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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?
If so, any remotely accessible computer (*nix box) with a wifi card will work.
Nobodies Prefect
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A neighbour? Why not hook up an external panel antenna to the side of your place aimed at their place and have a NAS with wifi on it (may need external antenna for your NAS as well but maybe not). Then you dont even have any wires to worry about and its still on your network...encrypt the NAS in case of possible break and enters..
I mean that would fit the bill in terms of being a fairly easy automatic setup. Just rsync your machine to the remote backup at midnight every day, or you can even do it ever hour or ever 5 minutes if you want. Obviously any scheme can run into "you have too much data to deal with RIGHT NOW" but there's no cure for that. I guess the other option is sneakernet. You might swing something with a neighbor that involves using wireless. If the guy next door can pick up the signal from your router you could locate a NAS box in his place, etc. This of course presumes you really trust your neighbor...
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
parkour disk over once in a while.
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.
1) Convince your neighbour to be a part of this;
2) Dig a small trench stretching from your garden to your neighbour's;
3) Lay a properly protected CAT6 ethernet cable;
4) profit?
Should 1) fail, do it surreptitiously.
I would use carbon copy cloner for the mac. as long as the remote drive appears mounted on your computer every once and a while, it will do the backup. You can configure it to automatically fire when the drive is mounted (also after the designated time period), so the not-always-on thing isn't an issue.
Also not sure about the low-bandwidth restore. maybe you walk over for that one instance. Hopefully it's rare!
Routers and NAS Devices are computers that you leave on all the time.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
If you can convince a friend to swap out his/her wifi router for a new one with the port you need, then all you need is to hook up a hard drive to the usb port on the back. Put a replacement OS on the router for additional features and you can use rsync over ssh. Since the wifi router will be an always on device, it would make a good backup target. Use dynamic dns or some homegrown ping system to find the router if it changes IP address.
Of course, your friend better stay that way if he has all your data.
Bitorrent sync is a very simple way to go if you don't want to be too worried about backup administration. Just set up a read-only share for directories on the remote machine and put password protected encryption on the remote share.
That will give you at least some measure of protection from the remote server owner reading your files and they won't be able to nuke your local copies. Btsync is the most no-fuss, transparent backup solution I've used so far. I've got 4 personal machines that it's syncing right now and aside from a couple minor issues in earlier releases, it's been reliable, fast and has a minimal amount of administration you have to deal with.
Where's the challenge? What's the piece you can't figure out?
A DD-WRT compatible WiFi router with USB port goes for $30, and draws all of 2W of power.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B009AO64E8
Connect a USB hard drive, enable mass storage, and SSH access. Use sdparm to set it to spin-down after 30 minutes of inactivity. Install rsync. Give it a free dyndns address (or some other service that screws free customers less).
Stick this contraption in a datacenter, under your desk in your office, in a friends/neighbor's house, etc. If you can't get them to open a port on their firewall, then you'll need to do "reverse SSH" tunneling, but it'll still work just a bit slower.
Hell, if you can find a location to put it that's under a KM from your home, you could even skip the internet requirement, and use WiFi for connectivity. You could even do without the power grid, setting up a modest solar panel to charge a 12V battery... My USB HDD enclosure runs on 12V directly, and a $5 car cell phone charger can provide the 5V@2A the listed router needs:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0079BLTPS
In any case, you'd just need to figure out the rsync command-line options to run on your home computers to copy the differences over the wire with the minimal overhead.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I doubt Anonymous Coward has a job. He posts here several times an hour, every hours, 24 by 7. Unless his job is spamming out these ripoff web sites.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
"Walk over a disk once in a while." Seriously, just once a week trade a drive with your neighbour. I know this is /. where complexity wins, but jebus.
Wifi and BitTorrent Sync?
I personally love BitTorrent Sync...
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
I have three options I'll present for you. One matches your headline, one is cheap, and one is really, really solid.
The option that most matches your headline would be to use a WIFI NAS at the next door neighbor's house. Use any of the many good backup software packages. More on what a "good" backup system is in a moment.
