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Online Backup Solutions?
OmnipotentEntity asks: "I'm an IT Manager (and also a lifeguard, don't ask) for a small private club. Recently parts of our server's RAID went bad just as Hurricane Dennis hit, making life a living hell for me and everyone involved. So, I figured perhaps backing up information online would make stuff like this less incredibly painful. A quick browse of Google will show that there are a lot of businesses offering automatic, offsite, online backup solutions. It seems it's becoming a big thing. The largest problem is that they all look alike -- same implementation, similar websites, it looks like someone came through this part of the Internet with a cookie cutter, and by the information available on the website and pricing (which may or may not be available without filling out 100 forms) I can't tell a good company from bad company. I've never had any experience with any of these companies, and I wanted to know if any of you guys had, and if so what were your experiences with them? What are the things to look for? What are the things to avoid? Am I barking up the wrong tree?"
Be really careful with this. What happens if the provider gets hacked?
I've always had good experiences with usdatatrust.com. WHat I like about them is that they backup your data as it changes. I find that to be extremely useful.
i may well have been drinking, but despite the fact that we can't do ndmp restores to our emc nas units, veritas netbackup is the proverbial shizzle, my nizzle.
I'm curious to know if there is any kind of off-site co-op. You know - you store my data, and I'll store someone's. Encrypted, blah blah blah.
Call me a commie - but why not?
this is a great solution...
Amazing magic tricks
Gmail gives you 2.42 gigs of storage, and growing! Never delete anything!
In a similar vein, how does Apple's .Mac hold up?
I have never used it, and its data storage limitations (250MB??) are ridiculously small for the price ($99/yr?), given free email storage upwards of 1GB. However, I was wondering what others' experiences were?
Cheers
I'm curious - what is it like being a lifeguard *and* an IT manager? Does the pay compare?
|/usr/games/fortune
The best I've found so far is DataDepositBox.com. Continous back up for 1c/meg/day. Secure website, download files from it, yadda yadda. Just like every other service I guess.
In my experience, they had good customer service, a good data center, strong software, and easy set up. Easy set up was important for lazy folks likeme. I tried to do my own offsite storate with a DVDR and safety deposit box. Didn't work so well.
I run it on two file servers (one for my home and one for my dedicated hosting server) as a service. I back up about 3G of my stuff and pay like $18/month. Hard to beat that. Couldn't find other places that were in that price range.
Create backups, then take them home with you if possible. Doing online backups leaves you at the mercy of the provider.
I think online backups won't be the future for anyone. If you have a 400GB raid, and you want to back that up, we're talking a lot of time and a lot of bandwidth to transfer that to the online storage. Tape afaik is still the best way to archive data.
We've used xdrive in the past, they're decent I guess
http://www.xdrive.com/
I have no idea how good LiveVault's service actually is, but their advertisement starring John Cleese is damn funny, and anything but "cookie cutter".
There are 2 kinds of people in this world. Those that can keep their train of thought,
Although pricey, IronMountain offers excellent service in this backup genre.
http://www.ironmountain.com/Index.asp
I highly recommend them if you can afford it.
Aside from that, if you are a smaller shop hit up freshmeat/sourceforge for projects like Bacula and BackupPC...they work well for smaller installs.
...but I gotta.
IT Managers get zero chicks. Lifeguards get tons of chicks. What happens when then two are combined in the same person?
(unless of course, you are a chick yourself, in which case I apologize for my blatantly sexist remarks)
It's the land of the brave, and the home of the free
Where the less you know, the better off you'll be.
Before the flames start, I want to throw in my two cents.
I have recently rebuild a few of our servers and noticed the high price of tape drives. It seems like you have to spend a grand to get anything decent. So, I've started to look around at what's available online. I've found livevault.com and evault.com. Both are offering between 5 and 10 gigabytes for between $100 and $200 a month. So, if I want 100 Gig, the only viable option is to spend ~$2,000 (hardware and software), pare down what I am backing up and send it off-site for ~$2,000 a year. Or, homegrow some other solution. What homegrown solutions have people come up with that can backup a heterogeneous environment?
Each Monday, I back a back up to the drive that is at the house (where I work from), and take it to the bank. Then I switch them, putting the newest drive in the bank, and taking home the "old' back up. This gets repeated every week (although admittedly not always on Mondays).
So far, this has worked for me pretty well.
Costs? $250 (Canadian) dollars for the drive and $80 per year for the safe deposit box, which also stores all source miniDV tapes from my event video business.
boxbackup has clients for various platforms. free too
vodka, straight up, thank you!
Their briefcase service could be an option.
cabg x3 is a life changing event...
One immediate limitation is the amount of data you have to backup and how you connect to the internet. If you have a slow connection and a ton of data to backup chances are the line will be in use by the backup software very often.
My company, a 4000-employee Silicon Valley software company, uses Connected DataProtector to back up our computers. They have both hosted and unhosted versions, our company is hosting it ourselves. It stores a diff of everyone's computer every day (or some other increment) so that people can back up their computers from any point in the past. I'm just getting started using it, but it looks pretty cool and it was incredibly easy to configure (as a user).
my blog
Not specific companies, but comparisons. Here's a good comparison page...though the page is slow loading already :)
e _file_storage/reviews.html
http://www.consumersearch.com/www/computers/onlin
We've been using DPS for about 2 years now. It requires virtually no maintenance on our end, and has always been available when we've nedded it to restore files. In addition, they have fantastic support. www.dataprotection.com
I would avoid online providers. Too many things can go wrong, least of which is theft of data.
Which option works for you will depend on what level of accessibility you will need.
If you just need to get access to the files in the event of server/site destruction and you can easily re-create the system and just need to re-import the data, then a cheap option would be to get some virtual hosting space or a racked system with tons of storage and a low cost data connection, depending on your quantity of data an budget.
You will regularly encrypt your data and sync it with the remote server. The data will basically be warehoused at the remote server in an encrypted state.
Old archives are deleted as space runs out or after a pre-determined amount of time.
When your primary site dies, you rebuild your servers, copy the files from your remote server, decrypt, and import.
Most virtual hosting places offer several GB of storage and a good deal of bandwidth per month for a mere $35/month. They are not explicitly marked as backup servers, but converting them into a backup server is fairly simple.
If your level of access if critical, then your best option is to have a live duplicate server that you sync your data with. If the main site dies, people will automatically be switched to the backup site until your primary site is rebuilt.
What you choose depends on what you need and how quickly you need to have things back up by.
Winged Power Photography
So, umm, how long - exactly - does it take to upload 560 GB over a broadband connection?
Actually, you'd better make that 560 + 560 GB because I may want to back up my OTHER PC as well.
I realize I am being sarchastic but I am always confused by "online" backup simply because it doesn't make much sense from a practicality standpoint. A semi-modern PC has a minimum 40GB sized hard drive. And it only goes up from there. I've been online for quite sometime and while things have gotten MUCH better, with respect to bandwidth, it still takes a LONG, LONG, LONG time to transfer huge amounts of data. Note, I am not talking about your 4.5gig ISO image. I'm talking 20 of them. In a row.
From my point of view: it's dead. Please enlighten me, if you experience is different.
I think it was $10/Gig/yr. I was thinking about it it for an offsite backup of my home directory in Linux, but no ftp/ssh access (Only Windows client or web client can be used for sending files), so I figured it wouldn't be the best of choices for automated backups. I also have no clue about the speed (I asked a service rep how fast it could be w/ a maxed out college connection, and he just said it could vary with their server traffic.... The difference between "average 300 k/s" and "average 30 k/s" is pretty important to me.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
Some people are using Gmail as an online backup system
It might be old fashioned but tape really is pretty cheap per GB.
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
I really like these guys. They may be too pricy for a large installation, but if you only have a few clients, it's a good deal, real-time "trickle" (and no headaches).
We have offices in two cities, and on top of our tape backups, we backup to each other. City one backs up via VPN and data encryption to City two, and visa versa. we are actually two seperate companies with the same parent company, so we encrypt the data (even over encrypted VPN) just to be safe from the prying eyes of people on each end.
True story: We both run Citrix servers, and one time we had a data loss at my location. Within an hour, we restored our database and application to an extra server at the remote location and used Citrix to connect our users here to the main database. I could then work on restoring from tape, without the pressure of true downtime, just inconvenience time, which I and management can tolerate.
Find them here. They'll back up your entire site and then only backup diffs after that if you wish - saves bandwidth and time. And their server reliability is second to none (yeah I know companies are singular :)).
