Online Backup Solutions? 422
OmnipotentEntity asks: "I'm an IT Manager (and also a lifeguard, don't ask) for a small private club. Recently parts of our server's RAID went bad just as Hurricane Dennis hit, making life a living hell for me and everyone involved. So, I figured perhaps backing up information online would make stuff like this less incredibly painful. A quick browse of Google will show that there are a lot of businesses offering automatic, offsite, online backup solutions. It seems it's becoming a big thing. The largest problem is that they all look alike -- same implementation, similar websites, it looks like someone came through this part of the Internet with a cookie cutter, and by the information available on the website and pricing (which may or may not be available without filling out 100 forms) I can't tell a good company from bad company. I've never had any experience with any of these companies, and I wanted to know if any of you guys had, and if so what were your experiences with them? What are the things to look for? What are the things to avoid? Am I barking up the wrong tree?"
Backups online (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Backups online (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Backups online (Score:3, Insightful)
Bzzt, wrong. Dunno why I'm responding to some A.C...
Zip or tar/gzip/bzip2 your files. Encrypt with GPG. Take MD5 checksum. Upload to backup company.
If your disk crashes, there is a nonzero and generally pretty decent chance that you will get your data back. You can use your MD5 checksum to verify bit-for-bit integrity.
Contrast that with the 0% chan
Re:Backups online (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.lingnu.com/backup.html [lingnu.com]
You hack one server. One copy of the data gets corrupted. Second copy, however, is on a server that can only initiate outgoing connections. You cannot hack that one from outside. By the time the data gets synced, the hash proves to be wrong, and we know we were hacked. Restore from good backup, and we're done.
Shachar
Re:Backups online (Score:3, Insightful)
We use a new symmetric key for each file. The symmetric key is stored in the encrypted file, encrypted using a public key. All you, as a backup client, have to do is to store that one private key in a safe place.
We went one step further. We use an encryption mechanism we developed to make sure the encryption works well with rsync.
Knowing the
No, that's why we are still using AES, a
Re:Backups online (Score:2, Insightful)
A reputable company should have better network security than "a small, private club". With some due-dillegence in checking out the company (beyond "Ask Slashdot"), the threat of hacking shouldn't be a reason to avoid online-backups altogether.
Re:Backups online (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Backups online (Score:2)
Re:Backups online (Score:3, Informative)
if ($timeToMoveDataOverWire * 10) > ($timeToShipDataOverLand) {use removable backup media}
I use 10% as a number, as if there is a weather related reason that your business is offline, there is a good chance that other businesses in the area are suffering from the same
You confused backups with availability. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're paranoid then run your own backup host over ssh at a trusted someone's personal connection. But there's no solution superior to online backups if the incremental changes in files can be met with 100% of your extra nightly bandwidth. Try backup PC on sourceforge. Try using more than 1 at different locations.
Parent has a good, but different point: If you have a lot of data it's going to take a ton of time to get it back up. If this is likely to be a problem, then by all means find faster ways to ship your data. One way would be to drive and get whichever of your mulitple backup machines is closest. (If you only have 1 backup machine make a copy to take with you and leave the original where it was)
But another way, especially if you don't have access to the online backups, is to drive a harddrive full of stuff somewhere. IF your backup provider can do an restore from a partially recovered backup (ie, rsync) you can keep extra physical backups lying around and still having the online "current" backup to save you. That is, you could bring in your extra HD from a month ago and just rsync the stuff that changed.
Re:You confused backups with availability. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Backups online (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Backups online (Score:5, Funny)
I can just imagine the look on people's faces when the article submitter, an IT Manager, goes to the staff and suggests gmail as a solution.
Some of us have these things called a J O B. At most jobs, 2GB is NOT enough space to backup all the core systems.
And again, what if the provider gets cracked?
I think I understand why you think 2GB is "plenty" of space.
usdatatrust.com (Score:3, Informative)
Offsite Co-op? (Score:5, Interesting)
Call me a commie - but why not?
Re:Offsite Co-op? (Score:2)
kind of along the lines of "real men backup to the usenet" or something along those lines.
I'd go for it, but how do you move the data? most people (in the US) are really strapped for upload BW.
-nB
Re:Offsite Co-op? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Offsite Co-op? (Score:2)
Watch this space.
Re:Offsite Co-op? (Score:2)
Did you watch TV on the morning of Sept 11, 2001?
