Advice on Remote Backup Services?

a-freeman asks: "Faced with the prospect of doing automated weekly backups for several servers with some 200 GB of files each, I have been looking for a remote backup solution. A couple of recent articles consider backup to hard drives, although I feel this still fails the 'separate snapshot in time' aspect of good backup policy, since with many of the solutions that I have seen, you will likely lose all your backups if your array gets corrupted. However, CD-Rs and DVDs are just too damn small. Can anyone recommend a remote backup service or interesting combination of hosting service + FTP/RSync/etc., or am I stuck buying a tape drive?"

Comments

Rsync local and remote

[bzant]

I currently have about 10G of "live" data on my office network, each night I back up using rsync, to a server at my house. This happens over a 768k DSL. On an average day I am pushing about 120MB over the wire, and it takes 10-20 minutes. Also in the office I have a 120GB drive where I have made 10 copies of the data, and each hour during the work day from 10AM to 8PM it makes an rsync copy, over 100mbit link it takes about 6 minutes to replicate the changes. I also have a nightly tape backup.

This system mainly gets used for the "oh shit, I deleted my file" kind of users. I can't say enough about rsync, works great and has saved my ass a numbe of times.

Re:Tape drives.

[GigsVT]

rdiff-backup and rsync with rotating incrementals are both able to do the first two very well, with the advantage of never needing a "full" backup after you do the first one, something tape will never be able to do. This makes things like offsite backups over slow and cheap links possible that would not be otherwise.

We back up about 1TB of total data to a offsite backup over a 512kbit fractional T1, with daily rsync incremental snapshots that we keep for 30 days. Our data velocity is about 3-6GB per day of data that changes or is added. The backup easily finishes between 5pm and 8am.

For #3, long term archival of small amount of data, hard disks probably aren't a good choice.

I resent it when people say "the only real backup solution is tape".