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Best Home Backup Strategy Now?
jollyreaper writes "Technology moves quickly and what was conventional wisdom last year can be folly this year. But the one thing that's remained constant is hard drives are far too large to backup via conventional means. Tape is expensive and can be unreliable, though it certainly has its proponents. DVDs are just too small. There are prosumer devices like the Drobo, but it's still just a giant box of hard drives, basically RAID. And as we've all had drilled into our heads, 'RAID is not backup.' When last this topic came up on Slashdot, the consensus was that hard drives were the best way to backup hard drives. Backup your internal HDD to an external one, and if your data is really important, have two externals and swap one off-site once a week. Is there any better advice these days?"
Switching off-site backups every week is an unnecessary hassle. Back up to an external hard drive and an online backup service. Anything more than that is overkill unless you have really important data.
A Magic the Gathering Article and Forum Aggregator
Not the same as external backup, but it provides redundancy against a single drive failure and provides history. Otherwise, run backup overnight every now and then to an external drive and store it away.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Almost 50GB per disc and brand name blanks aren't too expensive if you know where to look. (Hey Newegg: surely y'all could save us some nuisance if you'd import a shipping container or two of blanks direct from Japan...) Nero Linux supports Blu-ray drives. RAID1 for primary storage with BD-R DL backup, with the backups ideally stored securely off-site should be sufficiently paranoid for most home users though Blu-ray is too new to have real-world long-term integrity statistics.
Remote backup to a rented dedicated server is also a possibility though not terribly practical in America due to certain monopoly carriers (<cough>AT&T</cough>) being too cheap to build FTTH, at least until they run out of duct tape and bailing wire to keep their WWII-era copper plant patched together, and even then.
All of the online backup strategies are a joke. Due to bandwidth restrictions, it would take years just to make a backup of a typical user's hard drive, and they don't offer enough space (seriously). The cheapest form of medium currently is hard drives, so my current backup system is to have 2 equally sized 500 GB drives and I use Acronis on a schedule to do a differential backup of one drive to the other once a week during early morning hours. If the differentials start to get too large, I'll do a new full backup and start doing differentials from there again. I haven't found any backup solution that is "totally" automatic in this regard, but since it only requires manual intervention once every several months it's not a huge deal.
I decided that I have three main "categories of data":
- easily replaceable: This is stuff that is fairly easy to replace.. for instance I have ripped a huge portion of my DVD collection (for my own use). If I lost this data, it would not be a tragedy .. just a pain in the ass.
- hard to replace: This is stuff that does exist "out there".. but would not be easy to replace. This includes old TV shows that you can't buy or if you can are very hard to find.
- irreplaceable: Self explanatory.. this is my documents, code, photos, etc that could not be replaced if lost
I keep everything besides OS files on a file server. Raid 6 (two parity stripes).. this is the first layer..
to me this is adequate to protect "easily replaceable" stuff (which in my case constitutes a huge chunk of file space).
I backup everything in the "hard to replace" and "irreplaceable" categories to a seperate (removable but stays in the system) hard disk (so far 1TB has been enough to hold all this data). I make a
secondary backup to a second removable drive and store this "off site". This secondary backup does not get updated very often.. which is the trade off I guess... but it provides a "last hope" if something
crazy ever happened.. like my house burning down.
Oh.. and backups are encrypted!
rsync.
That's the protocol. Now what media do you recommend? Another hard drive?
Thank for reading to the sig. You may stop reading now. It is safe. There is no more content. Why are you still reading?
Windows Home Server actually has very good backup options. a)It allows for folder duplication on shared folders, protecting your shared files against a single hard drive failure. b)It allows you to add a hard drive as a backup drive, basically to dump all the shared folders, which can then be taken offsite. c)Jungle Disk has a WHS plugin, and there's an alternate Jungle Disk plugin which is allegedly better on whsplus.com, which provides your online protection. Automated daily backups mated with Volume Shadowing means that not only is your data safe, but previous versions are available too.
I've re-purposed a computer as a backup server, which lives at my parents house. It runs Ubuntu, with ZFS running over FUSE. Each night, a scripted CRON event will run zpool scrub on my storage pool, and if there is a problem, it will send me a text.
