any given time, I have 7 days of backups and another set of monthly "snapshot" backups.
When you think about it, there's alot of data that you don't NEED to save...I'm going to guess that 90% of your data is stuff that can be easily replaced (Binaries for games/apps, USENET/P2P downloads, etc)
I also backup specific directories on my Linux & BSD boxen.../home.../etc.../root Directories (excluding RPM files and anything in "archive" directories).
And as for daily off-site backups, it would be easy to add an FTP to this process...the script I wrote takes a simple config file with a list of directories to backup, which makes it easy to add new directories.
Encrypt your file and hide them IN your pr0n. Everyone will store your data for you. Then you just have to find it. =)
That's easy. I multi-directionally broadcast it into space. In the event I need to recover the data, I'll just invent a faster-than-light drive, zip out past the signal, and pick it all up on an antenna. At sufficient signal strength, it should be recoverable long past my expected lifetime. For extreme cases I encode it into a narrowly focused laser, which I aim at the event horizon of a black hole. If figure it'll last until the universe collapses, at which point time-travel becomes the best option.
... real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it. ;)
-- Linus Torvalds
media: stone tablets
storage location: the Ark of the Covenant
didn't he say something along the lines of:
"I don't backup. I open-source my data. Let the world back it up for me."
A hard disk is the cheapest backup media. Find a trusted buddy in another geological and geographic area, and buy each other a larger hard disk drive (cheap these days). Periodically ftp each other encrypted archives of your home directories (overnight on slower links). If you don't have an out-of-state buddy whom you trust, then just buy some disk space on an out-of-state web hosting facility and ftp there. Also keep a backup version or two locally on a portable and removable hard disk so you don't have to bother your buddy for accidentally deleted files, etc.
The best and sheapest way to backup your data is to burn it on cd's and mail them to an unknown address at the other end of the world. In time they will return address unknown.
Obviously the most secure way is to store all your backup data 180 degrees out of phase with the rest of the world...
Not enough to protect just your data. You need to protect the applications as well. Sounds trivial until you have to reinstall from
scratch and realize you don't have a media, or license numbers for commecial software you purchased. (OK - open source would be easier - but you may have to install onto different hardware, and that could cause problems)
What you need is a "recovery plan". Think about what you would need if you had to recover from a total loss.
I've worked up a decent and simple backup system for my OS X G4 at home. It could use a little more in terms of updating key directories a few times a day, but:
1) I took a 5.25" external CD-ROM Firewire case
2) Put in cheap-ass removable drive-sled sytem
3) Put 2 60GB drives in sleds
4) Bought one of those $250 media safes, put it next to my desk
5) Have Dantz Retrospect backup to the Firewire drive nightly my entire system
6) Occasionally open the safe, take out the other drive and swap it for the existing one.
This is all because I'm lazy so off-site won't happen. The safe weighs about 80 pounds and the lock is cheap but would take a bit of effort to open (more than nothing). So if the computer nukes, I'm backed up to last night. If someone breaks in and smashes/steals everything in a junkie rage the safe is probably more annoying than it's worth.. backed up to a few days ago. Ditto for fire as long as it isn't a total multi-hour inferno.
Simple, not too expensive, and simple/reliable. You could also use Retrospect or Apple Backup to backup key files and document directories over the net throughout the day as well.
He backs up his files once a week and just emails it to me. The files aren't too big so this works just fine.
I think my CD collection is very well backed up in KaZaa-dum! ;-)
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
Let's differentiate between personal data and business data. If we're talking about a business and the data is required for the business to reasonably run, that business had better come up with a decent disaster recovery plan including keeping their data at a secure, off-site location.
Now let's talk personal data. Face it, most of the data we're talking about would be, at worst, an inconvenience if lost. You can get copies of most everything we're talking about from say your bank or the government, etc. if there is a problem and the value of the data is just the amount of inconvenience it would cause to jump through whatever hoops are required to get a copy of it. Likewise, most of this data is of little or no value to anyone else (other than maybe someone trying to pull off identity theft). So you can probably be fairly safe by simply keeping a spare copy of the CD-RW or whatever your backup media of choice is in your desk drawer at work or a locker there, at a friends house, etc.
