Affordable and Safe Data Protection Practices? 591
cfreeze asks: "With the recent fire at the University of Twente, I started to think 'Are the steps I'm taking to backup my home network sufficient?'. The first thing going through my mind was the need to mail a set of recent backup discs to a family member. I feel this is a good first step, but due to the distances involved it may prove to be impractical. The second was a small hidden personal safe that is fireproof. What steps are you taking?" If you are interested in truly protecting your data, you have to realize that making backups is just a start. Next comes protecting those backups from floods, fires, and other catastrophes that might occur. What do you do to protect your backups?
the safe may be fireproof (Score:5, Insightful)
where are my mod points when I need them... (Score:5, Insightful)
I found that there were safes that were guaranteed to keep the inside at a temperature compatible with storage media, but their prices were not as affordable (obviously).
Re:where are my mod points when I need them... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention that the walls of fireproof safes are usually filled with moisture-retaining material. That helps with fires, but the humidity inside the safe is always high. Over time, that could degrade the plastic and metal parts of any digital media stored inside even without a fire.
Silica Gel - DO NOT EAT (Score:3, Informative)
My firesafe came with a large packet of dessicant for just that reason. If you open the safe on a regular basis, this shouldn't be much of a problem.
Silica gel is the most common type of dessicant. That's the little packet labeled "DO NOT EAT" in just about any consumer electronics packaging. I've saved the little packets in a jar for years, but I'm sure you can also buy them directly.
I recommended to a friend who wanted to save some backup CDRs that they put a small firesafe (the kind with a handle) inside a larger firesafe. Put CDRs and silica gel in the smaller one; put hanging folders in the remaining space in the larger one. (The moderate moisture is fine for paper storage when the temperature is rising, but not as good for the CDRs.)
Re:where are my mod points when I need them... (Score:3, Insightful)
However, an on-site fire resistant safe is just a starting point. I am sure there were lots of them in the WTC towers and they didn't help much.
sPh
Re:the safe may be fireproof (Score:5, Informative)
As for backups, best practices suggests that you keep one on site and one off site. The off site location should be at least 6.5 miles from the site. This distance was calculated throughout the years as insurance companies assessed damage caused by widespread natural disasters (hurricanes, floods) and the area that was impacted by them.
Re:the safe may be fireproof (Score:3, Informative)
While 6.5 miles may meet some statistical standard for insurers, it's not really sufficient in the individual company's case when planning to survive large natural disasters or civil disorder (or whatever else you haven't though of).
As an example from a large telco I worked for - data from Omaha, NE was offsited to Washington and vice-versa. Cross-country like that is your best bet.
Re:the safe may be fireproof (Score:3, Funny)
perfect solution... (Score:5, Funny)
2) put the fireproof safe in a blasting shell of sorts surrounded by some explosives with a high ignition temp...
3) you're done! when the fire engulfs the shell your safe is in, the safe itself will be shot outside... your media/backups will be safe & unmelted!
They make media fireproof boxes too... (Score:5, Interesting)
Oddly enough, I was just looking into these earlier today. They make media fireproof safes. Most of them I saw say that they will keep the internal temperature uner 125 degrees F, and under 80% humidity. 125 degrees is the melting point of most portable media. They seemed pretty costly, but if you are going to get a fireproof box, why not spend the extra $100 to get one that is media friendly? I saw some decent, albeit small, ones for around $250.
Safr place for your safe (Score:3, Informative)
1) Put the same in the basement. In fires heavy things such as safes will loose support and crash into the basement and crack open.
2) Suround the safe with non-flamable mass (cindar blocks). Or better yet, install the safe the "wall" of your basement.
3) Put your media in zip lock bags. Sure, the media may be intact, but it only takes a tiny bit of crud to trash magnetic media. Smoke particles are often ionized and will bond tighter to your disk than the mag particles.
Keep my backups at work (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Keep my backups at work (Score:2)
Re:Keep my backups at work (Score:2)
The advantage of them being at work is that I know I have quick access, the office is quite physically secure and has fire protection, and I'm regularly reminded how old the last "offsite backup" is... whereas "mail them to a family member" - maybe not...
Re:Keep my backups at work (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Keep my backups at work (Score:3, Funny)
I wish there was "no sig" checkbox on submission
Re:work backups at home? no(13x)o (Score:2)
Forgot to say, I don't live in the USA, and I work for small companies, so this isn't a concern for me although it's a valid point.
