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Online Backup vs. Tape Backup?
hashbox asks: "I work for a small non-profit (about 100 staff members) and management has decided that they want to use an online data backup system instead of our existing tape backup system. After a meeting with one of the many vendors providing this service, I must admit that I am impressed with the promise of the technology (ease of use etc). However the sysadmin side of me has a few reservations. Has anyone here on Slashdot used an online backup service, and what were your experiences?"
Amen. I'm working on a project involving management of multimedia assets, and one key part of the functionality is to archive and restore old artwork. My project leader and other stakeholders went through half a dozen providers, and they kept coming back to the same problem. They all stored data that was handed to them, but none of them provided an easy or programmable means of restoring that data. It seems backup providers seem to think that data restoration is a manual, labor-intensive process when for our needs we required it to be done on an automated, systematic basis. (We have much more data than we have capacity to keep accessable, hence a regular archive/restore cycle for many projects.)
Those who complain about affect & effect on
1) They are a labor intensive (still think we should spell that on OK style as Labour).
2) They don't have the shelf life they claim. If it ain't 100% reliable, you better have a backup of your backup.
3) The tape hardware can be really unreliable too.
4) Make sure you can really retstore just that one file you want as opposed to the entire tap.
As for Network Backups...point 4 definitely applies. All the other posts talking about network connectivity definitely apply.
I did a contract for a network backup solution. The kept buying really high end dirk arrays. However, you probably can get away with cheap disks for backups. Assuming 1 TB of slow IDE is about $250 right now (I haven'r priced in a while) You can back up 4 TB with no redundancy for $1000. Using AMANDA, you can do the partials etc for weekly, daily, monthly.
Depending on how you set this up, it can be more or less labo intensive than the tapes.
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I use 2 USB hard drives. I keep one off site. ( in my truck, I can get to it quickly if i need to) One stays in the shop for easy access. I rotate them at each backup. Restores are as easy as plug and copy. Also I keep a OS disk and boot floppy, cables and power supply with the off site unit just in case. It works great for us. I can back up '98, 2000, XP and Linux boxes all with one unit. :)
Hello.
I put together an entire online backup solution once. The braintrust of the project didn't want to spend a ton of money and wanted to just find another stream of income based on the internet. I told him that he'd end up spending tons of money on hardware and it'd have to be moved offsite (all of the standard backup strategy stuff) and if he wanted to be competitive, he'd have to do it securely (encryption) and reliabily.
His answer to this was to buy an IDE raid and a T1 (no tapes!). I scoffed at the idea, but wrote the entire system for him anyway. Needless to say, the whole thing worked and he has a few customers and they get their important data backed-up fine, but if he were to get any real customers or have a crash of some sort, he'd be out of business and out of luck.
My advice (similar to a previous poster) is to foll your own. I know that backups can be costly and a pain to maintain, but getting amanda running on a linux machine with a huge raid and a tape changer is a LOT better than putting your faith in an anonymous company. If you're still stuck on the online solution, see if you can take a tour of the company to see that they actually have the capacity and hardware to back up their claims.
Just my $0.02 and no, I'm not telling the name of the backup service that I built. It's not something that I'm very proud of.
Backups are done via rsync, and restores are done with cp. (The whole system is run on linux with php and mysql). The files are backed up from/restored to windows servers over samba.
This is all great and makes the users happy. However, any intelligent business will also have offsite backups. Right now, if a (pick your natural disaster/accident) happens, the company is basicaly out of business since no data resides outside the server room.
Of course since all the client data is stored in a central location, it would take nothing to add some tape backups/hot-swap HD/etc. and take them offsite once a week.
Remember that your online backup provider's backup versions of your files are fair game for subpoenas from the RIAA or whoever else can shell out a few bucks to a lawyer.
Uh, so are your own backup tapes. As Microsoft certainly discovered.
I could imagine that a small online backup company might roll over more quickly than you would. But the opposite case is more plausible to me.
If I were running an online backup company, I'd want people to feel that there data was very safe with me, and part of that would be a deep reluctance to give out data to third parties. Fighting hard against a dubious subpoena would be great advertising.
And if I were suing somebody and wanted their data, I don't see why I'd go after the backup company anyhow. The data, even when the backup company has it, still belongs to the company who had it backed up. It seems to me that I'd have to convince a judge that I had a legitimate beef with the owner of the data; to be fair the judge would have to hear from that owner. Then I'd think the judge would just order the owner to surrender the data, and let them work out where it was kept. I'd only get an order for the backup company if the person I'm suing wasn't coughing up.
So really, the only case where I'd be reluctant to use an on-line backup company was if I were thinking I needed to defy a court order and destroy my backup tapes. But that's pretty dumb, too. Here's my tip to all you criminals out there: if you're doing something bad, don't keep backups of the evidence against you.