My MacBook Pro will use Time Machine over NFS over SSH to make the actual backups from my dorm/wherever I happen to be.
Commence CDDL/GPL/BSD Flamewar.
-jX
Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
I store all of my porn videos and ripped music in the Limewire cloud, and let other people back it up for me. Works great, and I often realize I have backed up songs that I don't even remember ripping!
Not really, keep doing it like that. for how to do that read this: http://jwz.livejournal.com/801607.html
I'm kinda a 'option 1' guy, but stuff that's really important, I just burn on to DVD every so often.
The other option, now that most folk now have halfdecent connections is to set up an rsync to a buddies machine, (and reciprocate) , using encryption, you now have an automatic off site back up.
Carbonite works well to. I've got over 100GB backed up with them for $50/year. Comes out to about $0.04/GB/Month.
Mozy is good - it's offsite backup with nice shell integration. Sadly it's Windows only though :(
-- Mike
I have an external harddrive attached to my Macbook and Time machine takes care of the rest. And my important document and photos I upload to my dropbox That way I have a local backup of my entire harddrive in case something happens to my Macbook and one stored on the "cloud" that I can reach if my house burns down.
I fought the corporate America, and the corporate America bought the law.
It depends on how many important files you have. If you have just a few documents, you can still burn them to CD periodically, or use an online for-pay backup service such as Carbonite or Rsync.Net. The reason to use HDDs is because you have lots of data, or your computer data, including OS installs is very important to you, and you need a way to recover rapidly. (E.g. you _really_ can't wait, and it's worth the cost of external HDDs and accessorie to avoid waiting)
If money is no object, ioSafe makes some fireproof, waterproof, shock-proof drive enclosures, which could help against disaster situations. The alternative is indeed use of an offsite location. You need a lock box or safe regardless of method, to help protect against human risks to your drives. Or utilize encryption to help prevent data from fallign into the wrong hands.
Otherwise, if you use HDs for backup, consider a hard drive docking station. Like one of these or a voyager Q (who makes a model supporting Firewire800 also); docking stations are more convenient to buying a bunch of external HDs. Eventually, when you upgrade your hard drive, use the old one to store important files.
If you have a stack of old hard drives, you can actually use them also. So a dock, and some plastic cases to put your internal HDs in could be favorable to buying a bunch of external HDs. (There are companies that specialize in selling rugged anti-static plastic cases for HDs, but I just pile them in a box, and use the original anti-static bags that came with new HDs)
If you are using old HDDs for archival purposes, make sure to spin them up every few motnhs, or you suffer bit rot, and the mechanical components of the drive may fail.
Or get one dock + multiple cheap HDDs for important documents.
And possibly one large HD for a full system backup. Apple users are blessed with Time machine. Linux users can dd or rsync their files, and even have a script do it nightly (so long as you have multiple HDs, and cycle them after backups).
Windows users have got to use third-party software or do some scripting.
http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
Get an old P3 for free somewhere and load this up on it with a big disk or two for storage, put it on your network, and run it. That's what I do and it works like a charm. I went through all the options over the years, tape, DVDs, manual copying to a server.
Backuppc backs up all my windows and linux PCs. It backs up only what I tell it to, and it does both full and incremental. Sort of a pain in the ass to set up (I use cygwin rsyncd on the windows boxes, and regular rsyncd on the linux boxes), and it works well.
Only drawback is it is still on site.
Just because the backup solution _uses_ RAID doesn't mean the old adage applies to it. As long as you are using it as external backups all is well.
What that phrase IS telling you to do however is not use RAID on the machine you want to back up and expect it to do what you want.
My UID is prime... is yours?
I think the OP's post arose from a misunderstanding of what "RAID is not backup" means.
The adage isn't an admonition not to use hard drives as a means of backing up data. Rather, it is concerned with the fact that any change to your data is committed to each duplicate volume in a RAID, so if you delete an important file, for example, it's just as gone as if you weren't running a RAID.
That's completely different from mirroring your drive onto an external hard drive and putting it on a shelf somewhere. If you delete a file on your live system, you can restore from that backup.
Are you joking? S3 is perhaps the most overpriced way to backup data.
You're paying at least $0.15/GB/month for the space, and then paying $0.10/GB transferred in and $0.17/GB transferred out.