There are exceptions to what I'm suggesting (e.g., someone who runs a business out of their house) but, for most people, just keep a copy of your backup some place besides where the system is that your backing up. Believe me, your life isn't that interesting that anyone really wants to steal your backup.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Operational Recovery: Gee I deleted this file, broke the hard drive, etc. aka Recovery from flukes and stupidity
Disaster Recovery: Gee my office turned into a dust pile, I should have that file. aka Recover from bad karma
Archive: Umm gee Mr. Aircraft Manufacturer did you test that engine mount when you built the plane? aka Recover from lawsuits.
Since the storage times and recovery times are different you may well need different solutions. Operational recovery is short term 99% of the time. I need this back now so I want it close at hand. DR is a little longer term to recover. I get data sent to my backup site or a new machine and restore. Archive is much longer storage duration and higer latency for retrvial. I need this before I get to court next week.
I'd argue that long term storage of data should not be in raw format. How the heck am I going to recover a database file 17 years from now? (say for a patent dispute)
Be careful with your 'glass' based storage archive. I ran into this problem a few years ago. We were storing Ingres database files from VMS systems to RV-20 magento-optical platters. What would I do if we had to recover that data now???
Ingres=CA=Dead, RV-20=Digital Equipment Corp=Dead, VMS=OpenVMS=DEC/COMPAQ/HP=still alive.
1 out of 3 doesn't get my data back.
Our solution to the above was lo-tech, but it works. We output the data in column format to microfiche.
IMHO the full suite requires a 3 pronged strategy
Local storage operational recovery offsite media - DR offsite & onsite - image ready copy or technology refresh regiment. (Maybe HTML may live long enough)
-M
BTW: I live 4 blocks from a 16 acre testament to DR planning...
Oh for the love of God, we're talking about someone's personal home backups. Im pretty sure no one needs daily copies of all their data at 300 mile seperated bank branches. Who are you that your data is that important, Jesus? I think the original question of the article was based around home backup methods. If you own some massive business in the WTC, trust me, youll have better alternatives. A place I know takes a set of tapes down to salt mines in Kansas City every single day, where they're practically oblivious to every kind of catastrophe that leaves most of humanity intact. If this is for home, just dump your drive once in awhile to some CDRs or DVDRs and put them at work or something. Trust me, I lived through a fire in my home (total loss, not just some kitchen fire), and the last thing I was concerned about was my mp3s. What about your wife's wedding dress? What about your pets? Children? All your legal documents? What are you doing to do, keep your grandpa's world war 1 pocket watch in a kryptonite box in a vault at NORAD? Shit happens. If youre one of the 98% youll probably go through life without a single catastrophic disaster, if you have one, we'll, youll pick up the pieces and start over and you'll realize pretty quickly how really little mose of those 0's and 1's mean in the grand scheme of things.
If you have some REAL important shit at your house, chances are it doesnt change daily. Burn it to CD and send a copy to grandma for Christmas once a year if it makes you sleep better at night, but keeping 10 copies of everything across 300 miles of bank safes, and spending $1000 on a firesafe to protect $2 in JPEGs, its all just really retarded when you actually go through a loss like that.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
I keep three tape backups with the oldest being rotated through my safe deposit box at the bank where I keep all of my papers that need to be safe from fire and theft.
If you keep stock certificates, savings bonds, or other financial instruments in the safe deposit box, the fee is deductible on schedule A.
...you've never had your wallet stollen, have you?
* Once lost it all when he left his wallet, keys and cell phone in his gym bag and someone ran off with it. -_-
It's not a place I'd want to keep sensitive data.
Password protected zip files are horribly insecure. They can be cracked within a minute on average. I'd suggest using PGP or some other vastly more secure method of encryption on the zip file.
Many are worried about ensuring that your backup is at great distance from your machine, but complain about the effort of taking it elsewhere.