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
While it would be a lot more convenient to have someone else taking care of your backups, I daren't think of how much it will cost you! I don't know how small you are, and how much data you are looking to backup, but unless it's on the order of multiple terabytes, you should consider setting up your own remote mirroring. "Empty" (ie OS free) RAID boxes really are surprisingly cheap, especially for a Tb or two. If the mirror is purely for backup purposes, you could just keep it in the room next door. If you were thinking more along the lines of disaster recovery, you'd need to locate it in a separate building at the very least. Worthwhile doing, especially if you're in a hurricane affected area...
Seriously, using a combination of Rsync/SSH you can perform periodic backups of all your data, and only transfer the changed *PIECES* of files over your Internet connection. It's fast, efficient and works like a champ after you get the first full backup performed.
Slashmail.org "The Open Source Email Company"
Windows may be a different story. I have been toying around with the idea of releasing some software that let's you do something similar in Windows. I've written some peer to peer backup software that will let you share backups among the computers in your office. It also has an experimental feature that let's you also backup offsite to a web server running PHP (so you can use a commodity provider which is generally far cheaper than managed hosting). I haven't released that feature yet, but will probably do so if enough people express interest.
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
Get a shell account hosted on a server a long way away (or even rent a cheap server), create the backups on your server and sftp them to your new remote server.
If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done?
If you have a lot of data to backup you could always look at FileTek http://www.filetek.com/ who have several levels of archive service.
Ian D. K. Kelly
idkk Consultancy Ltd.
"Quality through Thought"
There are companies that provide offsite storage. We used Iron Mountain. They'd stop by daily and pickup a locked box containing our backup tapes, and drop off a box containing the set coming out of rotation to be recycled. The tapes are taken to their secure facility for storage.
I've used VIPBackup.com myself, but really as a 'secondary' backup, and not as much for 'corporate' stuff either.
We looked a few of these guys 6 months ago and they all seemed rather expensive. Here is what we do.
(1) raids are cheap, buy 2. Backup one to the other. rsync or nightly depending on your throughput. You should never have to recover from offsite due to hardware problems. Offsite is for when your building burns down (or blows down).
(2) external HDDs are cheap, buy 3. you can get 250Gb for $160 at costco. we have 3 that we monthly dump everything to and sent to one of our investors houses on across the country. She sends the old one back, so always has 2 just in case one of them fails. That is for disaster recovery only.
It's simple and you would only need to send large bandwidth over for your initial backup/snapshot -
http://dar.linux.free.fr/
Step 1 - perform a full backup using 2GB DAR Slices (in case you have a 2GB filesize limit)... If you are low on space you can FTP/SCP/RSYNC the slices offsite DURING the backup, which is great!
Step 2 - generate a DAR Catalog file against the full backup/snapshot and store it on your machine.
Step 3 - The next day (or whenever you decide your filesystem has changed enough to warrant another backup), create a DAR Differential backup against the full backup catalog, and only the differences in your filesystem will be saved.
Step 4 - Store the diff offsite
Step 5 - in case of failure, restore the full backup/snapshot followed by a restore of the diff (with overwrite=on). You may also want to store your MBR in case of full failure - just use dd to do that (google for instructions)
Industry standard disaster recovery involves off-site storage of data on tape/dvd, or other media in a *SECURE* location. Most on-line data storage is by its very nature insecure. Data transfer in general over the web is risky. If you are talking about customer information, this is still very taboo.
Purchase a safety deposit box at your local bank and setup a rotation(daily, weekly, etc..) of cycling you media to and from.
OR, get in touch with another local business person in your area and setup mutual hot-sites within each others facilities.
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
One of the questions online backup providers don't like to answer concerns recovery times. 100gb over a 5mbit line still takes longer than next day UPS, which many offer.
A couple providers that I looked at ship both DVD-R's and harddrives in times of emergency. One day for total disaster recovery isn't that bad, IMO. Otherwise, you can do partial restores over the Internet.
The two providers I contacted, both encrypted data with AES. One used an enhanced (CBC?) cipher. Both lose your data permanently if you lose your key. They don't save a copy anywhere (liability & marketing reasons, I'm sure).
If performance isn't a factor, I'd say online backups are worth looking at. Expect prices to be around $50 / GB per month. For myself, I would do this in ADDITION to a pre-existing backup plan.
I was looking for a free application like that a few weeks ago and found this guy's nice write-up of desired features.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
In the 90s I worked for about 5 years as a QA Engineer for an online file storage company called Xactlabs/Atrieva/Driveway. One of our competitors then was Iron Mountain. They're still in business, so I would recommend them.
Online storage is a convenient option for personal or small business use. These services can backup files on a schedule and save multiple versions of each file.
We looked at offsite backup solution few years ago and we sattled on "Not worth the trouble and cost ". Pushing and storing data off site is cheap, but wait till you want to restore that 100GB data. Most vendors charge as little as 10 cents per MB to $5 per MB! What we end up doing is bribed manager with "Free DSL for your home. In return, we want you to host a file server with tape device attached to it." He agreed to rotate tape weekly and it's fine and dandy ever since.
Just use rsync to a server in your home every night via dsl or cable. I have done that for the last 4 years and have about 60 gb of offsite storage.
If the work server would die or be stolen I simply drive home, pick up the entire server or just the drive, bring it back to work and set it up. Total down time is a couple of hours.
Total cost was $0 for an old Pentium 100 server, $100 for a 120gb drive and $40/month for the cable internet.
...I use Shutterfly. They don't have 'buy once a year or we'll delete your stuff' policies, registration is free, and on the off chance I want to order something, their picture quality is great!
They also offer an archive CD service if you need periodic hard copies.
Cheers
AC
Seriously, though, I haven't had much experience with the online data backup solutions, but depending on the sensitivity of the data involved, I would be more likely to do local backups to an external USB drive that you can just unplug and take with you, rather than one of these 100% off-site, online backup services. That being said, if you're not too worried about the privacy of the data, then the offsite guys are probably a really good deal. They have a much higher incentive to keep your data secure (along with their other customers' data) than even you do, because it's their business. Your business is being a club. Security and data protection aren't necessarily supposed to be your bailiwick.
antipaucity
We'll handle the rest.
Take a tape offsite every day. Do 4 weekday and 4 fridays. But only if your serious about your data.
If you have hundres of gigs of data to backup (if you're using RAID I'm assuming this is the case), and you know how to admin a server on your own, then the cheapest and most flexible solution in the long run is to buy a rack mountable server and send it to a colo company. To give you some idea of the up-front costs, you can get a 2u server from Penguin Computing with 1GB RAM and 750GB of disk space (RAID-5, hot-swap SATA, w/ a hot spare) for under $4000.
Then you can colo this on a 95th-percentile plan with 100Mbit available bandwidth for ~$100/month. Corporate Colo (corporatecolo.com) is one of the places I use, and they're good. SiteSouth is another with a good reputation (see the colo section on webhostingtalk.com for more). Just be sure that with whoever you go with, you get things like MRTG stats, remote hands, etc. If you happen live in an area where there's a good colo provider, then go ahead and use them, but don't constrain yourself to a local company, because you really won't have a whole lot of need to visit the colo center very often.
Also, save your money and don't bother to get an on-site service plan with the server vendor. It's almost impossible to get vendors to actually send someone out to do anything useful, especially so when it's at a colo center. I spent $600 on an on-site service plan once, and it was the biggest waste. Save the money for a plane ticket, gas, or paying for remote hands at the colo center instead.
We use Intronis Technologies at work. It does the job.
:-)
It's actually cheaper than 1cent/MB
$9.95 / 1024MB
or another plan
$199.95 / 51200MB
So yeah, I highly recommend it!
** Curb Your Enthusiam **
I sync of 40 sites to one site with rsync. It's a no brainer. The jobs never fail. There are plenty of scripts out there that will do incrementals and differentials, check the rsync homepage. It's got bandwidth limiting built in and works perfectly, I can rsync all day and not disturb users.
Easy/cheap solution if you don't have too much to backup, do an rsync over ssh to a remote box, like one at your house. The only gotcha is you need to exchange SSH keys between the boxes, but I think this is an acceptable risk, as someone would need physical access to the file to do anything, and then they'd be in. I've been backing up my things like this, albeit not online, it stays within my home network, just mirrors to another box - so it's not true DR - but if I wanted to I could simply do it to another box in another state. A sample script:
/usr/local/bin/rsync -ave ssh --delete $SERVER:/home/ /mnt/backup/$SERVER/home/
/mnt/backup/$SERVER/localhost/
#!/bin/sh
#
SERVER="jorge"
#
if ping -c 5 $SERVER
then
/usr/local/bin/rsync -ave ssh --delete $SERVER:/var/www/localhost/
else
echo "$SERVER unreachable"
fi
exit 0
bad_outlook
--
Is this vague enough for you?
I use FilePC because it is reasonably priced, encrypted and does incremental backup once the initial backup is completed.