Anyway, the point was more about taking my home-backups to work, and while I'm sure some lawyer could find a problem with this practice too, the fact is it works for me, and for "home backups" I'd suggest it's often a reasonable solution.
Online Backup (Score:4, Interesting)
For instance NovaStor [online-backup.com]
Three words: (Score:5, Insightful)
Your bank should make these available to you for next to nothing, and you don't have to worry about buying your own safe and making sure that it's secure, fireproof, etc.
Re:Three words: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Three words: (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Three words: (Score:4, Insightful)
What good are my financial backups if my bank is now a pile of rubble?
Re:Three words: (Score:5, Informative)
The idea is to keep two sets of backups: one onsite (i.e. at home), and another one at a remote location (i.e. at the bank).
Even if the contents is not insured (what's the monetary value of your personal data anyways?), the probability that something happens both to your home and to your bank is quite slim.
Re:Three words: (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, having said all that, I'll admit that I back up my data to CDR and put the CD in the safety deposit box at the bank. The one thing those backups contain that might cause a problem for my wife is the MS Money backup.
Re:Three words: (Score:2)
But this will only be a problem if
- you died in the fire along with the original copy (i.e. if you just had a heart attack she could still easily get to the original).
- the safe deposit backup was the only one you kept. For things like financial info, you could easily keep a copy at work of give a copy to another family member, or give a copy to your wife to stash somewhere (probably her purse
Re:Three words: (Score:5, Informative)
There is usually a provision for 'Will discovery'. One family member, usually the proposed executor/administrator, is allowed to go into the box to look for and retrieve the will. Life insurance policies as well. Nothing else may be removed, though, until after probate.
IANAL, but I just had to go through this procedure.
Re:Three words: (Score:3, Insightful)
If I'm dead what do I care if the backups are unavailable until after probate. At that point I am pretty sure that backups fall into the "Somebody Else's Problem" category.
How many buildings must burn (Score:5, Interesting)
One fellow, who was paranoid about the permanence of magnetic media, even kept a copy of his raw data on punch cards (cartons of them).
Re:How many buildings must burn (Score:3, Funny)
I put mine on Kazaa as [tmd]8mile.(ftf).ts.(1of2)_COMPLETE!!1!
Who said P2P doesn't have substantial non-infringing uses?
Portable hard drive (Score:3, Interesting)
Well... (Score:2)
For the stuff I *want* to save, I usually store them somewhere on my homepage (it's neatly backed up in 2 locations), and I burn it on CD.
pr0n!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
You're new around here, aren't you?
safety deposit box at the bank (Score:2)
Protecting my backups (Score:3, Insightful)
I've found that the bigger problem for me is how the heck to find some backup solution that is cheap enough for home usage and doesn't just involve using multiple hard drives and can handle around 500 GB of data in a timely manner. I think that is a lost game
What do you do to protect your backups? (Score:5, Funny)
I use the squirrel method, hiding my data on the drives of unsuspecting dupes all over the internet.
Unfortunately, I can't remember where all of these bits are, so if my primary system gets messed up I am going to be dataless
Fire at the University of Twente (Score:5, Funny)
Two different fireproof safes (Score:2)
-B
Get a safe deposit box. (Score:2)
What do I do? (Score:2, Funny)
Jaysyn
cool (Score:2)
I am, however, a little curious as to what is so important on a home network that offsite backups and a fireproof safe (!!) would be considered. In the grand scheme of things, are your pornography collection and your high score in Lemmings really that important?
Re:cool (Score:4, Insightful)
These are just some examples why I am probably going to go through the 'offsite box at my bank' route pretty soon...
Re:cool (Score:3, Funny)
I keep multiple copies of that on 5.25, 3.5, CD, DVD and punchcards hidden throughout Northern Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania. My home copies are on 2 identical RAID 5 systems backed up to compressed Exabyte tape librarys (one in my apartment, one connected wirelessly to my garage on the same property but 3 buildings away). The apartments have a sprinkler system, so the RAID and Exabyte cabinets are tented with plastic. Working on an archive for my vehicle that backs up through an 802.11a connection whenever I park in the garage.
