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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?
Why not do online backup? Many companies offer this fairly cheaply...
For instance NovaStor
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.
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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.
Sure, they may not be insured, but odds are next to none that both the backup that you keep at your house, the current running version of things on your lan and your bank are ALL going to go the way of the dodo on the same day. And if your really concerned about that then keep 2 deposit boxes at different branches of your bank.
Memories become legend, Legend fades to myth, and even myth is forgotten by the time that age comes again.-Robert Jordan
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.
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.
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.
I have a large safe, and I put several of the cheap small safes inside it with data and paper documents. The rating on safes is how long it takes the interior to reach paper combustion temps... (451f) That is 1.5 hours at 1600f for the large safe. The small safes are rated at 1h at 700 deg. If my house burns longer than the approx 2-3hrs it will take to heat up the little ones , then I have a problem.
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.
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.
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?
well, if you buy a good small one, spending about $150 or more, it will protect from fires for about 2 hours. They are rated in the sales literature. It will ensure that your media inside stays within the adequate temperature range for a total of 2 hours while it is in the fire. If it is in the fire for longer than 2 hours, then you will have problems. Since most fires burn for less than 2 hours, you can rest assured that your data is safe using one of these devices.
Generally a lot cheaper and easier to simply have an emergency relocation location; a backup of your server room and equipment, if you will, in a different geographical area. This is commonly done for business that need it, and can afford it.
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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?
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.
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.
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.
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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?
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).
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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.
...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.
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Then lay a pipe with network and power cables in the trench.
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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
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.
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
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.
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.