So if you were to use 1TB of storage over 5 years filling it perhaps 3 times over that period and reading it 10x, it would cost $1800 for the space alone, $300 bw in, $1700 bw out, for a total price of $3800.
Meanwhile, you can get 1TB hard drives for $80 everyday (you could almost buy 50 of them for the price of your online service). I'd love to hear how you can twist the math around so badly that it looks like you're actually saving money! Ever considered a career in politics?
i use rsync + samba on a linux box over the network with 2TB drives in a mirror (encrypted, mirrored with debian) for primary backup and have a LG Blue Ray burner for secondary backup. I get 50GB DL blu rays for $10 each from ebay (shipped from japan in 10 packs) mostly using verbatims. I burn two blu rays at a time with copies of the sam data on both and store them separately. $20 for 50 gig is not a bad bargain.
Once upon a time, the computer you wanted always cost (at least) $5,000.
This trend ended in the late 80's. All of a sudden, package system prices started trending seriously downwards, because due to Moore's law, computer speed started outrunning almost everything you'd want to run on it. Not true for certain specific apps, including graphics and games, but for office use it was perfectly fine.
I remember buying a 200 MB hard drive for $500 and thinking about what a great price it was.
Up until recently hard drives were one of the more expensive components left in a computer package. Now? Most are under $100. That's lower than tape backups used to be at their lowest prices. It's true, right now the best way to back up your hard drive is a second hard drive.
IMO the big question now is where that second hard drive will be. You can stick it in your computer and mirror your main drive in real time easily enough, but that means a virus or software issue will ruin both drives simultaneously. Better to sync them once a week? Perhaps.
Of course, this won't help you if there's a house fire. The fireproof hard drives are still darned expensive. Internet-based remote backup is great, if your broadband can handle it.
Cuneiform tablets work well for me. Don't store them in a flood zone, though.
Actually I read the summary and decided it was stupid. Sort of like, "I want to make a ham sandwich. Conventionally these contain bread and ham, but I'm an idiot so I want to make it from dog hair and epoxy resin".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Since when is tape unreliable? My DLT has a MTBF of 250,000 hours. I've used DLT, DDS, and Travan for years and I've seen far more HDD failures. I've seen plenty of tape drives fail, but not the tapes themselves. I trust my tapes far more than any spinning platter. Come to think of it, I trust my tapes more than any other backup I use (Optical disc, HDD, and Cloud). Once my station wagon full of tapes caught fire on the highway, but I blame that cheap-ass roach clip.
For really valuable files (the ones I won't ever be able to replace if I lose them: my own documents, my photos), I burn a monthly DVD and drop it alternatively at my parents' and brother's.
For the rest of the junk (media files: music, videos, books...)that are very large but not that important (or easily replaceable), I have a large external HD to which I clone my main HD once a week. I then keep the Backup HD off-line until the next time.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
it depends mostly on how much data you have. I have a couple of terabytes. I also have a daughter living 5 miles away so I backup at my house to external drives and swap those backups with another set kept at her house. If you have 50megs of data (many people have very small requirements) then an online backup strategy might be very handy. You can even get 32gig and larger(?) USB flash drives that are more than adequate for most people who just want to backup their email and pictures/data. Tape drives are fine for geeks but access is slow and rebuilding a drive becomes more of a chore. Definitely not for mom and dad if they aren't geeks. External drives give total bootability (or the potential for it) and for most people are the easiest way to do a complete mirror of your HD. For data, most people can fit all their data (if they can even find it) on a USB Thumb Drive.
rsync.
Ok, that covers the <5% of users who can set up and maintain a backup systems based on rsync. What about the other 95%?
As an interface to set up a backup system for a moderately adept geek with sufficient focus to set up and maintain a recurring rsync backup, an above average grasp of the layout of their filesystem, and the presence of mind to alter their rsync script as their computer changes over time, rsync is extremely powerful. For everyone else, it's next to useless.
Backups are:
- off line (viruses, power surge, sabotage...)
- off site (fires, theft...)
- tested (i've got horrors stories of people that THOUGHT they had backups...)
