Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Best On-Site Backup Plan?
An anonymous reader writes "I know most people use backup services in the cloud now, off-site, but does anyone have good ideas on how to best protect data without it leaving the site? I'm a photographer and, I shoot 32GB to 64GB in a couple of hours. I've accumulated about 8TB of images over the past decade and just can't imagine paying to host them somewhere off-site. I don't make enough money as it is. Currently I just redundantly back them up to hard drives in different rooms of my house, but that's a total crapshoot — if there's a fire, I'd be out of luck. Does anyone keep a hard disk or NAS inside a fireproof safe? In a bunker in the cellar? In the detached garage? It's so much data that even doing routine backups bogs the system down for days. I'd love suggestions, especially from gamers or videographers who have TBs of data they need to back up, on what options there are with a limited budget to maximize protection."
There are offsite options besides the cloud. I shuffle hard drives between work and home. If you work from home, you could do the same at a friend's house or something.
http://iosafe.com
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Works like a charm
megaupload
in the short run and in the long run. Also, storing locally does nothing to protect you from flood, fire, theft, etc... Backblaze is $5/mo, unlimited storage. I'm sure there are others with similar/better deals. What's a NAS inside a fireproof safe going to cost?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
if you earn revenue from it, pay for backups
if it has sentimental value then think about paying for backups
hard drives go bad all the time so if you're going to back up to hard disk and its important buy a few external ones and keep them in different locations
First, going strictly by your requirements, I would suggest either a fireproof safe or fireproof drive enclosure. I don't have experience with the enclosures, but the safe itself should be able to handle your normal everyday fire and protect your data.
However, I'd suggest that you don't store your safe at your location at all. Surely you have a friend or someone you know that would let you borrow a few square feet of their basement for the safe. This would create a physcial barrier that would enhance your securiy if not always convenient. I'd also recommend a second copy somewhere else if this data is that important to you.
Remember that as with (almost) anything else, there is a cost-benefit tradeoff. I'm not convinced that a "cloud" based solution is your best bet anyway. But a simple, low tech solution seems to be what you need anyhow.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Have you thought of getting a safety deposit box at a bank? Usually they're in a fire resistant box inside a fire resistant room.
Store backup copies of disks in there, and swap them out, similar to tape backup strategies.
You could put some backup drives in a safe deposit box. With as much as you're storing, it may be beneficial to store just the bare drives.
Any pro photographer will tell you that 95% of what you shoot is crap. Prune it mercilessly.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Safe deposit boxes aren't expensive and they're not a bad offsite location to store copies of you data on external hard drives. I don't really like using hard disks for long-term archiving but it's one of the lowest cost practical solutions. A tape drive would be something to look into but they're not cheap.
http://www.crashplan.com/
Unlimited backup for $5/mo to the cloud. FREE backup to other computers using their software which is cross platform on Windows, Mac, and Linux. I'd purchase an external HD(s), backup to it then get a friend to put it at their house. You can adopt the backup on their computer and then backup to their computer (FREE) and to your external HD(s) with their software automatically from your own computer.
Or you can just sync it to the cloud, but 8TB might take a while to get everything up there.
FunOne
In addition to your "hard drives in different rooms" strategy, consider keeping a copy offsite in a bank safe deposit box.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
Repeat after me:
Raid is not a backup
And RAID 0 is never used for reliability as it has no redundancy - the more disks, the higher chance of failure. You must have meant RAID 1.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
"does anyone have good ideas on how to best protect data without it leaving the site?"
If it's not leaving the site, you aren't protecting it. At the very least, get a few portable drives and rotate backups to a relative's house.
Any company that I've ever worked for that had money to spend did tape backups and stored them in a vault offsite. Tapes get verified as they're written, and don't have parts that fail like hard drives do. They have a 30-year shelf life, and you'll always be able to find a way to read them in the future. Go to ebay, buy a used LTO3 or LTO4 drive, (400GB and 800GB uncompressed, respectively). Tapes are about $25/ea for LTO3. Then put a backup somewhere safe.
I see this all the time with photographers. Bottom line: your photographs are not all that valuable. Some are, yes. Most are not. Pare them down. Delete the bad ones, the failures, the misfocussed, the bad exposures. The greatest photographers the world has ever known are only known for a few dozen photos at best. Do you really need an 8 TB photographic archive? Who's going to ever look at them all? Save the best. Delete the rest.
Not to sound like a shill (I'm a fanboy, which, while different, will sound somewhat similar in practice), Crashplan has a free option available where you and a friend can both run it and can use it to back up to each other. If you have a photographer friend (ideally in a place far enough away that you won't be hit by the same natural disaster), this can be a pretty good option. It'll likely take awhile to do the backups, however, and you'll also need to have adequate hard drives on hand to store not only your own work, but also your friend's, which may get in the way of going cheap.