:-)
The obvious answer is to back your data up, in lots of tiny pieces, in cookies stored on the PCs of everyone that visits your web site. Your only problem is to then get enough hits.
I suppose that restoring might be interesting, but work that out when it happens -- disasters only happen to other people
... is my backup repository.
That is all.
1) Put the same in the basement. In fires heavy things such as safes will loose support and crash into the basement and crack open.
2) Suround the safe with non-flamable mass (cindar blocks). Or better yet, install the safe the "wall" of your basement.
3) Put your media in zip lock bags. Sure, the media may be intact, but it only takes a tiny bit of crud to trash magnetic media. Smoke particles are often ionized and will bond tighter to your disk than the mag particles.
I was thinking about the same questions a while ago and came up with a solution that I think is pretty good. Once a month I make a backup of my fileserver on a CD-R, then I drop it off at my safe deposit box. I keep about 5 months back just in case. The advantage to using the safe deposit box is that it doesn't cost anything (I already had the box), it's close by (better than mailing), and the bank gets to worry about security, fire-proofing, etc. instead of me.
i've got a box at "public storage" for extra household junk, christmas lights, the styrofoam that my tv came in... all sorts of good crap. it's a big wooden crate stacked up in a climate-controlled, secure warehouse. i have the padlock key that locks it up - i mailed the other to my sister, and keep an unmarked spare. plus i need to present my id each time. i can have access to it on a few hours notice 6 days a week. since i already had it, seemed like a good place for backups.
i chose CD-R, cause
(a) they're cheap enough that i don't feel guilty backing up *everything*
(b) i burn a new one each time, and keep the old ones in there, in case the august file is corrupt, the july one might not be, etc.
(c) they're not that big, and file nicely.
(d) if you buy decent ones, they have a good shelf life.
one other note of offsite storage - a disk cataloger app, so i can figure out what i've got in storage *before* i go down there!
then upload them to various erotica newsgroups.
Let the geeks of the world keep my data safe!
For me, if it's not worth sharing, it's not worth worrying about. Bills, records, mass produced crap can all be replaced with a reasonable home insurance policy. If you've taken the trouble to present things to others, it's going to be some of your best work. Interestingly enough, publication aids survival.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
My carefully laid out program for backing up my data consists of these two steps:
1. If I have no space left on any harddisk, burn some of it to a CD.
2. Ehhh... ok, not two steps...
or more interesting.. get the "snow" steganography program.. it (somehow -- still blows my mind) inserts binary into text using whitespace encoding. you can insert your gpg'd tarballs into spoofed journal entries created with the Sugar Plum junk HTML generator. You even have built-in timestamps!
Of course, they may only keep the last 25 comments... hmm... it still seems like all this could be easily scripted with perl.
Intelligent Life on Earth
This just makes me want to go bury some CD-R's in a wood. Reminds me of cryptonomicon. Anyone got any tips for data burial?
And there should be plenty in here. We all have corporate-sponsored (and backed up) Intranet webdrives on reserved under our Intranet names with sharing ACLs tied to bluepages. I have stored gigs up there. You can also get a GSA drive on the Intranet that starts you off with 10GB of space. All officially supported and useful for storing copies of critical data in case a taxi runs over your Thinkpad.
Intelligent Life on Earth
Sometimes in business, especially military and intelligence business, :-)
it is important to have your data be Secure, both in the "eyes only" sense and in
the "safe from fire/flood/earthquake/mayhem/attack" sense.
However, it is also very often important that this data be surely and accountably
DESTROYED. These two seemingly oppositional goals must really make for
interesting practices in some environments. I need backups, and I also
need a way to guarantee that all backups are destroyed on command as well, because,
while the data is to be disposed of, it is not to be
disposed of until the order is given, at which point, it
must be disposed of, let's say, with the consequences being
court-martial or summary execution if it doesn't happen.
(I'n not just thinking about the kind, gentle, USAn military
here
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I've been a sysadmin, and I won't stand behind a backup plan that wasn't tested. Best is to try and reconstruct your work and its environment using your backups and only your backups. For example, do you need any special software to read your files? Any special browser or Word plugins? Any particular version of the OS? Got them ALL??? Are you sure?