- multiple (... and of backups that turn bad at the worst possible moment)
So backing up data is a hassle, and can be expensive depending on what you need: a DVD, a BD, an HD... But pretty much the only foolproof solution anyway is to burn your data onto a media you then send away to your parents' or other trusted 3rd party. Once a month is the very minimum.
If you're using HDs, you may want to re-use them after a while, but don't forget to keep some very old ones, for when you realize ages after the facts that one of your files got corrupted.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
There are three kinds of data:
1. If you lose this data you will go to jail.
2. If you lose this data, your business will be impacted.
3. If you lose this data, you will have less options for entertainment.
#1 tends to be a megabyte or less.
#2 tends to be a few hundred megabytes of documents.
#3 tends to be terabytes.
My company has a PDF of every document that we've touched in the past decade (federal law requires this retention), and our entire business continuity backup fits easily on four LTO-4 tapes, plus a very less-than-full tape that we rotate for offsite storage weekly. We've explored every backup system out there and this is by far the most cost-effective for us.
I don't understand why the OP claims "tape is unreliable", as I have not heard of a single instance of in-service failure of an LTO-4. As for it being expensive, it is, but before we went to tape we were using Firewire800 external drives, much more expensive than tape cartridges, and not as reliable as some people have been led to believe.
USB and FW external drives almost never fail as long as they are powered on. They fail in storage, which seemed pretty weird to me, since they should be able to sit on a warehouse shelf indefinitely. My low-sample unscientific data from experience says otherwise.
Since everybody is going from LTO-2/3 to LTO-4, you should be able to get LTO-3 transports pretty cheaply.
But my first advice is to identify the data in categories #1 and #2, where you might realize that it's a good practice in any case, to store the important stuff with its own priority. This is the hard part. Identifying what's actually important. If you don't do this, no matter what backup system you end up using, you're going to be burying the important stuff in the noise, introducing risk.
The OP also mentioned Drobo. I have a Drobo and I love it, but I must warn you that it's pretty slow, even with really fast drives. Don't expect to be able to copy a terabyte to it in less than 40 or 50 hours, even with firewire 800. This is the problem that drove us to tape, which is much faster than any filesystem we can feed it from.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
I just can't be bothered with slashdot any more. It's full of dummies with mod points. How do I get off the Internet?
Do I need a megabyte of backup capacity for every megabyte of storage? No, I decide what's important and how long it's important for.
Deleted
Ghost Virtual Machine gives 15gigs of Amazon.com data storage and right now if you use the promotion code of "launch" you get 10Gigs more as a bonus for 25Gigs. If you want to give me a referral my id is orion_blastar there, and each person you referred grants you 5Gigs more in a bonus.
Google Docs also has document storage but does not give as much as G.ho.st does. The Ghost Virtual Machine can access your Google Docs drive as well.
Here is a review of the top 5 online cloud storage sites so you can take your pick.
MyBloop offers unlimited free storage, but I am not 100% sure of that or their privacy policy.
Lifehacker talks about using your Yahoo Mail account for unlimited storage and also that Google's GMail almost offers the same service as well.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
This is a bad idea. Other than the ludicrous cost of the SSD, flash drives tend to fail all at once. bam! and all your data is gone. This is also why i do not use a USB key for backups.
On my system everything is dumped on a 2TB mirrored system (simple 2 x 2TB HDDs running debian software encryption + RAID lvm) and periodically backed up to blu ray DLs in duplicate. At $10/disk from japan (see ebay) two verbatims back up 50GB in duplicate for $20.
Typically it takes 2-3 months to generate that amount which means its cost effective. DVDRs (Taiyo Yudens) fill the gap if there is not enough data to justify a bunch of blu rays.
As an interface to set up a backup system for a moderately adept geek with sufficient focus to set up and maintain a recurring rsync backup, an above average grasp of the layout of their filesystem, and the presence of mind to alter their rsync script as their computer changes over time, rsync is extremely powerful. For everyone else, it's next to useless.
On the other hand, if you thought you could ask on /. you probably match this description...
A flash drive is probably the most stable technology. The drawback is the high expense. My strategy is several fold:
- Nearly all my home movies are recorded on Super VHS tape. Being analog if the tape gets damaged, it will still be watchable (wrinkles appear as momentary scanlines).
