Online, Inexpensive and Secure Data Storage?

ThePolkapunk asks: "After years of suffering through floppy demagnetizations, hard drive crashes, CDR bit rot and the click of death, I've become fed up with having to take care of my own backups. Does anyone know of a reasonably inexpensive, secure data storage facility accessible online that can store all of my important files with enough redundancy for me to feel safe?"

Comments

Gmail

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.gmail.com/

Simple...

[Anonymous Coward]

Compress everything, encrypt it, and share it on emule as "OSX_X86.iso.

For extra redundancy, post an obscure blog about it, and then submit that blog to /.

USB/Firewire drives

[andrews]

I've recently switched from DLT to external USB drives. They're cheaper, more reliable and easier to restore from than tape.

Re:USB/Firewire drives

[gregmac]

I've recently switched from DLT to external USB drives. They're cheaper, more reliable and easier to restore from than tape.

I've been doing backups this way for a few months now. It's also easier to backup. Plug in the usb drive, run rsync, unplug and take offsite. I have a script I run in cron (or manually) that tries to mount it first, and only if it suceeds, runs rsync.

I've been meaning to install another drive at my house to backup a couple servers (just haven't gotten around to it yet), but that'll be similar.. rsync over ssl, run in cron every night.

The one thing this doesn't address that tapes usually do is keeping multiple backups. I was doing this for a while - where I had a directory for I think monday, wednesday and friday - but then our storage space increased and I couldn't fit this on my backup drive anymore. It would just be a matter of buying a bigger drive, or getting another couple enclosures and drives, but I haven't done it yet.

I was playing with using rdiff-backup to make differential backups of just our file shares, but due to lack of a usable web interface I haven't bothered (I don't want to spend time selectively restoring backups for people.. if they can't do it themselves I want no part ;) ). I did start working on one, but there are too many things higher on my priority list.

Re:USB/Firewire drives

[Anonymous Coward]

I plug in and mount my USB disk once a day and run this. I could probably use a for to make it shorter, but... meh.
more information

#!/bin/sh
#SRCDIR requires a trailing /
SRCDIR=/home/acoward/
DSTDIR=/media/usb/acowar d/rsync/

cd $DSTDIR
if [ -d daily.7 ]; then
rm -rf daily.7
fi
if [ -d daily.6 ]; then
mv daily.6 daily.7
fi
if [ -d daily.5 ]; then
mv daily.5 daily.6
fi
if [ -d daily.4 ]; then
mv daily.4 daily.5
fi
if [ -d daily.3 ]; then
mv daily.3 daily.4
fi
if [ -d daily.2 ]; then
mv daily.2 daily.3
fi
if [ -d daily.1 ]; then
mv daily.1 daily.2
fi
if [ -d daily.0 ]; then
mv daily.0 daily.1
fi

mkdir daily.0
rsync -a --progress --stats --delete --link-dest=../daily.1 \
$SRCDIR daily.0/
touch daily.0

Re:USB/Firewire drives

[OctaneZ]

The whole reason people prefer tape for backup over hard drives, is that you seperate the stoarge medium from the recording device. You therefore have an easier time recovering if something fouls one or the other.

Re:USB/Firewire drives

[RGRistroph]

If you are going to keep a week of rsync'd backups, reduce your script to one line by employing the date command and it's formatting option:

rsync -a --progress --stats --delete --link-dest=../Mon $SRCDIR `date +%a`/

Run "date +%a" to see what it does.

Re:USB/Firewire drives

[altstadt]

You need rsnapshot and a *nix box.

I have up to 12 months worth of backups, including hourly snapshots of the previous 24 hours, always available to all the users online. Tapes do not have to be hunted down and mounted. The users can easily go browse their own snapshots and get the files they need when they have an oops. The snapshots are maintained on a different machine than the source data, so an individual machine can melt into a lump of slag with the loss of no more than one hour of data.

Since it uses rsync and hard links, only the changed files get added to the backup, so you can size your backup hard drive at roughly 50% larger than the source drive and never have to worry about running out of backup space.

If you have a reasonably fast network connection, you could even have the backups located off site with no extra effort beyond the initial setup.

Backups??

[rogabean]

Sage Advice:

"Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)" - Linus Torvalds

As usual..

[rylin]

As usual, someone thinks they can have all three.
Here's a hint: Pick two.

Re:As usual..

[dasunt]

Er, why not use GnuPG (free) + 2 Cheap Webstorage/hosts.

Its cheap, its secure, and since the data is on two physically different machines at two different locations it should be reliable.

How 'bout Gmail?

[xmas2003]

GmailFS - The Google File System as discussed on Slashdot ...

Re:My server

[rogabean]

I tend to actually take this a step forward in my thinking...

If it's important enough for me to feel I need to back it up, it's important enough I would not trust anyone else besides me backing it up.

Couple of external drives works great for me. Important stuff is backed up twice (once to each drive).

YMMV

Easy

[g1zmo]

my_backup_14-6-2005@yahoo.com
my_backup_15-6-2005@yahoo.com
my_backup_16-6-2005@yahoo.com
my_backup_17-6-2005@yahoo.com
my_backup_18-6-2005@yahoo.com
my_backup_19-6-2005@yahoo.com
ad infinitum...