They have some nice tools you might want to look into. The company I work for uses WanSyncHA for Exchange, and so far the clients have not noticed that the main Exchange server has had a drive blink out a few times. At which point I take the server down to swap the drive out, everyone just went about their business on the secondary Exchange server. Then when I was ready, brought the main one back up, and failed it back over to the main server. All done. www.xosoft.com They have stuff for replicating between two sites so if one gets knocked off, the other keeps serving up what you need.
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we have lots of buildings on the same (gbe) lan, so two identical computers with a couple tb of drives in different buildings works great.
one holds the backups, the other syncs nightly. tons faster than tapes, much less hassle, and verrry available and secure.
1. Purchase computer with RAID
2. Purchase internet connection to another location (your home, perhaps)
3. Backup encrypted data to RAID server over internet.
It's safer than taking the backups home with you once a week (no transit loss if you employ good encryption, no damaged drives/tapes, etc). It can be more reliable, depending on the connection you pay for. If you want to cut costs, get a cheap fast DSL - if you want a fast recovery drive home, copy the data to a drive, and drive back.
It can be more costly than other online services, but it looks like my wife's in labor so I'm going to end this comment early.
-Adam
There is no need to invest in some 3rd party solution. With the beauty of Linux, you can easiliy set up one or more offsite backup servers.
While something like a hurricane might wipe out an entire area, for the most part setting up a few servers outside of your office for online data backup makes more sense and is easy to do.
A couple of the IT guys at my place of employment have a server setup at home for data backup. The company pays for their high speed internet connections and the box and they simply setup Linux to perform the automated back overnight.
If you really know nothing about Linux or have no resources to setup these servers you can then invest in a 3rd party solution. I think it is easy enough and well worth it to look into creating your own solution. The reason why there are so many copycat companies offering this service is because it is dirt simple to implement.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I work for an ISP. We backup all accounting data and hundreds of websites daily over a DSL line to the owners home using a program called Super Flexible File Synchronizer. We do archival as well as daily backups. It runs in the wee hours of the night and takes surprising little bandwidth or time.
If you buy in the next 10 minutes, I'll throw in this fine set of Ginsu Knives... And for the next 10 customers, a pocket fisherman...
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Backing up online has it's positives and negitives. What you must make sure of is that the company you use is known and trustworthy. I suggest a company like Savvis who does more then just backup.
http://www.boomarangdbs.com/
Can't directly speak to their level of service, but they're a client and seem like nice folks who are on top of their game.
For the small company I work with, I backup to tape as well as to my home RAID5 via rsync+ssh. Cygwin on the windows boxes and scheduled task makes it easy. *NIX is easy - just install rsync and make a script called by cron. Currently I'm storing about 20gig of data on a FreeBSD 5.4 box (testing CFS soon). Because of the slow speed of internet (12 gig takes awhile), the initial backup was done on the local network. Been running for about 2 years now with no hickups.
this is hasselholfs other gig besides lifeguard, and german pop star... it all makes sense now.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
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Par down your data and use Gmail as your server. If it's too much more then a gig it's going to take forever for you to upload,DL the backup. At a gig you can probalby store the core db as long as you haven't poluted it with images and files.
Our company hosts our own Remote Backup service using Novastor's NovaNet-WEB product. You buy the server, and purchase client licenses. It is not restricted by the amount of data storage.
I use rdiff-backup to do online backups for several web hosting servers at several locations.
Just place a server with a cheap large raid off-site. And sync once a day. My provider gives 350 GB traffic per month free, and that is far enough, to back up five webservers with 40gb drive each.
Its not a replacement for a local backup on tapes, but it is cheap and so easy to use, that I may even recommend it beside a local tape backup! If a customer wants a file he accidently deleted two weeks ago or so, I can restore it in a minute.
With tapes you have to search quite a bit....
Rather than trusting some other provider to do this, why not roll your own? Use rdiff-backup and set up two backup servers. One of the backup servers resides locally, the other resides in a remote datacenter. They both run nightly differential backups of your data.
It's not that expensive to get a server rented at a data center. Just need to have enough bandwidth and storage space. This gives you redundancy and a reasonable amount of control over what's happening. If you need greater redundancy get more servers in more locations. There's some limitations to how far you can go but I should think you could have 2-3 backup servers without too many problems.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I had the same issue at work. Our email server's RAID controller went bad wiping out all of the array's data, and the backup couldn't be retrieved from tape. We tried getting our email data (6-7 GB) back from Evault, which would have taken ~23 hours over our T1 connection. We scrapped that idea and had them overnight a physical disk with the data on it (At a $200 additional expense).
After that whole fiasco was over, management sprung for two 1TB NAS devices with dual Gigabit network adapters. Now I can backup 100 Gigs of data in a matter of hours and restore any file from the last 12 months within seconds. I still take tapes offsite weekly, but for in-office backups, that's the way to go.
Now, you don't necessarily need to drop 5 Grand on a NAS, but you can build your own 1TB+ RAID 5 server with hot spares for a pretty decent price nowadays.
http://www.connected.com/ Works perfectly - and it's faster than hell. The restore feature is unreal.
Am I barking up the wrong tree?
Although it may seem more convenient to out source your backups, its not always best. What if the company goes belly up, gets hacked, or drastically changes pricing? If you think you have the technical skills, you really oughta do it in house. A decent system to check out is bacula. From the website:
Bacula is a set of computer programs that permit you (or the system administrator) to manage backup, recovery, and verification of computer data across a network of computers of different kinds. In technical terms, it is a network based backup program.
There is a small app called gmail drive that maps a gmail account as a drive.
If you did that for everyone then had another app automatically backup to those drives, or have each person do it manually it would work on a small scale.
I'm not going to go into much detail, but I'm looking to backup about 400G online/offsite, weekly.
Most of what I've seen so far is "toy" solutions that don't scale up to 400G well, or cost $2k-$3k per month for that amount of data...
Neither of those will do.
On the advice of a friend who is a certified Disaster Recovery specialist, I think I'm going to build linux based "backup appliances" with SATA arrays for each of our remote offices, back up all the data locally to the array and then replicate data between the "appliances" using RSYNC.
Building the "appliances" from off the shelf parts ensures that I'll be able to maintain and upgrade them without paying exorbitant prices for proprietary systems that are running Linux underneath a custom interface anyway...
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
And never, under any circunstances, underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes at 70 mph.
I am a mobile laptop user and one day I was thinking about if I were to ever loose my laptop (theft, damage, HD failure). I started to look into a live backup of my laptop. I created a share on my server, setup a VPN connection and run PeerSync over the VPN connection. I have it set to check for connectivity every 30 min then sync over my laptop to the server.
Remember, backing up the data files is great, but how do you restore from a COMPLETE failure from fire, flood, vandals or whatever. We use the DPU (Data Protection Unit) from Unitrends. http://www.unitrends.com./ Their system supports over 20 different operating systems and includes a "bare-metal" restore. If a server is destroyed, stolen or whatever, it creates a bootable CD that allows for a complete restore of the OS, drivers, software and all those settings you never wrote down! Then it restores the data files. It is completely disk-to-disk and extremely fast. Tapes are OK for smaller systems, (until they become unreadable) but for quick backup and restores of larger data sets, nothing beats disk-to-disk. With their hot-swap drives, you can rotate backups offsite. We backup Windows, Linux and MACs. When Hurricane Dennis was headed our way, all I had to do was pull one 400GB drive and take it with me. All of my backups from all the different systems were combined to just one drive. As an added bonus, the founder of the company has been a developer of backup software for over 18 years. Remember "lone-tar" anyone?
What do you mean your RAID 'went bad'?
Surely you had a configuration with hot spares? What RAID level were you using? A properly configured RAID array has always been enough for me.
Well, maybe you can't _find_ that particular .mpg or .mp3 file anymore? Some media are ephemeral, and go away after a while (example: http://uk.download.yahoo.com/ne/fu/oa/eurcncs18503 0.mpg ). The Wayback Machine doesn't always have them, either.
Sure, the online backup services seem pretty convenient, but what happens if you need the data NOW, and say your DSL line got destroyed, or the cable company blew away? No connectivity for you; guess you'll have to wait. Even if your connection is up, how many other users are downloading their backup data at the same time? You'll be waiting for a long time as bandwidth is stretched to the limit. Basically what I'm saying here is: don't depend on somebody else, or if you do, make SURE there's as little that can go wrong with their part as possible. Remember, there's all sorts of drama going on if you're trying to recover from a disaster, and you don't want to add to it if you can help it.