- My downloaded porn is backed-up on an external USB drive. If the c: drives fails, I can just copy the stuff over (and vice-versa).
- Stuff that I can buy on DVD or CD like Babylon 5 or Star Trek, I buy. These discs are physically pressed with pits so they won't self-erase themselves like DVD-Rs or CD-Rs tend to do. They should last the rest of my life.
Unfortunately none of these strategies protect my from a major accident like a house fire. I just need to make sure not to do something stupid like fall asleep with a cigarette in my mouth.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
We must lay out the kinds of failures and goals of a backup to determine how best to back up.
1. We would like to protect against mechanical drive failure. This can be done with a RAID.
1.5. We may also want to protect against the failure of other components of the computer. I recently had a computer die because its motherboard died, and it took about two weeks to get a new computer, and the new computer was a significant upgrade so it had SATA instead of IDE. In the mean time, I needed my data on other systems, and when the new computer came, I needed to borrow a USB-IDE bridge to recover some stuff that I wasn't backing up.
2. We would like to protect against accidental deletion of files, file corruption, or edits to a file that we have now reconsidered. This can be done with snapshotting. In source code, to reconsider and edit to a file is fairly common, and is the reason why most programming projects use revision control systems. Other options like nilfs or ZFS snapshots can also fill this goal. This goal is accomplished more easily if the backups area automatic and the backup device is live on the system.
Depending on your needs, this goal may be counterbalanced by a need to not retain the history of files for legal or other reasons, and this should inform your choice of backup strategy.
3. We would like to protect against filesystem corruption, whether by an OS bug, or by accidentally doing cat /dev/random > /dev/hda. This can be done by having an extra drive of some sort that isn't normally hooked up to the computer. Tape drives, CDs, and DVDs have traditionally fulfilled this purpose, and this is where the use of additional hard drives is being suggested. Remote backups, via rsync can also accomplish this. For this I use git.
4. We would like to protect against natural disasters. For someone living in New Orleans, it would be nice to have a backup somewhere outside the path of Hurricane Katrina. Remote backups may be pretty much the only way to accomplish this, unless you're a frequent traveler and can hand-deliver backup media to remote locations.
5. In addition to any of the above, the code you use create said backup may be buggy, or may become buggy or misconfigured over time. Checking the integrity and restorability of your backups after creating them, and keeping several (independent) previous versions of a backup may help here.
You may not be concerned with the various modes of failure described here occuring simultaneously. For example, it may be unlikely that you need to deal with file system corruption at the same time that you regret one of the edits you made on your file. In that case, your offline backup device doesn't need to hold all of your snapshots.
Flash drives have the advantage of their small size. No one wants to lug an external hard disk around with them, and discs don't fit in one's pocket either. So what good is your hard disk back up system when your house burns down, is flooded, or burgled?
The answer is to use a range of devices - just because I have a 500GB drive doesn't mean that all data on that disk is equally important. I can use a second hard disk for most data (e.g., videos, mp3s), and then an 8GB drive (which costs, ooh, about £5 - hardly a "ludicrous" cost) is more than ample to store the things that I couldn't lose, such as my source code, personal photos etc.
I hate to be that bitter old pessimist, but this has been debated to death and back here on Slashdot many times over. I swear, it should be in the FAQ by now.
All of the times this question has come up (feels like at least once a month), there have been many very good suggestions. Why should we rehash them for the nth time?
Bender: "Hey, what's this? Hermes' dreadlocks, and his arm? Leela, I'm shocked! Food goes in the disposal, hair and flesh go in the trash."
"Another hard drive?"
Yes. Tape has not kept up with hard drives, in fact they're now more per gigabyte than hard drives, very different from 90s prices. Even just the tapes themselves are more expensive than hard drives per gigabyte, and that doesn't include the thousands it can cost for a multiple terabyte autoloader tape drive.