BurnedOnce
A safe deposit box, as somebody else mentioned, is a good idea in theory (and potentially in practice - I use one myself). However, the big problem that makes it and so many other backup strategies inadequate in practice is that it requires manual intervention and most people aren't going to use these mechanisms frequently enough. Most of the people I've talked with in small businesses backup maybe once a month (to tape, zip disk, CD, etc), if they're lucky. That's unfortunate because there's really no reason why you should be backing up any less frequently than every day your data changes...
I've been working on some software for awhile that provides a simple, automated solution. At the core it's peer to peer backup software, so all your computers will backup to each other. To protect against things like fire and theft, it also gives you the option to backup offsite to third party servers. So you could back up the bulk of your data via p2p (very fast, cheap, and easy) and backup your critical stuff offsite (still cheap and easy and potentially fast depending on the amount of data). I have a test version out now and I'm going to be releasing another test version in a few days, so email me if you're interested. And yes, there is a Linux version.
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
I have found that safety deposit boxes are good safe storage facilities for off site backups, if you can live with the fact that your backups are only available during banking hours.
I always suggest 2 copies for that reason.
They tend to run around $35-70/year.
We're loaded.
Main box is an Endurance by Marathon, with the tuples split half a mile apart. Not exactly affordable, though.
As the day grinds along, stuff gets pumped to another rack, located in a concrete bunker under a trailer owned by some guy named "Bob" who works for AT&T. I think he lives in Tulsa or something. Should the world explode, our people can telecommute to it. That's not exactly affordable, either.
Before we used Bob at AT&T, I had a box in the basement of my house. As above, data transactions & incremental file snapshots were pushed onto it at some interval. That was mostly affordable, since it was effectively just a file store. During the day, my home's 'net connection would be sucked up by this crap. No big deal, I'm at work. When I get home, there's no real data left to push... so the net connection's all mine.
Along with that, we've got the obligatory 12-tape rotation. The tapes live in my truck most of the time, except for whatever ones will be used that night, and except for whatever monthly set goes to secured storage. Quite affordable, if DDS or DLT etc. is within your budget.
Stuff at home on my personal boxes... ugh. Snapshot anything of merit onto a Rom, and mail it off to Siberia. Ghost the rest onto a spare drive and store that drive somewhere else...
The true definition of madness is repeating the same action, over and over, hoping for a different result. - Einstein.
Einstein never used Windows. - The Mighty Dingus
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
I put all backups in my butt.
Works Great!!!
FTP your key files to your work machine. Encrypted, of course. Sure, you might lose you job, in which case you should switch to some other backup method (you still should keep a copy of the files at home). But for dirt-simple peace of mind, it's hard to beat this. Bear in mind your company's machine use policies etc, of course.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
I'm currently a senior in college writing a thesis. If I don't have a thesis I don't graduate, so as one can imagine I'm kind of paranoid about backups. For small data, I find the following procedurs sufficient:
1) Burn every single revision to cd
2) Keep a copy of most recent version in on campus mail box
3) Keep most recent version on my free web space at yahoo.com (you have to link it, but whatever).
4) Keep as many revisions as space allows in mailbox on www.runbox.com. They give you 100 megs of storage for a very small price.
It would be pretty difficult for all my data to get destroyed as it spans two continents and lots of different media. Most personal users have a relatively small ammount of absolutely critical data, and for them I think my solution makes allot of sense. Even for larger data sizes renting space from someone a fair geographic distance away makes sense. Sure their building can burn down to, but what are the odds of their building and yours burning down the same day?