Doing your own backups, and storing them in secure sites (like Iron Mountain, as other posters have suggested - they do this kind of thing for a living, and that's ALL they do) is the only way to go. Your backups are local, and you can generally lay your hands on them in hours. Which means you can begin the restore process in hours, not days or weeks. And as another poster noted, never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes. Tape drives are expensive, but the loss of an entire business because somebody wanted to cheap it out, well, you know the rest.
I run a backup server with a bunch of removable 400 GB drives.
/etc/ /home/ /root/ and occasionally a /var/lib/mysql or /var/www
rsync the requisite sub-dirs from each linux box is easy.
The trick to windows is to create a hidden (at least to the windows lusers) file share on their C-drive. Give read only permission to a backup user login. Then mount the share with smbclient. Use rsync to update your copy of the files on your backup disks. Note, I only backup the Documents and Settings folder.
Note that rsync is wonderful, in that it will skip any files that are already up to date. Backups normally zip along, since most people will create or update fewer than 20 documents per day.
Note.. There is a trick to backing up samba shares, and it has to do with the timestamps.. You need a --modify-window=10 otherwise it tries to backup files that are already current.
I make three staged backups. Daily, Weekly and once a month. Not scientific, but it hasn't let me down yet. Great part is that there is no proprietary format for the archive. Indeed, I setup a samba share on the backup server, and I can connect from any workstation and retrieve (or better yet, examine in place) any file that gets backed up.
Thanks to rsync's efficiency, I backup the web server via the internet, once a day.
My backups usually run less than an hour or two a day (40 workstations, 8 linux, one web)
I tried BRU, Amanda and more. This is a simple solution that works best.
Other than something you do when flames are licking at your front side, what's this "backup" you speak of?
Ever thought of backing up via normal methods (ie tape or other media) and then shipping them off site. You might even be able to use a storage facility locally and have a second server there. This way you could drop off backups as often as you need and if your server gets hit then you have a backup. It would all depend on how important the data is versus the time it would take to recover it.
There should be a +1, "sarcasm" modifier for clever comments such as the parent post.
Call your rep wherever you buy your IT. I work at a DMR (direct to market reseller), and anybody who does my job really should know how to set you up with the right hardware and software to get the job done.
I would probably suggest either a VXA or AIT tape drive or library (depending on your dataset size) with either Dantz Retrospect for win-svr (assuming you use win-svr) or Veritas BackupExec as software. You may also want to set up some sort of NAS or scsi drive enclosure to provide for a disk cache. This means faster backups and restores throughout the day, and you still back this disk up to tape overnight / over the weekend.
This is called disk to disk to tape. Go ahead and read up on it. It's simple, and it works. It's also cheaper than any SAN or other fibre based data solution.
Pretty good pricing and simple to use, supports compression, encryption, scheduling, all the usual stuff.
ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ONE! Just brushing up for my next big invention: Ethernet over Voice (EoV)
Remote data transmission maxim, courtesy of Andrew S. Tannenbaum (The Minix guy):
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
Seriously, transmitting many GB of data every day is going to cost you quite a bit of money for bandwidth cost alone, never mind storage.
An enterprise-quality tape drive, like a LTO drive, can be had for well under $1000 on ebay. If your company has a remote location, simply mail them a copy of the backup tape(s) once a week. Have them mail the old tapes back. Nothing could be simpler. Keep a copy on-site of course for more routine restores that don't involve the destruction of your data center.
The cheapest provider I found with a cursory web search was around $200/month for a puny 100GB of compressed storage. Ouch. You could pay off a drive + tapes + software pretty quick at those prices.
If you don't have a remote branch, there are numerous off-site document storage companies that will be more than happy to store your tapes for you.
Even an old LTO drive can pump data to tape at around 20-25MB/sec without breaking a sweat. While certainly restoring from an off-site tape is going to take 12-24 hours to physically get the tape to you, if you need the off-site tape, it is probably going to take you at least that long to get replacement hardware anyway.
Whatever method you choose, you MUST run restore tests. In my experience, a restore proceedure that is never tested ALWAYS fails, which causes rather extended restore times while you sort things out by hand.
SirWired
A business "server" that is a networked shared device running a nationally known and supported version of Linux. This server is maintained by a company that sends you the server overnight, replaces the server overnight should there be a failure, monitors the server for possible FUTURE failures, updates the server, and offers a bunch of additional features as part of the basic $99/month no contract service as well as a bunch of additional upgrades. Part of the basic service is to rsync your data share to a Tier 1 data center that is running redundant systems. Basically, there would have to be a triple failure for data loss to occur. Obviously, this isn't a big service for the standard ./ user, but the majority of small businesses and organizations don't have the level of experience we do.....
I'm curious what people think about this. I actually already DO this for a few clients.
Oh yea, the paranoid among us can have their files encrypted...
Putting your stuff into a version control system, such as subversion and checking it out to a remote machine is a great way to do distributed backups.
and so doesn't anyone here.
A minimum of 2 and a max of about 4 portable USB Harddrives and daily overturnung backups, cronjobed. Take the current one with you and keep the remaining ones as spare, shrinkrapped and sealed. Anything else is ancient and/or pointless and/or a waste of time, money and resources.
Unless you are backing up the bank of america this is the best solution I know. I recommend it to all my customers and it works with any OS and setup. I you look around you'll probably even find waterproof USB HDD cases. Add timer controlled power to them and they'll even be safe if they get in contact with water.
Backing up over the web is time consuming and unsecure if it's any more than a few tables and spreadsheets.
Even burining DVDs or CDs is silly compared to this, allthough those might even be more water proof.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Yup. My advice to you: DIY. I do this a lot, and it's much easier than you'd think. The low price of ADSL subscriptions with fixed IP addresses solves one part of the problem. The other I tackle with Linux: I've always used a combination of rsync and faubackup to backup data over the Internet, but I hear dirvish is a better choice these days. You can also use these Linux servers to backup any Windows machines you might have, but I never allow Windows to do any talking over the Internet -- I leave that to Linux (it's way more secure).
To get things going, I first took the backup server to the main office, copied all of the data from the main server to a mirror directory on the backup server, and then moved it to it's current location (in another city). The backup server runs a simple script every night using rsync to pull any changes made to main server's data to the mirror directory, after which it uses faubackup to back all that up. It works like a charm.
First I am curious, aparently your RAID has the same sensitivity that many animals exhibit just before an earthquake; aparently your RAID has trancended to a new level of machine conciousness!
But serously, just back up to DVD, and keep a few day old backup DVD at home.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Check out Novastor, I looked for sometime for offsite backup system and this seems to be the best option for cost http://www.novastor.com/
I've seen I few people chime in with Iron Mountain and I agree with them. The software is great, you don't need a fast connection either. The initial backup can be done onsite with their backup servers (probably saving quite a few days of backing up) and then subsquent backups are only the changes in the file, not the file themselves, so if you have a 6GB SQL data file and 1 record is changed it will only take the change. It also works on online/locked files as well. You can restore online or if its a big problem they can bring the same backup server on site and do a restore. Disaster recovery software is pretty good too. I live near one of the storage centes too, there are 3 giant warehouses filled with computer/equipment and storage within 5 miles of my home.
Speaking as someone who works for a company that offers the latter type of solution (NOT a plug
If you're interested in this type of service, do a little research on the providers and find one you feel comfortable with. And get a service agreement in writing!
Why not backup to tape or hard drive and ship it to a document warehouse?
Just be sure to encrypt the data just in case UPS decides to lose your package.
Get a stand-alone RAID/JBOD chassis or a cheap PC and stuff it with drives. Back up using rsync over Ethernet. Take the unit home with you or get two and rotate them to a safe location (e.g. bank safe deposit box).
This is way faster and cheaper than a tape or online system of equivalent capacity.
if you are looking to back stuff up... why not go the cheap route... get a tape storage device... a good software program (like ultrabac) .. and get a disaster proof safe! or find somewhere off site to store it like a bank or somthing.
Residential Verizon FiOS is 15mbps for $50/mo. That's more than 4 terabytes per month. If you have a flat rate pipe at your business, put a disk-based network backup server at an employee's home.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Why are you even thinking of backing up online? Buy a tape drive and store the tapes with an offsite storage company. IBM LT02 tapes hold 200 GB of data each. Or buy a cheap DLT tape drive off Ebay.
NewEgg has 320gig WD hard drive's for $145 after rebate. It does not sound like you are at a large facility, so buy one or two of those, backup to it, and bring it home and stuff it in your shoebox under your bed. Rotate out once a week. Not perfect, but better than what it sounds like you have now.
What about amanda (http://www.amanda.org/)? Just use any old 486+ over an internal network & put it in a Faraday cage or something (so magnetic fields from storms don't get to it)
l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand
Are any of you other guys working on Payment Card Industry Data Security Compliance? (PCI DSS)
Check this out:
The full requirements are here
Check out section 10 and the requirements for logs. Note the suggestion to store logs for 1 year with high security, possibly online.