There is really nothing else as cheap as hard drives per gigabyte. I use a external USB2 SATA dock and swap a few SATA drives. And honestly I'm not all that worried about backing up with modern operating systems. We've come a long away from Windows 95, where I was restoring from my Eagle Travan-3 1.6/3.2gb once a month.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
That's exactly what happened to us... the hit took out 2 Macs and the power bricks/adapters for nearly everything else electronic in the house. And it was a strike across the street that travelled thru the dsl line, not the well-protected outlets. I always have at least one backup NOT connected and stored off-site since then. The other awful thing that convinced me to use 3 external drives was backing up to a single drive and having a bad thing happen to both the main drive in my PowerBook and the backup at the same time. The screwup was a funky restore from backup (I'll never use Intego Personal Backup again). Yes, the stupid things happen and you'd better be ready...
DVDs are slightly better than CDs. A CD has the physical pits pressed on the top of the disk, then a thin silver backing is placed on top. When that backing gets damaged, goodbye data. A DVD, on the other hand, has the silver reflective part sandwiched in the middle of the disk. Therefore it is more resistant to physical damage.
Don't tell us you're using LVM for critical data such as backups.
LVM does not implement file system barriers.
Betcha didn't know that, did you? Scary, ain't it?
Heck, might as well google for why barriers aren't enabled by default in Linux....
Safest home backup solution
Use standard commodity parts for easy replacement/reconstruction.
ie. Consumer grade writable disc's and external hard drives.
Backup Home data to DVD/BR/CD regularly (Monthly)
Backup Bulk data with 3 Hard disks!!!!
1) Use one Live HD
2) Use one to backup Live
3) Use ANOTHER to backup Live again
The Reason?
If your backup is large, You will probably need to erase the target drive.
At this point you are VERY vulnerable.
With your only backup erased,
You had better hope your live drive doesn't fail while backing up again.
Or you may accidentally delete something from the live drive WHILE backing up.
With a 3rd hard drive, At least you can recover from your last backup if your current backup somehow nukes itself.
Dangers....
1) Don't have a live drive and think your safe with another live drive synced, You really want to keep hard drive backups IN
STORAGE. If it's live it can and probably will die. It's just a matter of time or circumstances. This goes for raid too.
2) This is home storage, So 6/12 month hard disk backups should root out any bit rot or hard disk seizures.
For example you deleted a file last week that you need now. A supplier has sent this month's data with last month's filenames and overwritten last month's data. Your database has 'acquired' corruptions and now you need to go back to find a working or clean version. A duplication strategy just means you have two copies of the bad stuff!
Here is what I do
The history chain has extending time gaps between copies eg 0.9,1,3,7,15,30,90 days. So for a daily backup of a file that changes every day the two most recent copies are always shifted down the chain and every 3 days the second is bumped down to 3rd position which in turn might bump 3 to 4 if 3 is more than a week newer than 4. This is ever so easy to program - I even did it in a DOS batch file.
Let's review what happens if the computer goes bang! - Reload from USB hard drive and flash. Alternatively if data gets corrupted - Trawl through the history on the HD.
On the other hand, if you thought you could ask on /. you probably match this description...
If you had to ask on /., you already don't match the description.
"What about the other 95%?" Over the years I became an old and bitter sysadm... you know what ? They just need to do what the 5% did: Put their asses in a chair and Read The Fucking Manual... and read again, and again until they understand the subject.
That's not what they did.
First, they were born/nurtured in such a way to have above average technical aptitude.
Second, they were interested enough in how computers work to tinker and learn and gain a broad base of knowledge about their computer and OS.
Only then did they "put their asses in a chair and Read The Fucking Manual... and read again, and again until they understand the subject."
If you expect the 95% who did not go through the first two parts to skip right over into the third part, you're in dire need of taking your ass out of the chair and meeting some Real Fucking People.
No, I'm not user friendly, I do not need to be... people are asking me for help anyway.
Do what I do. Tell them, "yes, there's a way but it's rather complex. Do you want me to explain it?" The answer is almost always "no". Because they really don't want you to explain it, they want you to do it. If they say yes, you'll probably be asked to stop in less than 60 seconds.
The adage isn't an admonition not to use
stop making up words.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
an 8GB drive (which costs, ooh, about £5 - hardly a "ludicrous" cost)
A 2TB hard drive costs $230. A 16GB flash drive costs $42. That is 200 times the per GB cost. If you are trying to store large volumes of data (which is what was being referred to) SSDs ARE ludicrously expensive. 200 times as expensive as hard drives. Given that an external 2.5" drive DOES fit in my pocket, and costs FAR less per GB, there is little justification for the thumb drive.