It was just my defense contracting work I was talking about here [slashdot.org]
Don't forget... (Score:5, Insightful)
We were backing up our Oracle database with the export-utility, and DIRECT=Y flag. Well, unfortunately, sometimes a direct backup is corrupted (a direct backup bypasses all the SQL parsing, and unloads it directy from the tablespace).
Now we restore our backups every few weeks to our development databases, to make sure they are working.
Re:Don't forget... (Score:3, Funny)
I found it even quicker to replace
Re:Don't forget... (Score:4, Funny)
No kidding! (Score:3, Informative)
The value of DATA (Score:2)
Then again maybe not, usually when something gets degaused from one of my machines, I have it somewhere else on another.
But your point is well taken, what would the impact be if I lost all the machines on my LAN at the same time?
Is there a 'smart' way for me to back it up, or how would I even start to evaluate which amoung the folders of fodder were the ones to back up.
Financial stuff would be obvious and easy, but beyond that it starts to get real muddy real quick.
And then, how do I secure my backup?
Connected.com rules (Score:3, Interesting)
I sleep in blissful peace because of this product: Connected Online Backup [connected.com]. All the files that change get backed up over the Internet every night on my system. It also does partial-file backups, so it figures out which part of a particular file actually changes, which works well for huge files like e-mail folders (my e-mail file is like 200 megabytes, and it typically moves about 20K every day). Of course, it automatically compresses the data when sending it.
Security? It encrypts your data BEFORE it leaves your PC, and the security password remains on your computer. They are careful to tell you that if you lose your password, they can't recover your data.
I've only had to restore a file a couple of times, but the few times I've done it seemed to work well. They also have a CD ordering option.
The last time I posted about these guys some people said that restoring a lot of data tended to be kind of slow, but I don't have experian with that.
Oh, the price? $14.95 a month, and I have several gigabytes backed up. Can't beat the price, can't beat the peace of mind. This service rocks.
Re:Connected.com rules (Score:3, Informative)
Of course, next comes the question about what happens if the server takes fire. I'd imagine there is a redundant unit somewhere, but that is just a guess.
Re:Connected.com rules (Score:2)
So you are comfortable with your backups residing with a dot com company. While farming out things can be nice for garbage and other waste removal, I don't think I'd be happy with someone else doing my backups. But then, I'm hypercritical and paranoid. Some of the technical people I respect have taken this view, but I'm too old fashioned to like it much.
But only for Windows (Score:3, Insightful)
If Connected had a *nix client, they might be worth invetigating. Seriously.
As it is, I'd have to do a local tar/dump/something of my data, copy the dump file to a Windows partition, boot into Windows, run the Connected program to chunk across this dump file, then reboot back into something useful.
Thanks, I'll stick with rsync. :-)
Re:Connected.com rules (Score:5, Informative)
Getting a little paranoid are we? (Score:2)
If you lose your backups to fire, flood, or whatever, just make new backups. The percentage of incidents where you would lose both your backups and the originals (given that they are stored in separate places) has to be so minimal that only someone who is either incredibly paranoid or has some really, really important would need to do anything more than create one set of backups.
rsync with cp -al (Score:5, Informative)
We're doing this in an enterprise environment, but it would be easy to co-ordinate between two friends as well.
--derek
gambitdesign.com [gambitdesign.com]
freely available, redundant webcaching. (Score:2, Funny)
For instance:
Grocery list:
Use Kazza to make backups.. (Score:5, Funny)
some very important steps from (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:some very important steps from (Score:2)
Re:some very important steps from (Score:3, Insightful)
Absolutely right - one time, a client's business got broken into and all computers stolen. Fortunately, a cyclic zip disk backup was already implemented and all data was saved on those discs...
...except for this one admin assist whose very important accounting records were not on those discs. She saved them to separate floppies. But her box of floppies was bad.
Turns out that nobody ever tested the integrity of the backed up data on those floppies! (And really, floppies are terrible for backup in the first place. They are too easily damaged.) It was pretty obivous to me that something was going wrong because the floppy drive made strange groaning noises when disks from that box were put into it, but with non-technical people such blindling obvious things simply don't occur to them.
TEST YOUR DATA-BACKUP INTEGRITY!
Iron Mountain (Score:2)
Make sure your backup methodology is good to start (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now, CD-Rs (not -RWs) seem to be a great way to store moderate amounts of data. -RWs suffer from degradation pretty quickly despite their rewriteability (I've never seen one live up to the '1000 writes' standard they claim -- more like 3-7). For larger amounts, DVD-R may be the wave of the future, but high-quality tapes are probably as good if you can persuade your boss to let you replace them from year to year.