The preceding passage has been checked for spelling, you will find no sentence without at least one mis spelled word
I have a reciprocal agreement with a friend in another city to run remote incremental backups over SSL. On day zero, I created a giant tar file of my entire system, and an XML file containing the MD5 hash and interesting fields from lstat(2) for every file on the system. Every night, a cron job checks that the MD5 fingerprint matches (as a sanity check on the computer and hard drive), and builds a new compressed and encrypted tar file of all changes in the filesystem, excluding anything from a list of regular expressions representing uninteresting transient data. When I get time, I'll also write a script to dump the database nightly and send incremental changes to the backup server. The system is still improving as I get time to futz with it, but I sleep well knowing that I will never lose more than a day's worth of changes to the system, and no manual intervention is required to keep the system running.
But what's your *backup* policy?
What do you do when you realise that bonehaded mistake has been instantly sychronised across every instance of your data?
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Want to know more about it?
Of course my MP3 collection is quite a bit larger than my /home.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
what I do, how safe is that for me?
Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
Since 1996 I have kept a copy of my master backups I perform ever so often (all data, programs, config files, etc) at my parents, it saved my a** 2 years ago when all my computer equipment was destroyed by a flood! I label them Set A and Set B, they are exact copies, one in my safe, one many miles away, safe from evrything but nuclear war, or a search warrent :).
In a Previous Article on backups, we discussed the impracticality of the average user backing up a very large HD with anything but another equally large HD.. starting from that premise as our backup method:
:)
I know of two incidents where a hard disk survived (with data intact) a fire inside the computer's case (one flaming power supply, one flaming modem from a lightning strike). I'd guess data damage may not be so much due to high temperature, as whether the HD receives a thermal shock by being heated too fast, or if gets warped due to being heated too unevenly. A safe might be useful in that it would heat up and cool down relatively slowly and uniformly, so would give the data platters a chance to adapt. (Obviously a stored HD's heads will not be writing data at the time of the theoretical fire, so misread/miswritten data is not the issue.)
Anyone got a garage, a safe, and a HD they'd care to sacrifice in the interests of science?
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Near-line storage on a HD in a mobile rack. (I paid less than $10 for mine) UNPLUG THE TRAY and put it somewhere else when not actively backing up or restoring. If that $9 power supply suddenly decides to feed your motherboard AC line voltage or your motherboard announces it's got the low-quality electrolytic cap problem by exploding, having your backup HD plugged in at the time is A BAD IDEA.
Burn a pile of CD-Rs every month (replace with DVD-Rwhatever when the format war ends) and mail them to a friend across the country. If a simultaneous disaster wipes out both locations out, there probably won't be any survivors to care. If security is a concern, PGP-encrypt the disks before sending. (for this, I suggest one-way encryption and try REAL hard to remember the passphrase.)
I prefer tape, but I've had problems getting backups back from tape. I used to have a Sony Superstation. Data verified perfectly during backups for a year and a half. Worked fine until my HD crashed. After some work with Customer Service, I managed to get about 95% of my files back, but the point behind getting a tape drive is... reload and you're running. While Ecrix or LVO drives are probably sufficiently stable/reliable to trust in, the price tag on either is ... rather high.
The fireproof safe isn't *that* bad an idea, even if humidity is a concern, just plop your CDs or HD rack in a plastic bag or a sealable metal strongbox with a silica gel packet inside. If the bag or box melts, chances are, your CDs will be melting shortly anyway. But having copies of the data somewhere else is more cost-effective. CD-Rs are cheap. Safes aren't.
The people who have their backups stored only a few miles away are gambling. Most areas have their own characteristic set of major disasters. I live in an earthquake zone. Others live in areas where hurricanes are popular. No coastal area is immune to tsunamis, even if this is a once-in-a-lifetime or longer scenario, "this only happens once in a long while" doesn't help if that's NOW. Areas that are considered seismically stable can become otherwise. Most people go through their lifetimes without having their homes or businesses burn down. Is this a reason to neglect fire insurance?
Online backup via commercial storage facility is only a reasonable solution for broadband users. Imagine retrieving even a 20G zipfile via dialup. I get 4667 cps on a *good* connection. You're also betting that the network connect between wherever you are and wherever your backup is will stay intact in the event of a major disaster. I'll assume anyone reading this is encrypting before sending the data out using your own crypto software, not theirs to remove the issue of trust. If you're figuring on retreiving the data via Fed Ex, why not simply send the disks? Note that if the problem is enterprise class, then making backups at 2 or more of the major facilities (out of courtesy, I'll assume redundant backbone connections at each site) on the network becomes reasonable.