Something I used to do was have two external drives. On Mondays, I'd switch out the drive in the house for the one in the car, which would go to work with me. The drawback to that is it's not fully automatic, so sometimes I'd forget or be in a rush. That leads us to the attributes of a good backup system:
Backups must be fully automatic, otherwise you'll stop doing them regularly.
Backups should be rotated. A midnight backup is useless if you are hacked at 11:55 PM, or discover a problem 2 days later. You must have access to older backups.
Backups must be offsite. Fires and burglars will take your backup if it is on site.
Backups must be accessible. As you said, spending two weeks downloading your data isn't acceptable.
Backups must be tested. Our experience with web servers indicates that approximately 60% of backups provided by hosting providers don't actually work when you try to restore them
To meet all of the above requirements, we use an enterprise grade system. It may be overkill for your needs, but then again the $8 / month version may be just what you want. It provides several offsite backups from different points in time and they are BOOTABLE. You can pull down a file or two, run a program or service remotely, or restore a full system.
3-4 Mbps to transfer 1TB is no good, as you said, but you actually have 200 Mbps available if you use the system we use. If you need the entire 1 TB, not just a small part of it, the whole 1TB bootable drive will be delivered to your front door within 12 hours. You may know the old saying "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full if tapes.". With a 1TB drive, the bandwidth of FedEX is over 200 Mbps.
What we use is called Clonebox. It's designed more for business, but it may either work for you, or give you some ideas.
many larger fire resistant safes (gun safes, etc.) have fire stopped power and network feedthroughs. Put a NAS in one* and plug it into your LAN.
*Assuming you have the justification to purchase such a safe for other valuables.
Have gnu, will travel.
I backup my iMac to a Time Capsule over WiFi. It happens to be located in my home, but it could just as well be next door, wouldn't make a difference. So if your neighbour is what we city dwellers think "neighbour" means and not "the next ranch ten miles down the river", that might work.
So basically, get a WiFi-enabled harddrive. Or a WiFi router with a USB port. Initial backup via USB or whatever, and incremental updates are usually small enough that they can happen in the background. On the Mac that's built-in, I'm sure there's software for Linux and maybe that hobby OS from Redmond a few people here use.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
"rsync at midnight". At 8:00 AM, discover that your filesystem got hosed at 10:00 PM, so you now have two copies of garbage.
Do not just sync periodically. Approximately everyone I've seen try that method got screwed in the end. They'd discover that they got rooted two weeks before, they'd overwritten an important file two days before, etc. You must ROTATE and then sync to be doing anything more than pretending that you have a backup.
me.
The attributes of a good backup system:
Backups must be fully automatic, otherwise you'll stop doing them regularly.
Backups should be rotated. A midnight backup is useless if you are hacked at 11:55 PM, or discover a problem 2 days later. You must have access to older backups.
Backups must be offsite. Fires and burglars will take your backup if it is on site.
Backups must be accessible. As OP said, spending two weeks downloading your data isn't acceptable.
Backups must be tested. Our experience with web servers indicates that approximately 60% of backups provided by hosting providers don't actually work when you try to restore them
To meet all of the above requirements, we use an enterprise grade system called Clonebox. Other systems may be more applicable for home use.
Agreed, since the original comment specifies "a site I own" then colo is really the only one that meets that requirement.
If he were to relax the requirements a bit, there are many good cloud backup services out there that probably meet everything except the ownership requirement.
Most cloud backup companies will be happy to dump a copy to disk and send the package through overnight shipping, or 2nd day, or whatever shipment method you are willing to pay for. You will need to pay for the disk and the shipping and a small fee, but it is much faster than trying to recover via download.
You would need to do the same thing with a colo backup, the only real difference is you are trusting a third party to do all the work. It generally works better that way because they specialize in backup and you are just a single client, so they can do it much cheaper than you could with colo.
Contact your potential online backup company. Ask about the costs to get a copy of the backed-up data shipped to you. The good companies do that kind of recovery disk shipments all the time.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
That's a higher quality response than often found here on /. when someone refutes a post, thank you.