That said, for $140 (the price of a hard drive or two) you can get a 4-year subscription for their cloud hosting with an unlimited backup size. The company I work at uses their business-level product, and I recently started using Crashplan+ at home for my own computers. While it does take awhile to back up, it's painless to do so. At least so far, I prefer it quite a bit over Carbonite, which is what I was previously using at home.
Give your mom a box of backups and ask her to hold on to it, it is "stuff you made"
She'll never get rid of it.
and if the house catches fire, it will be the first thing she grabs when she runs out.
I like microcars
Set up a RAID 6 array at a friends or relatives house. Do an initial dump of all of your data to it before you bring it over to them. Offer to pay their Internet bill in exchange. Set up a VPN and run rsync between your place and theirs.
That has got to be about the cheapest and simplest off site back up you can possible have. You can even write off the cost of their Internet as a necessary business expense if you can get a receipt (since you are a photographer for a living and not a hobby).
Because they are rated to prevent paper from catching on fire. And what temperature does this happen (hand in your geek card if you don't know the answer!): 451 Farenheit.
Think your hard drive will survive 451 degrees?
Yes, you can get a special fire safe to protect media, but it is more money.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
If you're going to put things in a fire rated container, there are a few things to consider. Those containers are not "fire proof" by any means. Get one whose rating is reasonably high as they will buy you some time.
Most house fires are either a basic 'room and contents' or a much more involved fire where whole floors are exposed (and largely consumed) by flame.
When you put your fire rated container somewhere, consider that fire burns upwards, and the thermal difference from floor to ceiling is around 400 degrees F on average. Before you put the container in the basement corner, remember that firefighters use water to put out fires. Lots of water. 150-200GPM per handline and 1000-2000GPM for the big pipes on the ladder trucks. Most of the damage in a house fire is from water. You'll get us much as 6-12 inches of flooding per floor (until the firefighters cut holes in the floor to drain it so the floors don't collapse.
Also should the roof or ceiling collapse, the best places to have things are near the corners of the load bearing walls.
This is my long way of saying store your fire rated container on a solid hardwood (not particle board) or metal shelf, about knee height on a low floor near the corner by load bearing walls. This way in the event the whole house is a write off, you still have a reasonable chance of saving some of your data and personal effects.
"Omnis tuus capsa sunt inesse nos"
I use a backup service called Crashplan. They have clients for Linux/Mac/Windows and support backups either to your local network (free), "friends" machines in a p2p type configuration (free) or to their servers (paid). Everything's encrypted locally and the client app is pretty decent IMHO. Best of all is that the paid plans are pretty reasonable - I have the unlimited plan for something like $100 a year, and it really is unlimited (well, they claim it is and I have no reason to doubt them). I currently have about 3TB up there so I don't see why you'd have an issue.
The way I have it configured is that all the machines on my network backup to both my local fileserver and to their cloud. The local backup has a higher priority so any changes get pushed over the lan immediately and then batched up and sent offsite over the slower link. Speedwise I can't saturate my uplink when uploading to them but I get a pretty consistent 1-2MB/s, so figure maybe 100GB a day? I think my initial seed took a couple of weeks. I've done a couple of small test restores and download speeds were similar (although in all but complete disasters I'd be restoring from my local fileserver which is obviously far faster).
Disclaimer - Not related to the company in any way, just a very happy customer.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Look for a used LTO3/LTO4 tape drive, then bulk-buy tapes.
Write each set of content to two tapes, ideally of different brands, and store in different places if you're really concerned.
I've been backing up to LTO3 tapes for ~3 years now, i've got 50+ tapes, mostly in my safety deposit box at the bank (cost $75/year)
LTO4 based on eBay prices right now would be an initial expenditure of ~$1k for the drive, and $25-30 per 800GB of storage.
The cloud options aren't really feasible for me, as the upload time & bandwidth cost is horrendous.
ICQ# : 30269588
"I used to be an idealist, but I got mugged by reality."
My RAID goes to 11, man....
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Gluster can't be told where to store something. So even in a gigantic cluster you still run into the problem that 2 duplicates of a file can be located on two storage nodes that are physically near to eachother. Let's say right where your fire begins ..
And if you run a server that runs a Crashplan compatable OS like Linux or Windows, you can put that somewhere and back up via Crashplan to that server. Personally I use a BSD box with ZFS as the repository.
You can mix and match al the options, backup local, backup to friend, backup to the Crashplan cloud.
Crashplan does a good job of compressing and de duping data, so you might not have to upload all 8TB.
Oh, and you can pre-seed by sending data on a portable drive to Crashplan and then just catch up.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
As a photographer myself (Though only around 4TB of photos at current) here's my setup:
Onsite backup: Drobo to Drobo.