Incomplete... (Score:1)
by Distan on Thursday November 21, @04:15PM (#4726118)
(User #122159 Info)
Your data backup isn't complete unless you could be up and running after having all of your computer equipment seized, your safety deposit boxes frozen, and search warrants served on all of your known friends and family members.
Maybe there is some sort of "off-shore" backup service in business?
Distan is right, but I haven't come up with a good answer for how to handle his problem. It isn't possible to rent a storage space from a regular storage space provider on a cash only - no ID basis anymore, at least not around here, and if a manager of such a facility is corruptible enough to do business against the rules, can he be trusted with your data? I don't mean not to read it, I mean to have the disks when you call for them. If the guy's a friend of yours, that's the "known associate" problem.
If the government (yours, wherever you are) comes up with a sufficiently plausible excuse, they can get the government local to wherever your backup records are to seize them from whoever they're stored with if one, so international isn't a really adequate solution.
Who's got some better ideas?
Tech Public Policy stuff
I just keep my backups at my hotsite, with a point-to-point T1 between my house and... oh, wait.. thats just a pipe dream. ;-)
Seriously, a safety deposit box at your local bank (or another branch, assuming you're closer than that 6.5 miles someone mentioned) is probably sufficient. As to "will discovery" and my heirs (brother & sister, and the nephews, since my parents certainly don't need the money), face it... if I'm friggin *DEAD* I really don't think my only semi-computer-literate family is really going to want my copies of hi-tech software. And the CD's of my digital pictures and such... well, if they have to wait, they have to wait. *I* certainly am not going to be worried about it at that point.
Interesting re the CDRWs. I wondered about their durability; this does not sound good.
How about if CDRWs are used as single-write CDs, never rewritten? how long can they be expected to last?
I've got a client who bought CDRW blanks by mistake (way too long ago to return 'em), and I could not convince him to spend more money on CDR blanks. Lacking better options, I did his backups on the CDRW blanks, but as closed single-session like one would for CDRs. (No idea if they're still rewritable, but the object was to prevent 'em from being altered, if possible. I don't use CDRW blanks myself so don't really know if it worked.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Something I'm not seeing mentioned enough in this thread is: Encryption.
Going forward, I want to give a copy to a friend or relative. BUT... I want:
The notion of having personal data floating around in the open is less than comforting. For example: What if your friend/relative gets burglarized? Sure, you trust your friend, but by giving them clear files, your data is now subject to THEIR firewall, and THEIR physical security (in addition to yours). Seems like this leads to a GREATER chance that someone untrusted will get access to your files.
Has anyone combined a sort of bare-bones Linux boot, gpg/tar, ISO creating/burning, cataloging project? hmmm... Might be interesting to have critical stuff on a business-card sized CDR.
i don't care if my hosue is flooded, burned down, or blown up, at least my porn is safe
I archive and compress my critical files, then encrypt & sign them with PGP, then upload them over FTP to a remote FTP site that I trust.
Hacking the Network
Only the two admins who have the root passwords, and the company CEO, have the keys to this facility.
Three copies of incremental backups are made each day on CD-R discs. Generally, the backup takes up a single disc. If large changes have taken place, a second disc may be required, but this is very rare. The first copy is placed on a shelf located in the room. Its purpose is the fast retrieval of files in the event of deletion. The second copy goes home with one of the sysadmins. (The sysadmins take turns each day.) The third copy goes home with the company CEO. To reduce the number of CD-Rs stored, three copies of full backups are made on the 12th day of each month, or the following business day. (Don't ask me why that day was selected.) Each of these three copies can take up to 17 CD-Rs, and the number is growing slowly. One copy is kept in the NOC. One is placed in a safe-deposit box at a bank. One is taken home by the company CEO.