Anybody who says "the revolution won't be televised" is well...wrong. (I know you, mi, aren't saying that.)
rsync+torrent=backup_cloud (Score:4, Interesting)
I was looking for a free application like that a few weeks ago and found this guy's nice write-up of desired features. [66.102.7.104]
Re:rsync+torrent=backup_cloud (Score:3)
Re:Offsite Co-op? (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, that sort of mechanism doesn't help if your purpose is to use backups for historical data retention, but then again, if that's your goal, online backup doesn't make sense anyway.
What would be nice would be for this sort of mechanism to be sufficiently simple that an idiot can understand it. You specify the number of unique copies (n) of your data based on how much you care about it. In exchange, you agree to store 2n times as many gigs of information for other people on your drives. That space is reserved in advance at upload time, and freed when you tell the software that the backup of that data is no longer needed.
To prevent abuse, laptops would not be allowed to participate, as the availability of data backed up on someone's laptop is dubious at best. Machines participating must have either a static IP or dynamic DNS (or, ideally, the software could automatically register some sort of free dyndns type name for you).
During the first 72 hours prior to the backup, the machine must respond to at least 75% of hourly requests for confirmation from other machines that have copies of its data. If it does not, it will be assumed to be a laptop and the data stored will be disposed of after 72 hours as space is needed. This means that you can use it if your machine is dying as a temporary backup mechanism, since the data won't go away immediately, but at the same time, will effectively prevent abusing the system by using it to backup people's laptops.
After 72 hours, the confirmation rate will decrease to once per day. A host that has been gone for more than two weeks will be assumed to have been abandoned. However, there should be a mechanism for making one machine double as a stand-in for a dead machine for an arbitrary period of time, so long as it provides enough storage to meet the original machine's obligations.
In addition to confirmation requests from the copyholder, the machine with the original data should attempt (daily) to contact each copyholder to verify that bidirectional connections are possible, thus ensuring that if the data needs to be recovered, it can be.
Obviously, since all data would be encrypted, the encyption key would be stored in a file on system being backed up. This means that you MUST back up if you ever want to recover your data....
Re:Offsite Co-op? (Score:3, Interesting)
The traffic should be minimized through the use of what I would call "data affinity". Data from a given source should naturally tend to congregate on the same servers as other data from a given source. This, coupled with internal data checksumming on each host, means that the number of messages should be relativel
Re:Offsite Co-op? (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Offsite Co-op? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oceanstore [berkeley.edu] is exactly what you described. From the website:
Re:Offsite Co-op? (Score:5, Interesting)
You store my data, I will store yours.
Error-corrected and replicated so that 50% of the cloud could disappear and you would still have 4 or 5 nines of reliability.
Per-file, content-dependant encryption (e.g. every file gets its own AES encryption key)
Free accounts have a 10:1 provided vs. consumed ratio (to cover replication and error-correction bloat, with the ratio expected to drop over time) and people who want to buy a better ratio or even not have to provide space can do so.
Access to data backed-up by any of your systems from any other system you have installed the software on. (No more need to fiddle with system-to-system sync to make sure you have access to all of your files.)
Sound interesting? If so, head over to Allmydata [allmydata.com] and sign up for the beta test. [Windows only at the moment, but OS X and Linux versions will be available in a couple of months...]
Re:Offsite Co-op? (Score:2)
Only few backup solutions offer encryption, though, and I've only heard of file-level encryption where the file names are transmitted in the clear (only the data itself is encrypted). In this case, this is clearly unacceptable.
great solution (Score:5, Informative)
Re:great solution (Score:2)
Re:great solution (Score:2, Insightful)
While the data does travel over an Internet connection, it is securely wrapped in an impenetrable 448-bit encrypted envelope to prevent any chance of unauthorized access.
When companies make claims like "impenetrable encryption" on their front page, it makes me a little bit worried. When they say "448-bit" encryption, it makes me a bit more worried. When that information is the only thing on their site about what type of security/encryption they are using, I don't think I would ever trust my data with th
Re:great solution (Score:2)
Who is going to pay $20/month to store one CD worth of data.
Really, if we are talking about less that 200G just use a removable drive and a saftey deposit box.
What I really need is a backup for my 3T array. Find that and I might consider a couple hundred a month.
Re:great solution (Score:2)
What I really need is a backup for my 3T array. Find that and I might consider a couple hundred a month.
As long as there's nothing really esoteric about your setup, this is easy:
- Purchase second 3TB array
- Purchase hosting agreement with local ISP/hosting provider
- Rsync changes from live 3TB array to "warm" 3TB array hosted at aforementioned hosting provider on whatever schedule you need (hourly, daily, weekly, etc)
- Sleep better at night
Use gmail. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Use gmail. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Use gmail. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Use gmail. (Score:3, Funny)
Apple's .Mac offering (Score:2, Interesting)
I have never used it, and its data storage limitations (250MB??) are ridiculously small for the price ($99/yr?), given free email storage upwards of 1GB. However, I was wondering what others' experiences were?
