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Easy, Reliable Distributed Storage and Backup?
RichiH writes "Most of you are the free IT staff of friends and family, just as I am. One of my largest headaches is backing up their data. What I am looking for allows for off-site storage on multiple server machines running Linux, has Linux & Windows clients that Just Work and require zero everyday effort (although a large-ish effort to set them up is just fine), allows for granular access control, is versioned and will, ideally, allow me to grab data automagically (think photo pool for your family where your mother, sister, etc., share each other's photos). This is something I've been trying to find for years, but I've never seen anything even closely resembling what I want. With the Wall Street Journal handing out its Technology Innovation Award to Cleversafe recently, I was once again reminded of this particular itch which needs scratching. Before I deploy it, I want to ask the Slashdot community for its opinion on that piece of software, and on potential alternatives. How do you solve this problem?"
I can tell you how I solve it in a business context, but whether or not it could be scaled down to personal I'm not sure.
The problem: 2 sites each with 70-100GB of data needs offsite backup with similar criteria to your own. Bandwidth available to these sites is 2-4Mbps. The only OS involved is Linux, though I'm sure Windows could be shoehorned in somehow. A third site which has a tape streamer and someone to take tapes offsite is available. Data protection legislation means that storing it with a hosted service is illegal unless I encrypt it myself before sending it offsite - I'm only aware of one tool which claims to be able to do this and still send data as a binary delta (it uses the rsync library) and that tool is still not particularly common in Linux distributions and not very widely used. I'm nervous of trusting my backups to a tool that isn't on heavy use, particularly if strong encryption is being employed.
The Solution: A server in the third site and some judicious scripting with rsync allows it to mirror the data in the other two sites. The first sync is fairly painful, of course, but provided you don't have too much data regularly changing subsequent syncs aren't too bad. The server is backed up to tape which provides versioning capability so if someone only realises that they lost a file a week after the fact it can still be restored,
Initial effort to set up was pretty great but now it's done it JFW and requires no brain power whatsoever to run on a daily basis. I can make the data available over the VPN (of course the access speed will be dog slow) more-or-less immediately and I can make it available at LAN speed by copying it to a hard disk and courier it to the remote office in under 48 hours. A full restore of 100GB across a 2Mbps connection will take at least 4-5 days.
Yes, because storing thousands of jpg images and other binary data is exactly what git was intended for. Get people to store their data on Samba fileservers. Set up home directories in their name as well as shared directories accessible by everybody or Samba groups. Use ACL if you need to. To backup, use rsync and OpenSSH, write a few batch scripts and hey - presto! Instant solution that'll even work with cheapo webhosts and your home linux box as backup servers. Versioning can be done for any amount of time by using rsync's backup feature, and you can allow people to browse old versions within Windows Explorer connected to a Samba share in that way.
You're asking two questions. The first is that you want backup, so that all their data just gets thrown somewhere and they lose the last few days' work their hard drive dies. You don't even necessarily want this on the network; just back up to a DVD-R every so often, and take every month's DVD-R offsite (a friend's house, a bank's vault, whatever). There's lots of backup software for this. Most can do fancy stuff like incremental backups. You can probably find something opensource you can host for your friends and family on a decently-available server.
The second question is networked file storage, where you don't care about automatically archiving files, but you do want frequent access and a good UI. For this I recommend something like Dropbox, which has good support for OS integration and a web interface.
Ars technica did a nice review of Dropbox, titled, "How Dropbox ended my search for seamless sync on Linux" (but it works on OSX 7 Windows too) http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080914-how-dropbox-ended-my-search-for-seamless-sync-on-linux.html
Have you considered the JungleDisk client that works with the Amazon S3 storage cloud? This has backup clients for Windows, Linux, and Mac and with suitable configuration of 'buckets' would allow you to do most of what you are trying to achieve. Okay so it's a pay-for service (albeit cheap) but it does provide the all important off-siting, strong security/encryption and unlimited capacity.
Backup isn't the same as sharing. And do you want actual replication or merely fault tolerance to node failure? Actual n-fold replication means you're going to pay n times the amount of money for storage. And why do you insist on one application to do everything?
My suggestion: set up automatic backups to one of the many backup services on the net. They worry about how to replicate your data, you don't have to. For the same service to support both backup and sharing is hard and it's probably a bad idea. It's much easier if you know that the backup service simply cannot access the contents of any of your files.
For sharing, use services designed for that: Flickr Pro, Picasa, Google Docs, whatever. They are designed for sharing, they know about users and permissions, and they can only publish what you actually upload to them.
As for Cleversafe, the idea is as old as forward error correction, but the economics and management never seem to quite work out. And basically, you're getting the same functionality from hosted storage: Amazon, Google, Box.NET, etc. are already figuring out how to keep your data available and secure, and are probably doing a better job than you could do with a homebrew system.
The subject says it all:
- rdiff-backup to backup your data one backup server.
- chironfs to clone the file system to another remote server.
rdiff-backup runs on *nix and windows (with the help of Cygwin).
Once set up, rdiff-backup needs virtually no maintenance. If needed, setup Nagios to warn you if things run afoul.
Used this for years, never disappointed me so far!
http://www.bacula.org/
Runs pretty tight (low bandwidth), supports channel encryption and datastore encryption, can even create Bare Metal Recovery disks. I have a server room with LTO3 tape drives that I use to backup my clients' incremental data changes nightly, including Linux, Mac and Windows clients and servers. I have VPN's out to each client, so don't use the built-in channel encryption, but I maintain a keypair for each client.
Backup only, but I /could/ present a maintained volume as a share over the VPN. Bacula supports disk and tape volumes as backup stores. I've personally had no need to do that to date.
We're not talking terabytes here - my ISP would pwn me if that was going on, but I do circa 20G of data changes every night from clients. Some of them are laptops that are not always on or connected. Most are friends and family PC's, so it backs up when it can. I have to do almost no maintenance apart from changing a tape occasionally. The backup client is tiny and unobtrusive, even when running. On Windows it uses VSS, so it is reliable.
I have had a number of panic phone calls (esp from my kids at Uni) who have lost a thesis or the like and are utterly amazed when, after a few clicks over the phone they look at their webmail and yesterday's version is in their inbox. That's what it's all about! I am the god of lost data! Which, of course, works for me.
Check out S3Backer. It lets you mount an Amazon S3 bucket to your Linux/Mac/BSD/*NIX box. GPL F/OSS as icing on the cake.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Recent versions of rsync fully support POSIX ACLs (including, if asked, setting up ACLs on the receiving end that don't make any sense because they refer to uids that don't exist - though you could work around that one with a common authentication mechanism such as LDAP) - I've not tried to get Windows working so I'm not sure how well that would work.
Be warned that full POSIX ACL support hasn't made it into every Linux distribution yet - IIRC Debian Etch's rsync doesn't, for instance. If you're paranoid, you could add a line to call getfacl before you call rsync in your existing script script - shouldn't require more than one line.
I think this is the quote you where looking for:
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -Linus Torvalds
cough ... JungleDisk ... cough
I just didn't want to deal with it. I use cloudbackup.openrsm.com and have them buy an account. It can do a whole network of Linux, MAC, and Windows machines with one account, or just a laptop. The client software is free and does network drive of the backup space too. I figure easy and my friends paying for it works. It's saved my butt a couple times too.
I use carbonite. Small app, I can have multiple machines within the same account, unlimited data for something like $49/year. I got it for a work machine - and it has already been used to retrieve deleted files (very painless process), liked it so much that I got it for a couple of the family machines that I support. I set it up for them and the only instructions they have to remember is "don't save tax returns under c:\windows\system32, save them under My Documents".
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"