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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?"
this is a great solution...
Amazing magic tricks
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.
s /
Most businesses don't care about backing up all of your pr0n and music. For a lot of places, if you back up documents, email, and source code, you've got the core business stuff--and that's often fairly small. You do a full local backup of the servers, have a standard image of the desktops, then do web backups of a few directories nightly (e.g. all files on some samba share, a source repository, email). The web backups are rsync'd (or equivalent) so only the day's changes are transferred.
It's not ideal, but for a lot of places it works. Of course, they often find out after a crash that employees _weren't_ storing everything in "Work Documents" folder like they're supposed to.
For home use I usually just do hourly snapshots to another machine at home (I keep every hour for the last week, and the 4 previous weeks, and montly for 6 months, and then just yearly) with something like:
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshot
With nothing automated for off-site backups (though I do keep a handful of critical documents off-site by hand).
I cheat and do the initial rsync on local disk, only incremental stuff goes over the network.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
We use Websafe (http://www.websafe.com/). https:/// SSL encryption while on Net and AES-256 while at rest (I have the clear-text encryption master key in my possesion). Also supports WebDAV webfolders via WebDrive service (http://www.webdrive.com/). Comes with free ZBKUP utility that zips data BEFORE it is transmitted and can be scheduled to do lights-out backups unattended via webfolders or you can use any D2D backup you like. Depending on your Internet upload performance you can easily upload gigabyte (compressed) backups during the night. No firewall issues because it only uses https:/// port 443. Cluster of Linux/64 servers power the service. Each storage disk is on separate controller and is mirrored. Backups are maintainted with a grandfather, father, son rotation (nightly) as well. Supports browser access and sharing of individual folders with other WebSafe users. Not the cheapest, but the combination of encryption, collaboration, and ease of use are unmatched.