Additionally, a "backup" system exists at a separate location, also protected, which cost the company approximately $20,000. It is similar to the "real" setup and can perform the same functions but on a smaller scale. If the main system is destroyed for whatever reason, the company can activate the backup system within a matter of minutes to provide interim services while the main system is brought back online. When the main system is taken offline for maintainence, all operations take place through the backup system. Additionally, tests are performed once a month (by switching to the backup system) to ensure that it works properly. The two systems are synchronized before and after each such switch.
Obviously, my company has taken the paranoid approach to protecting data.
Based on my extremely small experience with CD-RWs for medium-term backup, I'd trust the backup. At least, I'd trust it enough in a situation where I'd advised a client to put out another, say, $40 or so to alleviate risk and he refused my suggestion. I've heard some early (first-gen?) CD-RWs were unreliable to the point where they wrote fine, read fine, then a week later lost a bunch of data. I've heard recently here on Slashdot that a fellow who made his own TiVo type unit that could dump VCDs to CD-RW got something like 3-7 writes before the media got unacceptably screwy.
It's probable the backups you did will be just fine. Personally, I'd rely on them no more than a year or so if they were pristine and kept away from light and cigarette smoke, and I wouldn't reuse them for backups at the end, but this is just gut feeling. If made properly (and hopefully burned at slower than max speed, like 1X-4X), they'll last much longer, but the manufacturers muck too much with the composition of the things to permit me any real feeling of reliability even with a particular brand.
The blanks you've made are rewritable, but the user has to choose to blank the disc first, so it isn't likely someone is just going to drop the disc in the tray and blithely dump a new session over the backup.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
In looking at the media, CDRW *look* like they're denser. And I've noticed that the less-transparent and more solidly-backed CDRs read faster in old hardware (enough to notice), probably due to stronger reflectivity. So my initial thought was that CDRW media *should* be more reliable/more readable -- but I've had strange experiences with trying to write CDRWs (lots of fails for no good reason, whereas CDRs rarely fail -- in fact the Plextor *never* failed until TurboTax forcibly installed IE5.5, which FUBAR'd lots of stuff incl. the CDRW).
:)
:)
The guy I made the backup for didn't have the first clue how to use the CDRW (older Sony, of somewhere around the 6x era), so one can hope that he won't try something silly like writing over his backup! The disk read just fine immediately after, which I suppose is a good sign. I'll probably be doing his next backup in due course, and I can simply refuse to write over the old one
In my experience, given good quality blanks, data that fades in the next few weeks or months is an early symptom of a CDRW unit that's going tits-up. Have had enough evil adventures with failing Yamaha drives (never again!) to be fairly well convinced of that.
For myself, I just have too much data -- CDRs get silly in a hurry. Have been thinking about a RAID1 server with no mission in life except to mirror my other machines. I suppose I could string power and a network cable to my shop building and put it out there, under the theory that house and shop aren't likely to burn down at the same time
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Some replies, admittedly funny, have ranted about home data being pretty much useless.
HOW THE HELL DO YOU KNOW THAT ?
Just because YOU don't do anything productive on your home network, it doesn't mean that all of us do.
GET A GRIP YOURSELVES
What if this dude was a freelance programmer working from home, on a sixth month project that would basically feed/clothe him and his family for the next year ?
Or a freelance Graphic designer running a SOHO business ?
Some of you are such damn Nerds you assume that nobody elses home data is worth shit, because yours isn't. Bunch of ignorant dweebs.
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
You got 500 GBs of (private) dynamic data you need to backup on a regular basis???
//J
You, sir, need a life, not a backup solution.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
is encrypting all my personal data into a file called 'Britney_sucking_off_donkey.avi' and popping it in my Kazaa shared folder. Millions of copies distributed around the world in hours.
1) Keep an electronic backup in any media and place you think is safe enough for 95% of the cases of data-loss. This will give you an easy way of restoring your data. After all your house might burn/flood once or twice in your lifetime.
