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?"

Comments

Backups online

[Hansele]

Be really careful with this. What happens if the provider gets hacked?

Re:Backups online

[Fjornir]

There's this really, really neat thing called 'encryption' you might want to look into.

Re:Backups online

[Kevin DeGraaf]

unless there's some contract guarenteeing the integrety of the data, storing stuff with a third party is just as stupid as not doing any kind of backup.

Bzzt, wrong. Dunno why I'm responding to some A.C...

Zip or tar/gzip/bzip2 your files. Encrypt with GPG. Take MD5 checksum. Upload to backup company.

If your disk crashes, there is a nonzero and generally pretty decent chance that you will get your data back. You can use your MD5 checksum to verify bit-for-bit integrity.

Contrast that with the 0% chance you have of recovering your data from a nonexistent backup target. "Just as stupid"? As if.

Online backup? - Capacity

[tacokill]

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.

Re:Offsite Co-op?

[skraps]

Oceanstore is exactly what you described. From the website:

"OceanStore is a global persistent data store designed to scale to billions of users. It provides a consistent, highly-available, and durable storage utility atop an infrastructure comprised of untrusted servers."

You confused backups with availability.

[arete]

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.