Cheers
Re:Apple's .Mac offering (Score:3, Informative)
I can't get it to work through the corporate firewall, it's kind of slow, and it's very small as you said.
On the plus side, it has very good integration with the native Apple backup utility. I do find a USB HD more useful, though. And a USB HD works well with the Apple backup util, too.
Re:Apple's .Mac offering (Score:3, Insightful)
So true.
You can push a heck of a lot more data thru a half dozen 2Gbps HBAs thru Brocade switches, and onto SANs or "switch-attached tape drives", than you can thru a US$4000/month 155Mbps OC3 pipe.
And now that there are SANs (and "fiber NAS") that use SATA drives, it's easy to make a multi-layer backup strategy, where backups 1st go to cheap SAN/NAS and then to tape.
And every morning an Iron Mountain courier comes to get last night's tapes and bring back last mo
A lifeguard!? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:A lifeguard!? (Score:5, Funny)
In many ways the jobs are quite similar. Both involve multiple safeguards against the spread of viruses, both deal with sharing limited resources against hundreds of thankless clients, and no matter how pristine you keep either work environment there's always going to be some kid that ruins it by filling your storage solution with shit.
Re:A lifeguard!? (Score:2)
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mitch_Hedberg [wikiquote.org]
Rest in peace Mitch....
Re:A lifeguard!? (Score:5, Funny)
I'd guess that every once in a while, he gets confused and tries to give a server mouth-to-mouth or reboot a drowned swimmer.
Re:A lifeguard!? (Score:2)
All I can picture here is someone getting punched in the groin, for some reason.
Re:A lifeguard!? (Score:2)
Re:A lifeguard!? (Score:2)
I've lifeguarded before. The coworkers are nothing like Baywatch. For one thing, they're human, whereas Baywatch is a television show. For another - and I hope this doesn't come as a shock - reality is nothing like television. Even if they are "like Baywatch," they don't spend much time running and bouncing - more like sitting in a chair under an umbrella, getting POed at hormonal teenage boys who won't leave them alone because they look like a te
Re:A lifeguard!? (Score:2)
As have I, but I retained my sense of humor!
Re:A lifeguard!? (Score:3, Funny)
My manager was flipping channels in the break room one day, and happened to stumble across the opening credits. He turned to me with a look of awe and said, "Have you seen this? They're making lifeguards now with their own flotation devices."
Re:A lifeguard!? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a hidden invitation to ask, Mr. Literal. There's no other reason for it to be there, because it's never referenced.
I lifeguarded and know that lifeguards make from minimum wage starting at a Red Cross facility to ~15/hr as head guard. Find yourself an IT manager and your mystery is solved.
Mod parent down, offtopic.
Who peed in your Corn Flakes this morning?
Did you do it yourself?
I use Data Deposit Box (Score:3, Informative)
The best I've found so far is DataDepositBox.com [datadepositbox.com]. Continous back up for 1c/meg/day. Secure website, download files from it, yadda yadda. Just like every other service I guess.
In my experience, they had good customer service, a good data center, strong software, and easy set up. Easy set up was important for lazy folks likeme. I tried to do my own offsite storate with a DVDR and safety deposit box. Didn't work so well.
I run it on two file servers (one for my home and one for my dedicated hosting server) as a service. I back up about 3G of my stuff and pay like $18/month. Hard to beat that. Couldn't find other places that were in that price range.
Re:I use Data Deposit Box (Score:2)
Holy crap, at that price they'd better be good!
I mean gee, if I wanted to backup my work directories on there, which amounts to about 2G, that'd be about 7.5 grand a year, not counting ISP costs. And that's not even close to fulfilling my true, complete backup needs.
For that price, I'll get a boxful of hard-disks, trays, and a secu
Do it the old fashioned way (Score:3, Interesting)
Storage Size? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Institute for Backup Trauma (Score:2)
I have no idea how good LiveVault's service actually is, but their advertisement starring John Cleese [backuptrauma.com] is damn funny, and anything but "cookie cutter".
IronMountain (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.ironmountain.com/Index.asp [ironmountain.com]
I highly recommend them if you can afford it.
Aside from that, if you are a smaller shop hit up freshmeat/sourceforge for projects like Bacula and BackupPC...they work well for smaller installs.