Too painful and expensive. This can be made much simpler. I have two sets of backups I keep: an internal 2 TB hard drive for local backups, and a pair of 1 TB external drives for off site backups. Every Monday, I unplug the external drive at my house as I head out the door for work. At work, I put it into my locker and retrieve the other drive, which I bring home with me when I leave for the day. When I get home, I plug it into the vacant USB and power cord, and presto: it's online and ready for backup! My software (I use ShadowProtect Desktop) does a full backup of the machine every Sunday night, so Monday mornings it is always ready for the swap again. It's a very quick and painless way to have offsite backups without spending a fortune on comparatively slow Internet bandwidth.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
One other note: this works as long as you have any semi-private place at work where you can put the drive. It could be a desk drawer or something else. I don't see any reason why there is a requirement that it be stored at a site you "own and control". Just put heavy AES encryption on the backups as I do, just in case the drive falls into other hands. Then your only real risk is financial loss of the disk itself. I know other people at my workplace that all do the same thing. And if you want heavier security and don't mind paying for it and taking extra time, a safe deposit box at a local bank is a good fallback, and certainly much cheaper then a colo. You'd have to have pretty deep pockets for colo space and the bandwidth to back up to and from that location, making it impractical for most people.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
I am using a ReadyNAS Duo running Free BSD. The NAS is in a cupboard a a friend a few houses away.
For syncing I use Unison. The initial backup was created onsite. Every night I run an incremental backup. When local drives are destroyed it is only a short walk to get my data back.
It all works like a charm.
I use Crashplan - it doesn't need to be on all the time, and your neighbours computer doesn't need to be on all the time (the one that has your USB disk plugged into it).
Indeed! You have two options. Either via network or physical disk. If you do it via network, Crashplan will perform the backup when both PC's are online. If you need to restore you can copy the backup repository from your neighbor's computer onto a physical disk and restore from that at home.
Alternatively you can simply use a couple of USB disks, set up as two separate destinations for the backup set in Crashplan. Keep one at home and one at your neighbor. Once a week or whatever you swap them. Crashplan will automatically detect the disk when you plug it in and start syncing the backup.
The best part of this is that the data is encrypted in either case, and IIRC you can do all this using a free account. The paid options only matters if you also want to store the data in "the cloud".
Write to HD locally, mail it to yourself.
If you always have one in transit, you're safe.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Now that you can easily fit 3-6TB in an external enclosure, you can do some pretty flexible things with backups.
Here's my system.
Local 3TB drive in system, mirrored to 2nd internal 3TB drive
Nightly, I rsync that data to a 3TB mirrored NAS
Weekly I rsync that data to a 2nd 3TB mirrored NAS
Monthly, I rsync to an external 3TB enclosure via USB
When I go to the bank to deposit checks every month or two, I swap the 3TB external USB enclosure with an identical one in my safe deposit box.
Only costs me $50 a year for the safe deposit box, and I don't have to worry about my neighbors breaking anything.
Also, I have a 2nd manual version of my backup scripts featuring --delete for when storage starts to fill.
-- Dave
up 12 days, 22:30, 2 users, load averages: 993.20, 994.21, 994.56
*makes note to limit user processes...
Oddly enough I just caught an episode of The Linux Action Show last night that included a product that seems to have exactly what you'd want -- although it sure ain't cheap. Look for: DiskStation vs FreeNAS | LAS s29e03.
I'm at work so I can't get the details for you right now, but they did a brief review of a 4-bay NAS running Linux, which has some "app-store" style functionality...and it's a full linux system. There's an app that'll mirror the entire NAS to Amazon Glacier, although then you've got your network speed bottleneck (though having a one-button restore may help there) but there's no reason you couldn't set one of these up with your neighbor or wherever and access it via whatever network. It's very high speed, very low power, but it runs an Atom processor and a Linux distro so you could probably just toss your favorite PC backup solution on there. Could probably also grab that Glacier or a similar app, set it up to constantly *restore* nightly, and push the backups out from your machine...so you're only pushing incremental changes which shouldn't be bad, and the drive syncs those up to a local copy every night.