Does anyone know of any online backup service that would fit the bill for this?
friends don't let friends teleport drunk
I used to work for a backup software company.
Over 12 years of mergers and acquisitions, I have to say that the end product of dozens of backup software company amounts to; pretty much no technical advancement over that time period. It's a sordid story of successive purchases of competitors for the purpose of eliminating competition. The Garter folks called it "consolidation" - as if it was just fairly normal evolution of an industry. The end result was certainly not what I was raised to believe should be the outcome of rigorous competition in a "Free Market". So much for ideology.
There were a few interesting and novel products I knew of - all of which were eliminated by this strategy.
Palindrome Network Archivist (tape-based backup). Veritas Client Exec/Netbackup Pro (backup to network server dasd). Telebackup.
(Client Exec came about during the brief period when the company was owned by Seagate - who also sold disk drives, of course, so why would they not want disk to be the target of backups, instead of tapes? Was a cool idea, because it eliminated a lot of the problems caused by tape's sequential access mode, and also the heinous amount of money the industry charges for tape drives and blank tapes)
When my position became redundant after a merger, I never looked back, so I don't really know the state of the industry today. (Though, I know that Veritas was just swallowed by Symantec, and I'm not sure what their plans are for the backup product lines).
Given all that, I'm very pessimistic about the future of desktop backup. It seems that the immutable authoritarian culture of IT that so hates the Fat Client approach, has made meaningful development of this technology unprofitable. The message?: Keep your personal data on the server, and we'll back it up to tape (and hope to god we can find and read the tape later).
As far as remote backup - from all the horror stories I heard back in the day, I would not trust any remote backup solution, period. Telebackup was a fairly novel approach, they'd sell you a client, and back your data up encrypted over the internet (in an age where most home-clients were dial up), and if you were lucky, they'd mail you a set of restore CD's constructed from the server that contained the backups. They're gone now, but I recall a small up-and-coming competitor in the San Diego area with a similar concept - I think they got bought by CA.
Of course, where I work now, we're using ADSM - which; at my old jobs, is what the marketing geeks used to say they wanted our backup software to be "when it grows up." Having more direct experience with ADSM, I can say that was a pretty naive attitude for guys with half the education, and twice the salary of our typical developers. But hey, that was the dotcom era. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
It's been said before, but it's a great one:
Encrypt everything, then name the files something like "OMG_Hilton_XXX.avi" and upload to Kazaa or LimeWire or something. In 10 years you'll still be able to find copies.
My suggestion would be to make backups but store at least one recent off-site in a safety deposit box in a bank.
My preference is that the bank be at least 20 miles away, preferably more. In Florida, that 20 or more miles would be in a direction away from the ocean or likely flooding areas.
What about a couple of extra hard drives and a FedEx envelope?
paul reinheimer
I think the cheapest solution is simply to get 2 IDE HD's and external enclosures.
Backup, and put in a safe deposit box at your bank.
Backup on the 2nd one, and switch.
Repeat.
Cheap, effective (banks are rather safe).
Only thing that won't prevent is a nuclear attack on your area (since your bank is likely only a few miles from your home). But in that case, do you really care about losing some porn?
How about a case mod for a back server that uses a bolted down safe or vault. Fire proof and storm proof. Not to mention prettty neat. Just make damn sure the drives feature AUTO head parking.
Online backup services can become a very wrong choice if a critical Disaster occurs. Mostly because instead of simply needing to get your offsite backup tapes (If your tapes arent offsite they should be) to your restore location you also need to have a very fast internet connection provisioned and waiting as well. And an online restore is going to take much longer to finish than it would with an onsite copy on tape or some other media. You have to make sure to keep this back end situation in mind.
as some other people have said, it might be as easy as using a couple of removable hard drives.
One thing to keep in mind though, is don't keep THE ONLY backup someplace local...like a safety deposit box. That would be fine if your computer caught on fire. But for something like a flood, you'll want your backup data in some other geographic location....someplace that won't be effected by the same natural disaster that you might be.
Then again, maybe your business is one where if something that big happens, you don't care so much about your data anymore.
Always make local online backups / synced mirrors.
If the data is small or doesn't change that often, make mirrors on external discs (cheap USB or the like).
If your data is really small enough (e.g. 3GiB), you might consider online backups. Don't forget to calculate the download time when you would be in the need to perform a disaster recovery though.
If you got lot's of data (e.g. 30 GiB) go for tape backups.
Serge
We looked seriously at online solutions, such as Iron Mountain, but the cost of both the service on top of the extra bandwidth needed were prohibitive.
We decided to go with an off-site service with a 24/7 courier service. We do a weekly/monthy/yearly rotation, and so far have been very happy with it. The company has a unique solution because of their location at the bottom of Little Cottonwood canyon in Salt Lake in a solid chunk on granite, theoretically earthquake and flood proof. The tour of the facility was most impressive. Their webpage, while less impressive, gives a good idea of their services. http://perpetualstorage.com/index_home.htm
...and it is free!
-w
If you haven't actaully tried to restore your systems from your backup mechanism, you only think you have backups.
If you don't have detailed records about how the system was created, how every app was installed and configured and maintained, it'll be hard to restore in a disaster.
Too many organizations think it's far too expensive to have a replacement server at the ready, even if the cost of 36 hours of downtime would be an order of magnitude more expensive.
Curator of the Jefferson Computer Museum http://www.threedee.com/jcm
www.remotedatabackups.com.
The owner, Dan Dugal, calls you personally to see if you're happy with the service. All data is encrypted and HIPAA-compliant (great for doctor's offices) - provided you don't lose your encryption key. I've restored people's files several times and have never had a problem. It automatically compresses files too. It may be a bit pricey depending on what you're backing up - 100mb is $9.99, 4gb is $29.99, 10gb is $39.99 and 30gb is $99.99; however there is a 30 day trial. I highly recommend them.
"Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it."
i have found, you can find,happiness in slavery!
http://www.greenbackup.com/
this is run by a member of my local linux user group
http://www.flux.org/ it is linux/rsync based (on the server end).
it uses rsync code to send only the changes (block level) your data is encrypted on your machine and only you hold the key.
I work for a company who creates software for on-line data backup. Just to answer a few questions posted across this discussion:
1. Backup on-line is not like a cd-copy. You will never send your whole data across. Any good software would have at least the smarts to send only changed files, and even for changed files it should send only changed portions of the file (either block-level or some even claim byte-level incrementals). This means it may take a few days/weeks for the initial backup, however after this you never overload the internet connection. Protecting 100-200 GB of data over a DSL connection is not that unusual (of course, you wait for full restores in this case, but most software should offer some portable disk equivalent).
2. Most software is indeed similar web/gui on the web. This is because only a few companies make the software, however other companies ("Service Providers" actually host it and offer it). My company for example never offers the service hosted by us. We only develop the software.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
What would that be?
I've used them for quite awhile. good software to go with it. id recommend it.
I work for a company who creates software for on-line data backup. Just to answer a few questions posted across this discussion:
1. Backup on-line is not like a cd-copy. You will never send your whole data across. Any good software would have at least the smarts to send only changed files, and even for changed files it should send only changed portions of the file (either block-level or some even claim byte-level incrementals). This means it may take a few days/weeks for the initial backup, however after this you never overload the internet connection. Protecting 100-200 GB of data over a DSL connection is not that unusual (of course, you wait for full restores in this case, but most software should offer some portable disk equivalent).
2. Most software is indeed similar web/gui on the web. This is because only a few companies make the software, however other companies ("Service Providers" actually host it and offer it). My company for example never offers the service hosted by us. We only develop the software.
You DID say "small" private club. If the data requirements truly are on the small side, a daily DVD or CD mailed off-site would work and be well worth the few hundred bucks you'd pay per year doing it. Consider them expendable and do one a day. It's a failry inexpensive way to go.
I do not trust RAID at all, having had two of those suckers fail on me. "all you do is live swap a failed drive!" Right. Sure you do-- unless two drives and the controller all fail at once. That little issue forced me to move off of Novell in 8 hours, unplanned, a few years ago. I said, "Hey, Nancy, remember that experiment we were gonna do in a coupla months when we learned a little more?" "Yeah?" "Well, we're gonna do it today."
I do not trust tape (of any kind, DLT or no). They only fail when you need them. Nine inch reel to reel always worked, but it's a little late for that. For local backup to protect against idiocy ("I didn't realize that key labeled "D-E-L-E-T-E" actually erased anything. Sorry.") rather than nature, disk to disk on another machine entirely worked great for me, and I also use CompactFlash cards for small data sets. Of course, if you're talking triple digit gigabytes it's a different story.
