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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?
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 keep all my MP3s backed up on Kazaa.
Trolling is a art,
The idea is to keep two sets of backups: one onsite (i.e. at home), and another one at a remote location (i.e. at the bank).
Even if the contents is not insured (what's the monetary value of your personal data anyways?), the probability that something happens both to your home and to your bank is quite slim.
Say no to software patents.
The one problem you might have is if you die and your SO needs to get at the backups for some reason. Many (most) states require that the box be sealed on the death of one of the owners until the probate stuff is straightened out. This is the reason why you should not keep your will in your safety deposit box. Let the attorney keep it for you.
Of course, having said all that, I'll admit that I back up my data to CDR and put the CD in the safety deposit box at the bank. The one thing those backups contain that might cause a problem for my wife is the MS Money backup.
FreeSpeech.org
Of course, next comes the question about what happens if the server takes fire. I'd imagine there is a redundant unit somewhere, but that is just a guess.
You, sir, are a dork.
If your house burns down, it will burn all night and into the next day.
And for what you spent on all those safes, you could easily rent an insured safety deposit box at your local bank.
Of course, you know, that means going outside.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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
Better than rsync:
unison - I keep my desktop, server, and laptop synchronized over SSL connections. Like rsync, it sends minimal changes to keep source trees up to date. I can sync over a gig in my home directories in much less than a minute unless I dumped a whole bunch of new stuff on there.
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
This is the reason why you should not keep your will in your safety deposit box.
There is usually a provision for 'Will discovery'. One family member, usually the proposed executor/administrator, is allowed to go into the box to look for and retrieve the will. Life insurance policies as well. Nothing else may be removed, though, until after probate.
IANAL, but I just had to go through this procedure.
The submitter of this story should take a look at the ISO 17799 standard (formerly the British Standard 7799) for data security.
As for backups, best practices suggests that you keep one on site and one off site. The off site location should be at least 6.5 miles from the site. This distance was calculated throughout the years as insurance companies assessed damage caused by widespread natural disasters (hurricanes, floods) and the area that was impacted by them.
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.
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.
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
For that price, you can have storage companies such as "Iron Mountain" come out once a week and store your weekly tapes.
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 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.
Unfortunately, the poster of this Ask Slashdot question is the CEO of Connected.com.
C8H10N4O2 | Developer > Code
While 6.5 miles may meet some statistical standard for insurers, it's not really sufficient in the individual company's case when planning to survive large natural disasters or civil disorder (or whatever else you haven't though of).
As an example from a large telco I worked for - data from Omaha, NE was offsited to Washington and vice-versa. Cross-country like that is your best bet.
11*43+456^2
Where the hell is Grammar Nazi?!?
Safe Deposit Box. Or even Safe-Deposit Box.
Not Safety Deposit Box.
Bugs me more than "irregardless" and incorrect use of their/there/they're. Don't get me started on its/it's.
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.)
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You sir, are a bigger, more pompous dork. Safe deposit boxes at banks are NOT insured. The bank has no way to know what's in them, no way to value the contents, and thus has no obligation to replace them if the bank burns down.
o rmation /fdiciorn.html
If you don't believe me, try the FDIC:
http://www.fdic.gov/consumers/consumer/inf
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'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!
You, sir, are an ass.
If your house burns down, it will burn for a short time until the fire department puts the fire out. And even if it takes time for the entire house to burn, the portion with the safe will likely be Real Hot for a relatively short time (per this informative FAQ).
And your safe might not even be near the fire.
And although a safety deposit box is a good idea for level 0 or level 1 backups, what is the point of it being insured wrt data storage?
Next time you call someone names, know what you are talking about. And a "fireproof" safe can be a good part of an entire data safety plan.
What bothers me about all the people stating "get a fireproof safe" is that NO ONE has said if the normal kind actually work (or not) for protecting media from a fire. One person said he heard horror stories, but that's it. Ref. the previous FAQ link.
And please, if you get a "fireproof" safe, consider bolting it to something strong (e.g. cement in basement) because having someone steal your computer and your backups sucks!
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