Offsite backup: Backblaze. I pay $4/mo (2 years prepaid). This is a secondary backup. It still has everything, but I rely on the local backup to retrieve something should my primary storage fail, and the offsite is for when things burn to the ground or someone steals my stuff or lightning takes everything out. Really it's cheap, it's just that initial backup which takes an eternity and might get you in trouble with your ISP. Fortunately I was able to use the local university 1gbit connection to reduce my initial backup time to just 18 days (straight).
Zing!
Upload your photos. All of them. To flickr, facebook, whatever. The good ones will survive. The great ones will be shared. The ones you're ashamed of will go viral and you'll never get rid of them again, no matter how much you want them to.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
There is no "safe" on-site storage option. My brother had an expensive expensive fire-proof gun safe at his house - it weighed over 500 lbs.... After his house literally burnt to the ground (rural area, no one home to alert the first department, by the time the neighbor down the road saw the fire and called the fire department, all they could do was put out the fire in the surrounding brush (and cars)), he couldn't even identify any remaining pieces of the safe or the guns that were in it in the debris.
If you want your data safe, store it off site, preferably in another part of the country so it's not subject to the same local disasters as your house. Mailing snapshots of your data to an out of state relative is probably best.
Fireboxes are designed to keep paper from bursting into flame. Sure, your hard drive is mostly metal, but that PCB board on the back could melt, warp, lose solder, etc.
I guess the part I don't understand is how any of the solutions involving buying another hard drive (or three) and securing them are somehow cheaper than a tool like www.crashplan.com that is $50 a year for unlimited storage. Sure, the upload of 8TB will take a while.. so what? a single T1 (1.5Mbs) line can upload a few TB a month.
Then its all offsite. Worst case, just download the crashplan sofware, and have a buddy install it too, and use the free person to person backup feature (only pay to store on their servers) to have an offsite backup. Have him bring his PC over for a night, to sync up the initial copy.. then you will just send changes over the internet.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
there are better options than that.
for starters, 100GB archival gold Bluray XL discs
digistor makes them and guarantees them for life.
If you buy a 25pk spindle, they include a free drive.
They're using their grammar skills there.
HDD's are more than just cases with platters. At those temperatures expect circuit boards to fry, magnets to lose their strength, seals to melt, connectors to "fall off", voice coils to become wires, spindles to warp, plastic to drip, etc. Transplanting platters is NOT something you do yourself and costs THOUSANDS to get done professionally (and hope it works).
Crashplan is likely to be a reasonable option, including the free version, particularly if you're working from an office that is separate from your home, or if you have a friend, relative, or given the size of your daily data increase perhaps just a neighbor who's willing to accept a machine for you. Notes on that at the end.
What you'll want to do is set up a backup machine with plenty of disk space. This will likely need to be a single monster volume and you probably want to ensure that it's expandable; I can't help with the details of that but others here certainly can. What are the good expandable RAID options?
The backup machine will receive the initial backup sitting next to the source machine, but will then be moved offsite. Given the volume of data you described, creating a "seed" backup and just moving that would likely be more hassle than it's worth.
All machines involved should have Gigabit Ethernet, and I strongly recommend investing in a Gigabit network switch or better, an ABGN router with Gigabit ports. If you can find one, I like the WNDR3700v2 (that v2 is REALLY IMPORTANT and hard to find these days) running OpenWRT, but there are plenty of other options. You're still going to need an Internet connection for the machines to identify each other (I believe this uses Crashplan's servers even if you're not backing up to them).
Once you have all that set up, you're just going to install Crashplan on both machines, run your backup, and move the backup machine to its new home. Crashplan assigns unique IDs to machines and uses those for coordinating the backups between them, so the fact that the backup server has moved won't cause a problem.
Finally for the note about "just a neighbor" - if you're creating tens or hundreds of gigs of new data per month, just hosting your offsite backup may be a problem for many people (think bandwidth caps), and transmitting it may be just as big a problem for you. If you have or can find a reasonably close neighbor that you'll trust with an encrypted copy of your data and who's willing to host your machine, I'm going to strongly suggest that you set up the machine with a good wireless connector and have it in their house but on your wireless. Ideally this person would not be in the same building you're in (assuming condo/apartment). Wireless-N at 2.4GHz is likely to be your best bet for range, though it's more prone to interference than 5.5GHz.
fencepost
just a little off
Or just use BD-R (*non*-LTH) discs. Millenniata discs are basically BD-R media burned to look like a DVD to the player. They're great when DVD-compatibility is important, but kind of a waste if you can make use of 25-gig BD-R capacity (BD-R is cheaper per-disc than Millenniata).
Just insist on *original*-type inorganic BD-R, and stay awy from "LTH" BD-R. The same way that Millenniata is like BD R media in DVD form, LTH is DVD media in Blu-Ray form.