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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
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
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 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
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)
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.
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.
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.
We're doing this in an enterprise environment, but it would be easy to co-ordinate between two friends as well.
--derek
gambitdesign.com
For instance:
Grocery list:
Pad your data into some porn movie and you will have loads of copies floated around the internet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Forgot to say, I don't live in the USA, and I work for small companies, so this isn't a concern for me although it's a valid point.
Anyway, the point was more about taking my home-backups to work, and while I'm sure some lawyer could find a problem with this practice too, the fact is it works for me, and for "home backups" I'd suggest it's often a reasonable solution.
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
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.
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.
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!!!!
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!
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.
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
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
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
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 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
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
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.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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)
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.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
...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
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.
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.
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
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...
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
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
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 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?"
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.)
[
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.
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
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!
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!
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
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
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!
.signature: No such file or directory
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.
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
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"
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
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?
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?
> 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?