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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?
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.
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
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
"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.
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.
Network speed was identified as a problem by the questioner. With a neighbour, perhaps on the opposite site of the street where a fire is unlikely to spread, a fast wifi link could be used.
On "pro" versions of Windows you can back up automatically to any network drive, including a low end low cost NAS. Doesn't Crashplan support backup to your own NAS as well as their cloud?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
"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.
Except that's flawed on a few levels
Your surburban wouldn't move if you loaded 10,000kg of micro SD cards in the boot.
You'd spend decades loading the data on the 20 million cards, even with hundreds of readers - and you'll need at least 2,000 because MicroSD sockets are only rated to 10,000 insertions.
Tranferring it from one side of USA to the other, costs $200k per mile + gas + tow truck because you bent your axels with too many MicroSD cards.
You're all but guaranteed data corruption, since you're transferring much more data than the unrecoverable bit error rate.
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".
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.