Thank the Lord I'm retired and don't have to worry about this stuff any more!
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Check out http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~emin/source_code/dib s/
Local public key encryption, contracts, ECC coding, etc.
As far as electronic vaulting, Iron Mountain is the leader in the industry. They are also the leader in offsite data protection. The company is very interesting, having been founded shortly after WWII during the cold war era, they built a huge underground facility which was literally a miniature city underground, the idea being that in the event of a nuclear war, all the top executives and financial leaders from banks and other federal institutions would be relocated to the secure facility, where backup mainframes and copies of all the data would allow the federal reserve to continue to operate during nuclear winter.
The company I work for uses them for offsiting tapes, but the e-vaulting option looks appealing and we may start doing that. Some of the highlights of the e-vaulting solution they offer are AES-256 encryption, a native client for Linux, Windows, Unix, and just about any other platform, and a proven track record when it comes to data protection. Find out more here: Link to click on
Also, if you're interested in reading the fascinating history of Iron Mountain, I found this article especially interesting to read.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Everyone should check out dataassure.com. If you mention Cory, they will hook you up big time. For all my 35 clients, everyone of them uses this service. Its great!
To me, remote backups are all about the amount of data to be stored, and the rate of change of that data. You don't mention those numbers, so I'll have to assume that your bandwidth/throughput to data-to-store ratio is within acceptable values, and the rate of change is low enough such that after the initial pig of an upload, it's manageable.
Personally, I have a no-name 5U co-lo account with an old Sun Ultra 5 stored there. I basically collect all of my backup data to my local staging area using rsync, and I then rsync the data over to my remote server.
Sure the first time it does it, it borks out a couple of times and takes a bit long to do, but eventually everything gets up there and from then on it's a relatively minor process.
The key is that I don't back up everything... just the stuff I need should my servers melt some day. That stuff includes our code repositories, machine configs, docs, websites, sql databases, etc.
That generally works out well for us, and is nice and cheap, and doesn't require any special sofware, etc.
$0.02 (CDN)
md5 or other checksums do not guarantee bit-for-bit integrity. They are just a way to gain confidence about the integrity of files without resorting to a much slower bit-for-bit comparison.
"Yeah well
We offer an offsite backup service : http://tech.coop/Offsite%20Backup . We are a not-for-profit member owned services co-operative, which basically means you own a share and have voting rights along with the other shareholders. The goal of the Tech Co-op is to provide the best services we can to our members. drop us an email if you want to know more. drewc
Drew Crampsie - Software Developer
Open Source Business : The Tec
I work for a manufacturing company with around 100 employees, and have had good success with http://safedata.backupmybusiness.com/. Very silly name. We have their 30 gig package, and have it set to back up incrementally at night. You can retrieve previous versions of files if you need to.
Take an old PC, fill it up with disk drives and put it in your basement. Then use rsync over ssh to back the server up, using a little script in /etc/cron.daily that looks like this:
rsync -e ssh --timeout=240 -Cavuzb thor:/home/ /mirror/thor/home/
Oh well, what the hell...
We use this at my work, and it's saved our data several times.
1) Put all your files into one big tarball 2) Rename it HOT PARIS HILTON SEX XXX HENTAI PUSSY PLAYBOY NATALIE PORTMAN BRITNEY SPEARS ... (extend as long as necessary).mpg
3) Distribute on your favorite P2P network
4) When your server crashes, come back and find it.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
Check out connected corp. or Iron mountain if you are serious about offsite online data backup.
I warn you though, its not cheap.
They use encryption too so no worries. You just upload changes everynight so it doesn't kill the bandwidth.
I don't know why i'm commenting on a comment on an anonymous comment, anonymously.
Anyway, what I was trying to say is that online backups are no substitute for a well-designed backup policy. If your "backup policy" is the policy of uploading everything onto some third-party's online "backup" operation, then unless you have some k ind of verifiable paper trail of how the data is stored, what kind of risk mitigation policies the backup provider has implemented, you end up depending on an additional risk-introducing factor.
Why risk that? Unless you're running a data warehousing operation, just buy a bunch of harddrives, make a mirror, and store them in a bank vault. Do this twice a month, and you've got it set.
Time to get the backup back up is a valid consideration, but it's not the only one. How easy it is to MAKE the backup (and therefore how current it will be) is arguably more important because having more frequent backups IS more important. Driving to a different town every day is probably not an efficient use of your time unless you can't get enough pipe to xfer just the changed files. Hence online backups.
If you're paranoid then run your own backup host over ssh at a trusted someone's personal connection. But there's no solution superior to online backups if the incremental changes in files can be met with 100% of your extra nightly bandwidth. Try backup PC on sourceforge. Try using more than 1 at different locations.
Parent has a good, but different point: If you have a lot of data it's going to take a ton of time to get it back up. If this is likely to be a problem, then by all means find faster ways to ship your data. One way would be to drive and get whichever of your mulitple backup machines is closest. (If you only have 1 backup machine make a copy to take with you and leave the original where it was)
But another way, especially if you don't have access to the online backups, is to drive a harddrive full of stuff somewhere. IF your backup provider can do an restore from a partially recovered backup (ie, rsync) you can keep extra physical backups lying around and still having the online "current" backup to save you. That is, you could bring in your extra HD from a month ago and just rsync the stuff that changed.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
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I currently design systems for a large telecommunications company.
Let me know....
After a horrible experience I looked around and found a great online backup service at http://www.backupsolutions.com/.
If you just want to backup your data it's very easy to use. Just download the program, pick what data you want and set the time you want it done. I have been using it for a few years and have restored several files and it worked great. LouSir
Another brainless slashdotter who can't be bothered actually reading what he replies to. The dude doesn't need help finding a provider. He needs something to distinguish one provider from another.
... and they've been good. Nice folks to deal with. Every monday morning, my tape robot pukes tapes onto the floor, and I happily scoop them up and put them into a box and send them off to Iron Mountain.
Their facility is out in the central valley (I'm in the Silicon Valley) - not *too* far but far enough away from any "points of interest" and in a seismically stable area.
This has already been built. 312, Inc. did it. tell me if anyone is interested in blowing the dust off it again. We killed it November of 2004 because a lot of people didn't want to trust random people to store their encrypted files. I'd love to get this back out the door...does anyone think there would be demand? We've spent 2 years developing. Any ideas on how my company could recoup some of that investment?? A fair pricing method? The software exists...I just want to know how to unleash it, and it's been terribly frustrating as people somehow missed the value of it last year. Looking for any feedback....send an e-mail to sales@312inc[dot]com (I don't want my personal account spammed) if you want to contact me directly with ideas on how to market our product. For now, we are charging ahead with "BitVault" which is like all the models you guys are complaining about. If we can figure out how to sell LeanOnMe at a fair price...we'd do it. Thanks! www.312inc.com (google for cached websites and documents regarding our past software R&D efforts)
My company has recently started using software called EVault from Cerdant. We are using it to backup to 2 offsite locations (for redundancy). They charge on a compress gigabyte scale. We can encrypt from 56 bit DES to triple DES, blowfish, and 128 bit AES. They will need to get a "seed" or a full backup, and from there on, they only grab the parts of files that change, as opposed to a regular incremental that grabs the whole file.
They have agents for Windows, Novell, and Solaris, and plug-ins for Exchange, MS SQL, and an open file manager. It takes a while to get things configured, but once you are up and running, things are great. I can restore 5 megs worth of data in about 20 seconds over our T3, as opposed to waiting for tapes to be selected from a 128 tape library, wound to the correct spot, and then start restore. We had a problem with the MS SQL agent in that our DB server had around 72 databases. The agent requires a 4 - 6 minute configuration per DB, and you have to do that twice in order to backup to 2 remote locations. Yeah, EVault could work on that some. We ended up just doing local DB backups on disk, and then shipping all of those across the wire at one time.
My install tech has been very helpfull when problems arise, and they even monitor my backups for me! When a job fails, they try to restart it. If it fails again, they give me a call to let me know what's going on. Data is compressed and encrypted from the time it leaves your server, stored on the vault, and until it comes back (as a restore). Over the proces of a full Grandfather-Father-Son backup rotation, you will use (on the vault) close to 1 to 1.5 amount of the original data space.
For isntance, if I backup 100 gig of data, the initial seed will be around 50 gig. On average, each day, the daily delta, or changed data, will be around 2%, or 2 gig. At the end of day 2, you will be using about 52 gig on the vault, and so on. Compression on average is around 50%. As you all know, files like mp3s, jpegs, and EXEs won't compress all that well. However, text files, Office Documents, and things like that compress very well. And most often, a document will change, not an executable. Therefore, on the daily backup, only the blocks of the document that changed will be backed up (as opposed to the entire file like a traditional backup).