:P
2) To be covered for extreme cases, print everything out
and keep them in a fire/water-proof safe. Paper wont burn inside the safe and humidity wont destroy it. I assume the
paper and print method play a role in this scenario. e.g. paper should be very thin to save space and priting sould be done at least on lazer printer. This way you can always restore your data, it will just take a longer time.
Method 2 will also work if you want to save binary data,
as long as you print them in hexadecimal format
just large enough to keep a nice litle stack of CD's (or even a ghosted HDD in a metallic bag)
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
I find keeping my data backed up with a laptop is fairly easy. I guess you'll need hard drives to suit your needs and conveniance. My laptop is almost always as safe as I am. It also goes almost everywhere with me - this is where the backup comes in. When I'm at friends houses I back my stuff up on to their computers. Ok this process is not rigorously controlled - all my friends *might* decide to reformat their disks the same day I loose my data - but I loose less sleep over this than over those damm shrews.
Well, anyone with any intellegence would simply perform regular backups and store them offsite. Oh yeah, unless you test these backups by loading them on a recovery system then they are worthless. You have to prove the backups are capable of recovery. I'd hire a disaster recovery coordinator...
When I do full backups, I do 'em twice. The first copy goes into our safe at home, and the second copy goes into our safe deposit box at the bank down the street. Incremental backups done during the week only go in the safe; I don't have time to go to the bank every day. I've seen other customers from time to time come into the bank with a box full of tapes -- either their business backups or just protecting their porn collection. :)
1.) If you are using a media fireproof safe in the US make sure it is certified by UL or any other US testing laboratory. You may have a problem with your insurance company if the safe is not up to US standards. 2.) The National Fire Protection Association has standard 232 Provides requirements for records protection equipment and facilities and record-handling techniques that provide protection from the hazards of fire. 3.) Something to remember. When you see that a safe, door or wall is rated for say 2 hours, the intent is to give you 2 hours of protection until someone notices the fire and calls the Fire Department, the sprinkler system activates and extinguishes or controls the fire until the FD arrives or the fire goes undiscovered and hopefully the fire burns itself out or otherwise say goodbye to your backups. Fireproof safes are rated the same way. So, if you have a safe rated for 45 minutes, make sure there is adequate fire suppresion or the facility is staffed 24 hours 7 days a week. Haligan
The few important documents I have (all of a few megs) and the much more important family pictures (of the kids growing up & stuff) off the digital camera are always on more than one machine. Usually I download my pictures to my main PC and then dump them to my linux server over samba. The linux server runs Martain's Photoframe which is the best/easiest web-based photo gallery software I have used. But I'm getting OT now so back to the topic...
Attached to the linux server is an Exabyte tape library with 10 tapes (thanks Ebay). Every night I backup the whole server except ISO images and MP3s. Each day of the week uses a different tape automatically with sunday being tape 1 and saturday tape 7. I wrote a custom script for using mtx to change the tape based on day of the week, then tar to backup, then tar again to verify, then mtx to unload.
Before an upgrade (every 6 months or so with Redhat/now Mandrake 9) I also do a special backup to tape 10 after doing a cleaning tape.
So to sum it up... important data is always on more than one machine and backups are always done daily with more than one tape.
I should run tape 10 over to my in-laws for safe keeping though. I have been more worried about a harddrive crash (especially with one year warrenties now) than fire. Flood is not an issue if you saw street I climb when returning from work you would agree.
Jeff
Streamload.com has UNLIMITED storage online for FREE. You are limited to what you can download under the free account. I pay $4.95 and get 1000MB download per month. Not bad considering if my house goes up in smoke I still have my data somewhere.
Wherever you go, there you are.
> So my initial thought was that CDRW media *should* be more reliable/more readable.
CDRs have ~0.8 or 0.9 times the contrast of a pressed CD. CDRWs have ~0.6 or 0.7 times the contrast. They're harder for non-Multiread hardware to deal with.
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
Interesting. Tho I'd guess it varies much more radically for CDRs -- as I've noted, the ones that are more opaque (better backing, more visible reflectivity) read considerably faster in old hardware. Enough to really notice in a 4x.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?