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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?
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 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
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 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.
We're doing this in an enterprise environment, but it would be easy to co-ordinate between two friends as well.
--derek
gambitdesign.com
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 ?
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,
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.
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.
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.
Then you play the little exhange game. Your data for my data. You want your shady finacial records, I want my porn. Or is it the other way around?
what about 8-9 years of email? my thesis? custom firewall/sendmail/other rules that would take ages to rewrite? digital pictures taken at important events in my life?
These are just some examples why I am probably going to go through the 'offsite box at my bank' route pretty soon...
-- the cake is a lie
Ooops! In my other post I forgot about my porn!
I keep multiple copies of that on 5.25, 3.5, CD, DVD and punchcards hidden throughout Northern Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania. My home copies are on 2 identical RAID 5 systems backed up to compressed Exabyte tape librarys (one in my apartment, one connected wirelessly to my garage on the same property but 3 buildings away). The apartments have a sprinkler system, so the RAID and Exabyte cabinets are tented with plastic. Working on an archive for my vehicle that backs up through an 802.11a connection whenever I park in the garage.
It was just my defense contracting work I was talking about here
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
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.
I was going to say that my karma is excellent so this wouldn't happen, but I see my original comment has been modded down already, so pardon me for a moment while I go hide my latest backups under the garden shed...
I wish there was "no sig" checkbox on submission
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
You, sir, are a dork.
If your house burns down, it will burn all night and into the next day.
And for what you spent on all those safes, you could easily rent an insured safety deposit box at your local bank.
Of course, you know, that means going outside.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Ok here's what I do for my small (about 12 persons) company:
You need two server machines, one to be the primary server, and one to hold a backup drive. (having the primary and backup drives on seperate machines prevents total loss through several faliure modes right off the bat, like a power supply malfunction on one machine)
These machines can be affordable and inexpensive Pentium II or III machines.
For this example, I'll tell you exactly what I used.
I went to newegg.com and bought three identical hard drives, 80 GB maxtors. I also purchased a lian-li removable IDE hard drive bay plus an extra cartridge for it.
I put one of the maxtors in the primary server machine, and made it the primary drive.
I put the other two maxtors in lian-li removable carts, and labeled them Backup drive A and Backup Drive B.
I put backup drive A in the lian li bay on the backup computer.
On the primary server, I made two tasks with windows task scheduler:
The first task does a full backup every monday night to the backup drive over the network.
The second task does a nightly incremental backup, on every night of the week except monday night.
When I come in on Monday morning, I remove the current backup drive, take it down to our safe deposit box at our bank, and swap it for the other drive, which has been sitting there for a week. in the evening, task scheduler runs a full backup on the drive.
So at all times, there is at least a week of incremental backups in case a deleted file needs to be retrieved, and there is an offsite backup that is never more than a week old, and there are nightly incremental backups on-site. All you have to do is swap the drives once a week and take them to your favorite off-site location for storage.
I've been doing this for a few months now and it's been good. I also put the server and backup machine on UPS, and the primary server has control of it through USB, and shuts itself down before the power dies.
--Mike
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?
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?
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.
When you test your restore, be sure you test it on a machine and tape drive other then the one you used to create the backup. Tape drives easily fall out of alignment. An out of alignment tape drive will generate an out of alignment tape. A mis-aligned tape may work fine in the drive that created it, but may not be readable on any other tape drive. This does you no good if the only tape drive that can read the tape is in a melted ruin.
If you are in a Microsoft network environment or any other environment that uses a central security or configuration database, (domain controller, directory server, etc.) don't forget to have a backup plan for that as well. Recovering the data is only part of the battle; you also have to recover the logins, security rights, and all other configuration aspects of your network.
Did you remember to store a copy of the install media and license codes for your backup software at your off-site location along with your backup media? How about written copies of your hardware and software configurations?
As others have noted, a safe-deposit box at a bank not too physically close to your computers is an economical option. I use this option for my home network. A down side to this is you can only get to your backup media during the bank's operating hours. If you need better access, a professional off-site storage company may be a better option. Many will pick up, deliver, and manage rotations for you.
Finally, don't forget that there are other things then fire and flood and natural disasters that can keep you from your physical equipment. Your data may be safe on your servers, but you might not be able to get to your servers if there is a chemical spill, civil unrest, or some other police action happening between you and your equipment.
If Connected had a *nix client, they might be worth invetigating. Seriously.
As it is, I'd have to do a local tar/dump/something of my data, copy the dump file to a Windows partition, boot into Windows, run the Connected program to chunk across this dump file, then reboot back into something useful.
Thanks, I'll stick with rsync. :-)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
...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 &
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.
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
My firesafe came with a large packet of dessicant for just that reason. If you open the safe on a regular basis, this shouldn't be much of a problem.
Silica gel is the most common type of dessicant. That's the little packet labeled "DO NOT EAT" in just about any consumer electronics packaging. I've saved the little packets in a jar for years, but I'm sure you can also buy them directly.
I recommended to a friend who wanted to save some backup CDRs that they put a small firesafe (the kind with a handle) inside a larger firesafe. Put CDRs and silica gel in the smaller one; put hanging folders in the remaining space in the larger one. (The moderate moisture is fine for paper storage when the temperature is rising, but not as good for the CDRs.)
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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.
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...
You, sir, are an ass.
If your house burns down, it will burn for a short time until the fire department puts the fire out. And even if it takes time for the entire house to burn, the portion with the safe will likely be Real Hot for a relatively short time (per this informative FAQ).
And your safe might not even be near the fire.
And although a safety deposit box is a good idea for level 0 or level 1 backups, what is the point of it being insured wrt data storage?
Next time you call someone names, know what you are talking about. And a "fireproof" safe can be a good part of an entire data safety plan.
What bothers me about all the people stating "get a fireproof safe" is that NO ONE has said if the normal kind actually work (or not) for protecting media from a fire. One person said he heard horror stories, but that's it. Ref. the previous FAQ link.
And please, if you get a "fireproof" safe, consider bolting it to something strong (e.g. cement in basement) because having someone steal your computer and your backups sucks!
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