Backups

[mknewman]

You can try these guys: http://www.box.net/ Marc

EVault.com

[gothzilla]

Check out http://www.evault.com/
Very reasonably priced and they maintain offsite backups of their backups.
One thing to keep in mind is transfer speed. I would have used them but I have 40gigs of data to back up and it would take too long to send daily.

Consider Magneto-Optical

[VernonNemitz]

This technology is based on a scientific method used to detect the orientation of the Earth's magnetic field from millions of years ago. That qualifies as great data retention in my book! The drives (3.5in) run $200-$300 depending on source and capacity (current max is 2.3Gb per approx-$20 removable disk). 5.25in drives are also avaialable in capacities up to 9Gb or so, but also are much more expensive.

Re:Inexpensive Online Storage

[hoggoth]

> I have 80gigs to backup. I currently use a friends machine, but it would be nice to pay about $20/month and not have to maintain it mayself.

Get another 80 Gig hard drive. They go for about $0.40/Gig with rebates (see www.bensbargains.net). Put it inside your machine or in an external USB enclosure.

Get Norton Ghost, or if you don't want to pay for Norton Ghost, make a Knoppix CD for free and use 'ntfsclone'.

Make exact images of your hard drive once a week. It may not be "online" but it couldn't get much easier.

Cost:
Drive: approx. $32
External USB enclosure: approx. $30
Knoppix: free
Total: $62.
Time to make a ghost/ntfsclone backup: 30 seconds to click GO, then go do something else for an hour.

So for about $5/month you have a simple easy to do backup system.

Re:RAID

[HawkingMattress]

Not sure if that's what you mean or not, But RAID is *not* a replacement for backup. If you don't pay attention and delete a file, a backup should be able to give you that file back. A RAID setup will ensure that the file gets deleted on all the mirrors...
On the other hand if you use an external RAID server to store backups on yep it's not bad. But i'd say that it would be even better to just have a regular ide disk to make backups on, and a remote location you can upload your backups to... RAID is good, but what happens if you PSU goes crazy and kills all the disk in the array (happened to me :( ) ? Or if the physical location the server is in catches on fire ?
So if you can have a place to upload to and it's doable for the amount of data you need to transfer, it'll probably be much cheaper, and much more secure than a RAID array.

See all the current losses in backups

[MerlynEmrys67]

Here are companies paying big BIG bucks for these three (well, probably not online - they'll ship tapes) and you still have tapes lost/stolen off of the UPS truck.

My advice - make sure you SECURE your data before it leaves the house... ie. run AES over the whole thing. Depending on your parania level - either keep the key locally, or with a DIFFERENT backup provider so that there would have to be a collusion between the two vendors to get your data.

Another solution would be to encrypt the AES key for each backup with your public key - then all you have to do is keep the private key private. Is it small enough to keep on a pair (or more) USB dongles - or again, back it up with a second vendor.

End result - most backup vendors provide physical security, so it is up to you to provide true security for when their physical systems are broken into.

underwater basket weaving

[Hell O'World]

Oh sure, it's easy to laugh. But one day, people will not laugh. Weavers unite!

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably the part where you can access it online...

Re:RAID

[Captain Splendid]

Easy, it keeps the bugs away! *rimshot*

Can't have your cake and eat it too.

[Stephen H-B]

Secure. Online. Inexpensive.

Pick two.

Marginally On-Topic Observations Regarding Backups

[PurpleFloyd]

A good thing to remember about backups (and one that no one in this thread has yet brought up) is that most of your data isn't that important. Sure, you've got a 200 gigabyte hard drive that's full to bursting, but how much of that is MP3s and how much is your really important, totally irreplacable data? You know, your finances, your emails, even your vacation pictures?

A quick check of my own hard drive gives me about a gig for my /home directory on the Linux side and about 3.5 gigs for the My Documents and Application Data directories on the Windows side; meanwhile, my Media directory has about 110 gigs in it - all ripped from other media, and thus replacable. Even the 4.5 gig figure could probably be pared down considerably, if I wanted to put the effort into it - especially in Windows, applications tend to leave temporary files everywhere. Although I wouldn't be surprised to hear that many people here have far more data than I, I would also be very surprised to hear many non-business users say that the majority of the information on their hard drives is totally irreplacable - that is, there are more than a few non-professionals who have more space devoted to their own work than they do programs, ripped media, and the like.

Why is this important? It makes it a lot easier to back up your data if you can isolate the important bits. Instead of a fairly expensive solution involving removable hard drives, it's probably possible to fit everything on a much cheaper archival-grade DVD or two - or store everything on a remote backup server for a lot less money. In fact, with only a few gigs of mostly static data to consider, an FTP or SSH-based reciprocal backup arrangement with a friend could work well.

The point here is that, while backing up every single bit on your hard disk is an excellent idea, and will certainly get you back up and running quickly, it can be much more feasable to simply back up the small subset of truly irreplacable data. While it's not as good as a full system backup, it's certainly better than the full system backup you never implemented or used because it was such a hassle. While this kind of system might be unacceptably lax in the buisiness world, it is certainly better than what many home users, including many Slashdotters, are using right now.