Sure there have been some kinks to work out, but overall I am VERY pleased with this product. If you have questions about it, drop me an email: brian (underscore) ritt (at) yahoo (dot) com
Several of the big guns in online backup have reseller programs (I know, I am a reseller of said service) which allows anyone to sign up and start selling online backups using their templates. So it is not surprising. When talking to anyone regarding this service, ask who their provider is, are they a reseller, is it their own hardward, then double check it for yourself, get references if possible.
- faster;
- more customizable (you backup exactly when you want to);
- less risky (does the provider peek into your data? what if it's being hacked?)
- cheaper;
- way more secure (I wouldn't allow ANYONE to access important data from the internet, never ever)
Sorry for the off topicSeriously. How much will it cost? How much data you wish to backup over the Internet (you know - quite slow, AFAIR even 10mbps line is quite expensive)? How much time you wish to spend (and time == money) on reconfiguring everything to use other solution?
Is this broken RAID of yours really more expensive than all of above?
Geez. What for you need hardware RAID? An old box with 4 IDE drives (like 100GB each - I belive it will suffice - you don't want to backup 1TB of data over Internet don't you?) running some free operating system and some volume management application will do backups much better than anything which means backuping over Internet.
http://www.backupmyinfo.com/
Excellent service, easy to use. From one box to terabytes. I seriously recommend them and I don't work for them.
This
Use RAID. Don't send all your data to one remote site. Send it to ten and encoded in such a way that if two or three of these sites disapeared you could still get your data back. The concept of a "hot spar" would apply too so when one site went down you would reconstruct the lost data on a new site.
Bandwidth is the hard part. All changed would have to be push up your Internet connection.
Yes the consortium idea is good call it the "backup club"
It is actually a really good thing(TM), there's some scary statistics out there regarding the effectiveness of tapes as backup - 46% of restores are just never going to get your business up and running - on-line DRS is 100% safe.
Only uploads incremental changes, so you can backup a whole load of data on-going after you've done your original storage dump. Normally you have an on-site server to locally host the files for quick recovery - you only need to courier those disks when the whole place burns down/floods/gets stolen/hacked by aliens.
But yeah, it is hideously expensive...
Check out Rsync, it's free. I've recently been playing with it, and it has my flash drive and my hard drive backed up nicely to my server. This is over TCP/IP, so you could set up a server at somebody's house on a DSL line and call it good. Cheap and you can host it yourself and not pay somebody. It's also surprisingly fast, and very simple to set up and install.
It's probably not well-suited to backing up a small number of large databases, but will do very very well with a large number of small to medium size files. My laptop has 460,000 files on it, for 53gb. I double click a one line script and it takes 4-5 minutes to catalog my HD, and another 30 seconds to sync any files that need syncing. That is simply awesome. My 4g flash drive (1gb used) took 10 minutes to drag and drop - now rsync syncs it with a folder on my laptop in 15 seconds flat.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
The reason they all look the same is most of them use the same software. http://remote-backup.com/ RBS sells the software letting anyone go into buisness, the consulting firm I work for is buying this not as a money maker, but just so we don't have to keep suporting all these tape backup systems in the field.
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
In the interests of full-disclosure, I am the Technical Manager for an Online Backup service provider. That being said, I am in a very good position to know the good, bad & ugly of an online backup solution (over 8 years of experience as customer, product support for the vendor, and now administration and product management for a reseller - hey, it's a small world, don't burn your bridges, folks).
For server backups, frankly, get some fat, dedicated pipes to the provider or it will never be worth it. The key mantra to repeat to yourself is "It's the restore time, stupid!" No matter how optimized the backup process is, when you server takes the dirt nap, you want to make sure you can get that data back up in an acceptable timeframe, and transfering more then 10 GB of data over the Internet is a slow and painful process.
Now, business desktop backup is another story. Last I looked, RAID was not an option that came on most laptops, and rarely do the important contents of your average business desktop (i.e., barring that complete Santana collection or Holiday photo-trip to Wallyworld) ammount to more than a couple of GB. Granted, there are exceptions to file sizes (CAD designers, Graphic artists, etc.), but most critical business docs usually aren't that big, with the exception of the Outlook personal folder file. With these guys, its all about backup optimization, because you can't restore what never was backed up in the first place. Your prime candidate is generally those pesky mobile users, you know, CEOs, VPs, & Sales weasels who control your paycheck one way or another. File servers? "Ha, they're too busy." CD burners? "I can't be bothered." Innaccessible HDD errors on boot? "Where the hell's my backup!?! What do you do all day in those IT cubes of yours?"
Personal use? Comes down to personal preference, and level of risk you want to accept. Me, I have RAID on all my home devices, and burn those apps and things (mp3s) that are pretty static. I do have online backup accounts on those systems, but they're free. Would I pay for it? Probably not. But if I had to backup 20 machines (or 200, or 20,000) and make sure they were protected, I'd consider it money well spent, and job well-protected. Nothing like saying to your panicking CIO: "Your presentation to the board was on that laptop that was stolen? No problem, have it for you in 5 minutes".
Are there security risks? Hell yes. Investigate your provider. Don't take their word for it. But also keep in mind that data tapes have been sent to outsourced facilities for decades now, so don't be too quick to discount outsourced solutions just because the data leaves your firewall. And pray that network speeds start catching up to disk space, 'cause otherwise, we're all going to be screwed in the end.
Ok I am biased because I used to work for them, but as a former insider I highly recommend their service if this is a Windows system and you don't have a huge (>15GB) amount of data to back up. The client software is written extremely well and picks up only the necessary data to be backed up, and the best part is everything is triple secured and you will be the only person in the world that could decode your backed up data. Check them out
First, remote storage requires bandwidth to get the dataset up there.
Second, remote storage requires bandwidth to get the dataset back. Most people seem to have overlooked this small aspect... you must expect that "incremental" is irrelevent. If you're dealing with a T1 on the upload, then you'll probably be dealing with a T1 on the download.
We use a combination of tapes and "cold spare" colocation; nightly tapes are the primary method, and they are kept offsite. The colocation is maintained by a kludgeware called "doubletake", which effectively echoes cluster writes between us and the colo.
Total dataset is about 60gigs - 40 gigs for SQL, and another 20 gig for GIS & map stuff. Over a 1.5, you can do the math and figure out how long the initial mirror takes. It's great once done, though, because DblTake will keep them current. If our building goes away, we just tunnel in, mount the fileset into SQL and Mapguide, etc, and we're back up with the (now hot) spare. And therein lies the flaw in "online backups".
If I lose a box, I can restore it from tape in about 2 hours. Or, I can restore it from the colocation in about... uh, a week + some days. It isn't viable in that respect; where I can (and do) prove our tape backups by (literally) wiping production servers and restoring them (takes two hours on a slow night), we cannot even *try* the colocation idea because of the timespan involved - a timespan where we are *completely* dependant on the internet. And you know how dependable *that* is.
You, however, wouldn't even have that as an option. You'd simply be storing remotely; if your local dataset goes away, it stays gone until you copy it back. That goes directly towards downtime; unless you either have a trivial dataset, or you have an OC3 (*very* cost effective to have one of those lying around when it's average utilization is 0.00004%), the solution loses appeal very quickly. You can probably cheat and go with a cablemodem (or even bond several together), but be aware that there are no SLAs in that arena, and most people will shy away from it.
So, there's the problem with "online backups", or in non-hype english, "remote storage". All is not lost, however - you have options.
First, you can get a burstable pipe. We run a T1 that can burst, which cuts the initial transfer down to only a couple days. The cost may be prohibitive for you, however.
Second, you don't need no stupid "provider" to host your dataset. The issue is *not* the initial upload to the remote site; the issue is getting it *back* when you need it. You can literally create some connectivity between your shop and someone's house (or even setup a quid-pro-quo with another business across town), throw a box in their basement, and you're set. Come the day when you need the entire fileset, you can tirenet the entire thing back to your shop in about 20 minutes.
All of this is assuming you actually *need* this failed-buzzword-concept-du-jour. I'm trying to figure out why some tape rotation strategy wouldn't work; at two bucks for a DDS4, combined with the fact that you can practically ghost the drives into them these days, combined with the reality that your "online backup provider" has a security model of swiss cheese and is a *major* source of non-accountable, non-auditable vulnerability... I don't quite understand the problem that an "online backup" is going to solve; I only see them being obscured, while a large quantity of new ones are introduced.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
Here are just a few I found with a quick search of '448 blowfish backup' on google
http://www.firstbackup.com/
http://www.bindbackup.com/
http://www.liutilities.com/
https://datavaultcorp.com/
http://www.databak.com/
http://www.backupcomplete.com/index.cfm
I guess that means being a geek precedes being a lifeguard. He's still not getting any.