Your math only works if you have two full terabytes to fill up. If you only have 16 gigs of stuff, the cost per gig isn't that useful of measurement.
Believe it or not, I agree with your assessment, at lesat in the context of my own needs. I'm just not convinced on the 'one size fits all' argument.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
They should use Time Machine.
Is there any particular reason you had to be an ass here?
Actually I read the summary and decided it was stupid. Sort of like, "I want to make a ham sandwich. Conventionally these contain bread and ham, but I'm an idiot so I want to make it from dog hair and epoxy resin".
I think the poster posed a perfectly valid question. The way I read the summary was (using your analogy) more like,
I want to make a ham sandwich. The last time I checked, these were made with Wonder bread and Oscar Meyer ham. Since then, has anyone discovered a better recipe?
Of course, while your analogy is somewhat amusing, it is not necessarily the most appropriate one since computer tech changes significantly faster than ham sandwich tech. :)
Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)
- Linus Torvalds
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds
FYI, even if you use your own key, Mozy only encrypts the contents, not the filenames. That's rather insufficient. A court could subpoena them for a list of your files, establish that particular files exists, and require you to produce them. See http://michaelshadle.com/2007/05/07/mozy-the-backup-client-damn-close-but-still-no-cigar/
Plug: In 2006 I founded https://spideroak.com/ specifically to provide a zero-knowledge approach to online backups. We don't know anything about your data, including your file and foldernames. On the servers we just see sequentially numbered data blocks. It's written in Python and C and we've always supported Linux and OS X (and Windows if that's what you're into.) SpiderOak keeps historical versions of your files and deleted files forever (or until you decide to remove them) and will sync folders for you across several computers. Some reviews are http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/6644/1/ and http://www.maclife.com/article/reviews/online_storage_battle_which_cloud_backup_service_reigns_supreme
Yeah. The reason is lots of people are suddenly saving nontrivial amounts of data (primarily media-driven) and they want a moore's law of reliable backup. But, all the consumer-level stuff (HDD, optical) isn't good enough and the rest costs actual money.
Until backup is as cheap, reliable, and able to store as much as the rest of consumer tech, we'll get more of these on /. :-(
In the mean time, tape drives are worth the money if your data's the result of real work or investment. If it's archived video downloaded off the net, then a few throwaway drives are best.
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
So can anybody say something to rsync-like features in other backup software? Surely there should be loads of commercial ones that do this differential copying thing?
Just googled for it and at least found DeltaCopy, a Windows wrapper around rsync incorporating a scheduler. If that's done properly, it should be alright for the average Windows user.
And honestly I'm not all that worried about backing up with modern operating systems.
Modern operating systems don't protect you from:
Best thing at the moment for home backup is to mount an encrypted external hard drive and copy to it, then take it off-site. If you think that sounds over the top, then I predict one day you'll be sitting at your terminal saying "aw, shit".
Advice: on VPS providers
That's a fairly naive cost assessment. The lifespan of that SSD is much shorter than the 2.5" drive. I'd suspect that it is at least half as long, making it in fact 400 times as expensive, and (most importantly) requiring more frequent backups.
Assuming what you say is true (due to wear levelling and the utter lack of moving parts, I'm not inclined to agree), the issue I brought up is still there. It's only more expensive if you reach the threshold.
Everybody has different things to consider. Cost-per-gig is not a one-size-fits-all answer.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately none of these strategies protect my from a major accident like a house fire. I just need to make sure not to do something stupid like fall asleep with a cigarette in my mouth.
You could buy a media rated fire safe.
You'll pay a stiff premium over the price of a safe that only has to protect paper. "Fahrenheit 451" and all that.
You might also consider renting a safety deposit box at your bank.
For porn I'd want instant immolation. Media no more durable than flash paper.
I heard this on a podcast somewhere. I don't remember which one....
The 3-2-1 rule.
3 copies of your data
on 2 different types of media
and 1 copy offsite.
Personally I use Macs, so my strategy involves Time Machine and an external HD AND a copy of Mozy for online/offsite backup.
On the LInux side you could use an external drive and either rsync, or any number of Time Machine clones, and for your offsite backups, you could use Jungle Disk to do online backups to Amazon S3.
