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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
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
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.
Unfortunately, the poster of this Ask Slashdot question is the CEO of Connected.com.
C8H10N4O2 | Developer > Code