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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
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
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
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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
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.
what about 8-9 years of email? my thesis? custom firewall/sendmail/other rules that would take ages to rewrite? digital pictures taken at important events in my life?
These are just some examples why I am probably going to go through the 'offsite box at my bank' route pretty soon...
-- the cake is a lie
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)
>> I'm hypercritical and paranoid
.com winners as iDrive and the like for backups.
I wouldn't say so.
I've seen clients relying on such
When the bubble burst, so did their piece of mind.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
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)
What about recovery? That'd be an interesting scenario.
I am probably going to go through the 'offsite box at my bank' route pretty soon...
...Famous last words...
The time of day is 29:33.
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