"I want to make a ham sandwich. Conventionally these contain bread and ham, but I'm an idiot so I want to make it from dog hair and epoxy resin".
Leela: And that sandwich you're eating is made of old discarded sandwiches. Nothing just gets thrown away.
Fry: The future is disgusting!
Bullshit.
I've got a pretty large collection of old games. One of the things I've noticed about them is that, even for factory-pressed discs, you have to deal with the following factors:
- Unsealing. If the disc wasn't sealed properly, it will begin to oxidize. Several of mine have done this. It moves from the edge inwards.
- Plastic clouding. Even if it's stored in a cool, dry place and kept out of sunlight, clouding can and will occur. The cheaper the disc was produced, the sooner this happens. Many of my older titles (Civ 2 among them) suffer from precisely this problem and that's one reason I began taking them all and making ISO backups just in case as well.
- Physical usage. If it's something you use often, wear and tear occurs. Games have access patterns that are clearly different from music CD's. For one, music CD's tend to spin at the standard 1X rate (unless you're seeking), which doesn't cause the disc to deform much (as opposed to full-speed data access... see the high-speed footage from the Mythbusters ep on this if you want). Two, data CD's access a lot more erratically - and the more "back and forth" you have, the more likely you are to scratch the disc from ordinary use. If you put an older CD (not physically designed for higher-speed drives) into a modern higher-speed drive, you can make the problem worse.
Of course, sure, you could abuse them. I saw a Rock Band disc once that looked like an LP - someone had put it in at a convention 15 feet away from the DDR setup, and the room had been bouncing so violently that the disc read head had literally put grooves into the disc. But I doubt that's what happened to the gpp's Civ 2 disc.
Your statements are logically consistent, but I respectfully agree with Mr. Coward for the following reasons.
1) Main features of backups non-exhaustively include the ability to restore files and to restore functionality. You might be able to restore functionality by ripping from a commercial disc, but the resulting byte stream will almost certainly be different from the original. Even with respect to restoring functionality, ripping from a commercial disc will almost certainly take longer than copying an encoded file with the same human level content. And that does not include important meta-data such as ratings, access times, album organization/collections, album covers, etc.
2) Clearly the intent of this entire story is to discuss best practices with respect to backing up user generated data, of which one special case is audio-visual content, of which one special case is content which is available commercially as pressed discs.
In short, you have presented one relatively expensive solution for one special case of a special case, which as you have acknowledged, is not generalizable as you've described it to the problem being discussed in the story. Pressed discs as a backup solution fit neither the spirit nor the letter of the problem described.
About the only way to discuss pressed discs with relevance to a home backup method would be to point out the costs of getting a disc pressed for really irreplaceable data (currently around $10^3 to $10^4 per disc), or the relative merits of the various optical disc formats with respect to the probable availability of devices to read them at various points in the future (signals from a CD-* can be read with a flatbed scanner, but blue laser devices which can record at a higher density are more likely to be relevant for data storage in two decades than red laser devices).
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
Well here I go again:
1) You need to have a backup strategy first:. The strategy will be elaborated according to your needs and the amount of risk that you are willing to take.
2) Incremental backups should be part of your strategy.
3) You should backup on a second computer to prevent against a single point of failure (e.g. you controller). It is best that this computer is physically hosted at a different site than your production computer to prevent against disasters. If not, you should at least take full images once in a while that you store somewhere else. Again, this all depends on the amount of risk that you are willing to take, no backup solution is 100% proof. A fire at my bank, a fire at my prod site and a fire at my backup site occurring at about the same time would leave me totally screwed.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1292323&cid=28588177&art_pos=40
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1292323&cid=28588079&art_pos=41
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1277921&cid=28430691&art_pos=76
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1277921&cid=28429713&art_pos=78
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
It's further to the post office. What's more it's quite difficult to drive up stairs.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
From common usage (rather than one pedant), it's a verb, a noun, and an adjective.
Verb: You should backup your data
Noun: All my data is on a backup
Adjective: You need a backup disk
Exactly, this is why my backup only takes up 1.8TB instead of 1.9TB, because I was able to properly identify the stuff that really needed backed up.
Fear is the mind killer.