Re:IronMountain (Score:2)
Re:IronMountain (Score:2)
You said don't ask... (Score:5, Funny)
IT Managers get zero chicks. Lifeguards get tons of chicks. What happens when then two are combined in the same person?
(unless of course, you are a chick yourself, in which case I apologize for my blatantly sexist remarks)
Re:You said don't ask... (Score:2)
Re:You said don't ask... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:You said don't ask... (Score:5, Funny)
You get the curious effect of a "chick ring" as the attractive and repulsive forces reach an equilibrium somewhere just out of arms reach. From there they tend to fall into a stable orbit.
looking as well (Score:2)
I have recently rebuild a few of our servers and noticed the high price of tape drives. It seems like you have to spend a grand to get anything decent. So, I've started to look around at what's available online. I've found livevault.com [livevault.com] and evault.com [evault.com]. Both are offering between 5 and 10 gigabytes for between $100 and $200 a month. So, if I want 100 Gig, the only viable option is to spend ~$2,000 (hardware and software), pare down what I am backing up
Re:looking as well (Score:2)
If you just want backup to a separate machi
Re:looking as well (Score:2)
I don't know if you want to buy software or just
extra hard drives are the key for me. (Score:3, Informative)
Each Monday, I back a back up to the drive that is at the house (where I work from), and take it to the bank. Then I switch them, putting the newest drive in the bank, and taking home the "old' back up. This gets repeated every week (although admittedly not always on Mondays).
So far, this has worked for me pretty well.
Costs? $250 (Canadian) dollars for the drive and $80 per year for the safe deposit box, which also stores all source miniDV tapes from my event video business.
Re:extra hard drives are the key for me. (Score:2)
I can't personally imagine spending the time each week to go to the bank and access the safety deposit box (but perhaps your bank is more efficient and pleasant than any I've known). I do store data that way myself, but not every week, more like once every 2 months. And in the mean time I shuttle automatically backed-up encrypted drives weekly between work and home, as well as burning encrypted DVDs of my most active/daily-use data. I just s
Connected DataProtector (Score:3, Informative)
Google it (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.consumersearch.com/www/computers/onlin
What Level of Accessibility Do You Need? (Score:2)
I would avoid online providers. Too many things can go wrong, least of which is theft of data.
Which option works for you will depend on what level of accessibility you will need.
If you just need to get access to the files in the event of server/site destruction and you can easily re-create the system and just need to re-import the data, then a cheap option would be to get some virtual hosting space or a racked system with tons of storage and a low cost data connection, depending on your quantity of data
Online backup? - Capacity (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, you'd better make that 560 + 560 GB because I may want to back up my OTHER PC as well.
I realize I am being sarchastic but I am always confused by "online" backup simply because it doesn't make much sense from a practicality standpoint. A semi-modern PC has a minimum 40GB sized hard drive. And it only goes up from there. I've been online for quite sometime and while things have gotten MUCH better, with respect to bandwidth, it still takes a LONG, LONG, LONG time to transfer huge amounts of data. Note, I am not talking about your 4.5gig ISO image. I'm talking 20 of them. In a row.
From my point of view: it's dead. Please enlighten me, if you experience is different.
Re:Online backup? - Capacity (Score:5, Informative)
Most businesses don't care about backing up all of your pr0n and music. For a lot of places, if you back up documents, email, and source code, you've got the core business stuff--and that's often fairly small. You do a full local backup of the servers, have a standard image of the desktops, then do web backups of a few directories nightly (e.g. all files on some samba share, a source repository, email). The web backups are rsync'd (or equivalent) so only the day's changes are transferred.
It's not ideal, but for a lot of places it works. Of course, they often find out after a crash that employees _weren't_ storing everything in "Work Documents" folder like they're supposed to.
For home use I usually just do hourly snapshots to another machine at home (I keep every hour for the last week, and the 4 previous weeks, and montly for 6 months, and then just yearly) with something like:
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshot
With nothing automated for off-site backups (though I do keep a handful of critical documents off-site by hand).
I cheat and do the initial rsync on local disk, only incremental stuff goes over the network.
Re:Online backup? - Capacity (Score:2)
My pr0n and music collection is MUCH bigger than 560GB.
