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.

Offsite Co-op?

[kwerle]

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?

Re:Offsite Co-op?

[dgatwood]

Agreed. Online data storage is hideously expensive. A coalition of businesses and/or individuals doing a shared backup strategy via a bittorrent-like protocol would be far more effective at preventing data loss, for far less overall cost to everyone.

Of course, that sort of mechanism doesn't help if your purpose is to use backups for historical data retention, but then again, if that's your goal, online backup doesn't make sense anyway.

What would be nice would be for this sort of mechanism to be sufficiently simple that an idiot can understand it. You specify the number of unique copies (n) of your data based on how much you care about it. In exchange, you agree to store 2n times as many gigs of information for other people on your drives. That space is reserved in advance at upload time, and freed when you tell the software that the backup of that data is no longer needed.

To prevent abuse, laptops would not be allowed to participate, as the availability of data backed up on someone's laptop is dubious at best. Machines participating must have either a static IP or dynamic DNS (or, ideally, the software could automatically register some sort of free dyndns type name for you).

During the first 72 hours prior to the backup, the machine must respond to at least 75% of hourly requests for confirmation from other machines that have copies of its data. If it does not, it will be assumed to be a laptop and the data stored will be disposed of after 72 hours as space is needed. This means that you can use it if your machine is dying as a temporary backup mechanism, since the data won't go away immediately, but at the same time, will effectively prevent abusing the system by using it to backup people's laptops.

After 72 hours, the confirmation rate will decrease to once per day. A host that has been gone for more than two weeks will be assumed to have been abandoned. However, there should be a mechanism for making one machine double as a stand-in for a dead machine for an arbitrary period of time, so long as it provides enough storage to meet the original machine's obligations.

In addition to confirmation requests from the copyholder, the machine with the original data should attempt (daily) to contact each copyholder to verify that bidirectional connections are possible, thus ensuring that if the data needs to be recovered, it can be.

Obviously, since all data would be encrypted, the encyption key would be stored in a file on system being backed up. This means that you MUST back up if you ever want to recover your data....

Re:Offsite Co-op?

[Jim McCoy]

How does this sound?

You store my data, I will store yours.

Error-corrected and replicated so that 50% of the cloud could disappear and you would still have 4 or 5 nines of reliability.

Per-file, content-dependant encryption (e.g. every file gets its own AES encryption key)

Free accounts have a 10:1 provided vs. consumed ratio (to cover replication and error-correction bloat, with the ratio expected to drop over time) and people who want to buy a better ratio or even not have to provide space can do so.

Access to data backed-up by any of your systems from any other system you have installed the software on. (No more need to fiddle with system-to-system sync to make sure you have access to all of your files.)

Sound interesting? If so, head over to Allmydata and sign up for the beta test. [Windows only at the moment, but OS X and Linux versions will be available in a couple of months...]

You said don't ask...

[BaudKarma]

...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)

Re:You said don't ask...

[BlogPope]

IT Managers get zero chicks. Lifeguards get tons of chicks. What happens when then two are combined in the same person?

You get the curious effect of a "chick ring" as the attractive and repulsive forces reach an equilibrium somewhere just out of arms reach. From there they tend to fall into a stable orbit.

Re:A lifeguard!?

[Lev13than]

I'm curious - what is it like being a lifeguard *and* an IT manager?

In many ways the jobs are quite similar. Both involve multiple safeguards against the spread of viruses, both deal with sharing limited resources against hundreds of thankless clients, and no matter how pristine you keep either work environment there's always going to be some kid that ruins it by filling your storage solution with shit.