Ask Slashdot: Simple Backups To a Neighbor?

First time accepted submitter renzema writes "I'm looking for a way to do near-site backups — backups that are not on my physical property, but with a hard drive still accessible should I need to do a restore (let's face it — this is where cloud backup services are really weak — 1 TB at 3-4mb downloads just doesn't cut it). I've tried crashplan, but that requires that someone has a computer on all the time and they don't ship hard drives to Sweden. What I want is to be able to back up my Windows and Mac to both a local disk and to a disk that I own that is not on site. I don't want a computer running 24x7 to support this — just a router or NAS. I would even be happy with a local disk that is somehow mirrored to a remote location. I haven't found anything out there that makes this simple. Any ideas?" What, besides "walk over a disk once in a while," would you advise?

Comments

crashplan might still work

[j-beda]

Crashplan certainly does the "neighbour backup" quite well, and I think it is smart enough to wait around until both machines are online at the same time to do its magic, if you don't want to have the "destination machine" having to be running 24/7. You can use it to do the initial backup to an external drive and then walk that drive over to the neighbour's place for the subsequent incremental backups. One used to be able to buy a "Crashplan+" license which had a few more features like multiple backup sets for different destinations, but I don't see any way to get that type of license without signing up for a cloud backup subscription. Perhaps if you sign up for a few months and then cancel the cloud backup subscription part, your software might retain the "+" features.

Hard drive rotation

[Skapare]

What I do is make incremental backups to a set of 3 hard drives (which I just recently upgraded to USB 3.0 and 2TB each). I rotate them to/from my work location (but you could do this with a friend's or family member's house). I take one to work, and bring the other one that was at work back with me at the end of the day, and run the backup to it that night or the next day or two. I rotate about twice a week since usually a few days of lost data due to, say, my house burning down and destroying the backup drive, too, would be the least of my worries. So there is always at least one at home and at least one at work. If you are more paranoid, get 5 drives and do it more often. Or maybe use 2 sites away from home. If you work for the NSA ... uh ... nevermind.

I use a black one, a red one, and a blue one. I did not get the titanium one.

Re:that's roughly useless without rotation

[Giant Electronic Bra]

While I'm not arguing with your analysis, rsync is still a perfectly valid way to create offsite recovery copies of your filesystem, which is what the OP appears to desire. As ls671 noted, you can also use the backup dir option. You can also backup the remote server in whatever way you wish, which adds another layer. Along with backup dirs you can get a perfectly fine father, grandfather, son recovery set using something as simply as tar (though star will work better). Still rsync by itself will protect you from physical loss of your drive (theft, fire, etc).

The point being, rsync isn't 'useless' at all, even just used on its own, and we really don't know all the other components of the OP's data protection strategy. Obviously we could devise some elaborate plan for him using various tools that would provide for every eventuality. Go ahead and do so. Frankly I assumed he was sophisticated enough based on his question to supply himself with those answers.

Re:Simple solution is the best

[grep -v '.*' *]

Walk over and interact with your neighbor?

What, are you kidding? I just want to use his house and his power, I don't want to interact with the bastard!