Re:Online backup? - Capacity (Score:2)
Remember that not everyone is limited by some crappy 256K upstream from consumer-grade cable or DSL. It is very possible that someone has a fairly decent Internet connection. A full T-1 would be sufficient for doing most backups. Also remember that most of these places charge based on storage used, so you would only want to use them for the important stuff, not for your 559GB of pr0n. I would say the average small-to-medium business, the ones that would need this sort of solution, probably only have a f
Re:Online backup? - Capacity (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Online backup? - Capacity (Score:3, Insightful)
On the order of a week. But how much of that data changes on a daily basis? For most users, maybe just a few tens of megabytes or less. For a small fraction of users who generate tens of gigabytes of new data every day which absolutely must be backed up, offsite online is not the best solution. But it works great for everyone else. And it is still useful for the most critical fraction of the heavy data user's data
Re:Online backup? - Capacity (Score:2)
Well, you have to keep in mind that it's really only necessary to back up those parts of your hard drive that can't be replaced using an automated download from alt.binaries.pictures.erotica, so for the typical geek that means only storing about
Gmail (Score:2, Interesting)
Not always the way to go... (Score:2)
It might be old fashioned but tape really is pretty cheap per GB.
Good Solution (Score:3, Interesting)
True story: We both run Citrix servers, and one time we had a data loss at my location. Within an hour, we restored our database and application to an extra server at the remote location and used Citrix to connect our users here to the main database. I could then work on restoring from tape, without the pressure of true downtime, just inconvenience time, which I and management can tolerate.
Attix5 are one of the best IMHO (Score:2)
Remote mirroring (Score:2, Insightful)
Do it yourself? (Score:2)
Windows may be a different story. I have been toying around with the idea of releasing some software that let's you do something similar in Windows. I've written some peer to peer backup software [pensamos.com] that will let you share backups among the computers in y
How about an offsite storage company (Score:2)
Proper disater recovery and data restoration.... (Score:2, Informative)
Purchase a safety deposit box at your local bank and setup a rotation(daily, weekly, etc..) of cycling you media to and from.
OR, get in touch with another local business person in your area and setup mutual
rsync (Score:2)
If the work server would die or be stolen I simply drive home, pick up the entire server or just the drive, bring it back to work and set it up. Total down time is a couple of hours.
Total cost was $0 for an old Pentium 100 server, $100 for a 120gb drive and $40/month for the cable internet.
put a big floatie on it (Score:2)
Seriously, though, I haven't had much experience with the online data backup solutions, but depending on the sensitivity of the data involved, I would be more likely to do local backups to an external USB drive that you can just unplug and take with you, rather than one of these 100% off-site, online backup services. That being said, if you're not too worried about the privacy of the data, then the offsite guys
Re:put a big floatie on it (Score:2)
Just Post the Torrent (Score:3, Funny)
XOsoft.com (Score:2)
Do it yourself. (Score:2)
1. Purchase computer with RAID
2. Purchase internet connection to another location (your home, perhaps)
3. Backup encrypted data to RAID server over internet.
It's safer than taking the backups home with you once a week (no transit loss if you employ good encryption, no damaged drives/tapes, etc). It can be more reliable, depending on the connection you pay for. If you want to cut costs, get a cheap fast DSL - if you want a fast recovery drive home, copy the data to a drive, and drive back.
It can be
What about doing a DYI network backup? (Score:2)
It's not that expensive to get a server rented at a data center. Just need to have enough bandwidth and storage space. This gives you redundancy and a reasonable amount of control over what's happening. If you need greater redundancy get mo
My corp. uses "Connected" (Score:3, Informative)
I'm doing the same thing right now... (Score:2)
Most of what I've seen so far is "toy" solutions that don't scale up to 400G well, or cost $2k-$3k per month for that amount of data...
Neither of those will do.
On the advice of a friend who is a certified Disaster Recovery specialist, I think I'm going to build linux based "backup appliances" with SATA arrays for each of our remote offices, back up all the data locally to the array and then replicate data bet
My recommendation. (Score:4, Funny)
Encrypt everything, then name the files something like "OMG_Hilton_XXX.avi" and upload to Kazaa or LimeWire or something. In 10 years you'll still be able to find copies.
Re:Yahoo, perhaps? (Score:2)
I also mail shareware registration keys and the entire software installer to myself. Having the registration keys online has saved my butt more than once. Plus, whenever I set up a new machine, I can get the exact version I'm used to.
Re:'went bad'? (Score:3, Informative)
Instant loss of a cluster of data. Would have happened on a Mirror set too, if the working mirror had the same problem.
This happened on DEC/Compaq/HP HSG80, a serious SAN controller, not some cheap internal or software raid.
We have about 30 or 40 pairs of these HSG's, spinning about 300TB, and this is the first t
Re:FedEx (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh yeah... You'll be famous the day someone can't account for that tape after it has been shipped.