I think the answer lies in how much data we are talking about.
5 gig...
50 gig...
500 gig?
It should be trivially easy to make some weekly scripts that compress, encrypt and FTP your data to a server somewhere.
But if it's 500 gig, you have more of a problem than if it is 5.
You might consider seeing if you can find several of those "$5.95 per month" hosting places with FTP access and just use a web server to back up to.
I have heard of plugins that can mount the Google 1 gig of storage email service as a shared file resource. I am sure you could pick up a couple of dozen Google invites or a couple hundred if need be.
Offsite and online backup should be one consideration in an overall plan though. Redundant hard drives (even just copy to workstations from servers) a backup tape drive you can use to make tapes to keep in your safe or house...
A hurricane is a big disaster, but its about as big as you are going to get in the continental US. Anything bigger or worse than that and you should be worrying about fresh water and survival instead.
I think of data problems like viruses. It almost doesnt matter what you are doing as long as you are doing a VARIETY of things to keep your data safe. Lots and lots of data on tape in a car that gets burned up is useless. But online, local network, and backup tapes make it a lot harder to destroy data.
Another thing you will want to consider is how much down time can you afford? If you can deal with a week as long as you get the database back, thats different than if you loose $1000 per hour of downtime. Spend accordingly.
I'm interested in the same thing and was shocked to see how expensive the archive/backup services can be. Then it occurred to me...
I can get more storage for less money with a cheap web hosting plan. Then, all I'd have to do is upload my backups and they'll take care of backing up my backups and giving me guaranteed uptime and redundant connections to my data.
Why the discrepancy?
if you organization has good geographic distribution, why not consider something like:
http://www.hivecache.com/home.html
This allows you to use the excess capacity you already have (believe it or not, having 2+ gigabytes taken up by the same operating system/programs files distributed across all of your desktops falls under the catatory of "excess capacity"). The average corporate desktop has gigabytes upon gigabytes of unused diskspace and oddles of unused cycles (that's what the grid computing fad, in full inflamation about 2 years ago, was all about). Still, it's good to see something actually positive and useful come out of the p2p area.
It has encryption and allows users to self-service themselves with regard to restores.
I have more than a hundred different Gmail accounts, each with more than 2 GB of space. I backup to those. Why not let gmail spend their dime rather than me to maintain all those servers?
BTW the backup is also automatically offsite this way.
I don't know that I'd call it industrial strength, but with BitVault you can run your own online/offsite backup network. Run the clients on all the machines that have data you want backed up and/or that you want to backup to and they all backup to each other, using at least one central server to do with coordinating. You can run several servers/relays if you wish. Compresses, then encrypts, and then sends off the data to the other clients. You just flag which files and/or directories that you want to be backed up and then forget about it. Defaults to syncing every two hours, but you can make the interval any that you wish, including at a set time on certain days. I use it for personal backups for family members' machines, which granted is far from some corporate environment. But if you're not too big then perhaps it'll suffice for you as well. I'm not sure how large it'll scale, but it's working well for about a dozen machines for me. Used to be called LeanOnMe, but also used to rely on their central communication servers. Now it's called BitVault and you're in charge of putting up your own servers. http://www.312inc.com/
This would work better if Kazaa or the like were still popular, but:
-Encrypt all your data -Rename file to 'LindseyLohanXXX.mpg' -Release on p2p network
Now when you need the file back, just look for people sharing it and download it.
-You're only as clean as your towel.
We have two boxes with a large RAID5 array (about 2TB). One onsite, the other off, connected to the onsite box via a private circuit.
Nightly, a process runs that rsyncs data off all our critical servers to the RAID boxes. We also use the --backup flag to keep copies of changed files in a set of directories that get rotated over a period of 14 days. In this way I can very quickly recover a file in any state over the last two weeks, not just the current version.
Granted, we have a 100Mbps circuit to the remote site, but we do have some fairly large DB files (about 50GB worth) that change daily, and we also have DB logging to that site running during the day. If you are running a smaller op with less changes (especially to large files) you might be able to get away with something like SDSL or even ADSL. The secret is that with rsync you only transmit changed files. Or you could be a little more risky and just do it onsite or via wired/wireless to a nearby building, eg an outhouse, garage, friend's house across the road or whatever - just think about fire or flood risk.
It's pretty sweet compared to the agony of tape. Even with LTOII we were getting to 3 tapes per day, and the third tape would not finish until well after closing time, so we couldn't do backups every day, and as a further downer, of course each tape would have files from different times on it, which is a nightmare if you're trying to back up DBs and keep them consistent!
-- Sig Sig Sputnik
If you have extremely low bandwidth (or a lot of data to backup), you should consider using rsync via SSH tunnel (for transfer security). After the initial file transfer, which must sync all files the first time, even a dial-up modem should be able to keep up with daily transfers of a single user. If the business is using a cable modem connection, this should be sufficient for them as well for nightly backups.
Rsync transfers only changes made to files, not the entire files. Let's say you only change 3 or 4 files a day, like financial spreadsheets. If you rsync the entire folder, the only data that is transfered is from those 3 or 4 files, and not even the entire files, just the exact changes made. This is an extremely efficient transfer method.
Using rsync with SSH
Of course, there are now some incremental solutions without using rsync (which isn't perfect in all situations), but rsync should get the job done in most situations. If you need backups on a more timed scale, a CVS-like solution might suit you better.
Regardless of online backup method, RAID should still be part of your total solution if you are really concerned about data integrity.
I8-D
has anyone ever used www.xdrive.com? looks like they give you the software, use encryption, etc.
LiveVault, an online backup provider, has a whitepaper on their Information Resources page. (registration req'd)
LiveVault was a very expensive solution when I looked into last year - maybe not a good solution for a business that has the ever-popular IT Manager/Lifeguard position. But, their white papers might provide some ideas to help with evaluations.
Many of the online systems promise many things about encryption; I guess they all promise stuff is encrypted over the wire, and I guess most also state that stuff is encrypted on their storage servers.
But with what keys - and where are those stored?
I'm aware of at least one (very large!) online storage company who has a small note in their docs saying that the keys are stored 'in escrow' with them - i.e. everything is nice and safely encrypted but they have the keys to decrypt them!
They're docs also say how that key can get revealed to lawyers in some cases, and I think to end users who forget their keys.
I don't know. The whole notion of giving a third party (and Internet crackers) access to possibly confidential business records strikes me as a terribly bad idea.
After reading about 7/10's of the replies, I saw that some people were missing this poor guy's point.... He lives in flippin hurricane alley, mailing tapes to the office 8 miles away? Hello??!! Chances are he has no basement to put a box of disks into, it would fill with water too if he did. Solution, spend the cash for some 250Gb firewire harddisks, enough to have one set in watertight storage, ready for evac, and one set hooked into the system backing up...Set a schedule and stick to it. I know a woman who will sell you handcuffs for the securing of the data to your person....
Sig Hansen?
I've adopted the following for my personal use and some small businesses when they've asked me to setup something for them. All of 'em run WindowsXP in some way and just want to backup their spread sheets, word documents, Quicken Data, and their larger files being Outlook .pst's.
] for twenty dollars.
1.) Buy 2 flash drives in the appropiate capacity
2.) Buy and setup [url=http://www.2brightsparks.com]SyncBackSE[/url
I have it setup on my home pc and my father's small business. Backs up daily in the early morning to the thumb drive there and sends a compressed/encrypted WinZip compatible file too an FTP server of their choice. I think the most economical thing (note, not neccesarily the safest or smartest) would be to just get those cheapo hosting plans, throw up a small text blog no one will read, and backup to there using SyncBack's ftp backup feature.
I've found it to be worth the twenty dollars since it does everything I need too and is pretty easy to setup. I didn't feel like messing with cygwin and rsync.
nothing in your question about platform, but if you're using mac, why not use .mac?
only tried it a bit myself, but it seems very nice
This isn't entirely objective, since I work with these people, but we have a remote backup solution that uses IBM Tivoli software to provide encrypted, compressed remote backups. The pricing is quite reasonable. More info: http://www.waterloodatafortress.ca/
because a lot of the smaller services are based on the same software.
We did a fair amount of research in this area when deciding how to handle online backups for our customers. (In many cases, offices without an IT staff and tape backups are a bad mix.)
As it turns out, there are a few companies that offer their own backup services at varying levels of service (LiveVault, Connected, @Backup, etc.) and there are a few companies that sell online backup software, which allows you to buy the software and open your own business. One of the biggest is Remote Backup Systems, which a friend of mine used to start his backup business.
The basic system is something like this:
RBS even has a "Business Kit" (an extra $200-ish) which includes a business plan, web site, telephone scripts, service contracts, etc.