Periodically, it's important to store your backups offsite. A safe-deposit box works well, or perhaps a fireproof safe if you're worried about the confidentialness of your information. But yeah, I'd move that stuff offsite biweekly or monthly at a minimum.
Re:Make sure your backup methodology is good to st (Score:2)
I know it may not be the most secure method, but I am willing to accept the risk of someone being willing and able to hack the ecryption on my files.
I'm smart (Score:3, Informative)
I keep all my MP3s backed up on Kazaa.
9-11 IT recovery tally? (Score:2)
Store them in space (Score:3, Interesting)
Might still be too expensive for the individual, but I can surely see a large multinational corporation thinking about this.
Re:Store them in space (Score:3, Insightful)
Protecting the tapes: (Score:2)
Get a safe deposit box at your bank to keep offsite backups in. Most banks offer these to their members for free or a reasonable rate -- much cheaper than mailing tapes or disks. I keep my monthly backups there. Once a month rides the line between "current enough" and "so often it's annoying so I don't do it like I should".
Why physical backup-tapes? (Score:3, Interesting)
I back-up my system that way (it's about 10Gb), over a 1Mbit link. At the moment I just back it up that way to one remote site (about 5km away), but soon, I will probably back it up to one more site (about 2km away).
This is much safer (as it is done more often), and much easier (as it is fully automatic) that tapes or CDs or whatnot.
Re:Why physical backup-tapes? (Score:2)
Re:Why physical backup-tapes? (Score:4, Informative)
unison - I keep my desktop, server, and laptop synchronized over SSL connections. Like rsync, it sends minimal changes to keep source trees up to date. I can sync over a gig in my home directories in much less than a minute unless I dumped a whole bunch of new stuff on there.
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/ [upenn.edu]
I don't know about your home network, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Fireproof safes are not good enough (Score:4, Insightful)
A good alternitave is to put your backups in a safe in the back yard.
Affordable and Safe Data Protection Practices? (Score:2)
Thesis backup (Score:2)
One set in the same room as my computer - generally a day or two old.
One set in another room in the house - a bit older.
One set in another house in the same city.
One set (a few weeks old) in my brother's house about 500 km away.
This gave me a good lifeline to sanity when I accidentally deleted my partition table a week before finishing. (In fact, I didn't need the backup - I had the partition table info in hardcopy and just reentered it.)
Now I use my computer mostly for games, so my only backup is that my parents have copies of all my photos.
"Paranoia is good".
infect your machines with nimda (Score:3, Funny)
Priorities (Score:2)
How about having a plan to saving your family and yourself incase of fire?
Really who cares about your email's you sent out announcing a party in the long run?
my backups? (Score:2)
A decent and affordable backup system (Score:4, Informative)
You need two server machines, one to be the primary server, and one to hold a backup drive. (having the primary and backup drives on seperate machines prevents total loss through several faliure modes right off the bat, like a power supply malfunction on one machine)
These machines can be affordable and inexpensive Pentium II or III machines.
For this example, I'll tell you exactly what I used.
I went to newegg.com and bought three identical hard drives, 80 GB maxtors. I also purchased a lian-li removable IDE hard drive bay plus an extra cartridge for it.
I put one of the maxtors in the primary server machine, and made it the primary drive.
I put the other two maxtors in lian-li removable carts, and labeled them Backup drive A and Backup Drive B.
I put backup drive A in the lian li bay on the backup computer.
On the primary server, I made two tasks with windows task scheduler:
The first task does a full backup every monday night to the backup drive over the network.
The second task does a nightly incremental backup, on every night of the week except monday night.
When I come in on Monday morning, I remove the current backup drive, take it down to our safe deposit box at our bank, and swap it for the other drive, which has been sitting there for a week. in the evening, task scheduler runs a full backup on the drive.
So at all times, there is at least a week of incremental backups in case a deleted file needs to be retrieved, and there is an offsite backup that is never more than a week old, and there are nightly incremental backups on-site. All you have to do is swap the drives once a week and take them to your favorite off-site location for storage.
I've been doing this for a few months now and it's been good. I also put the server and backup machine on UPS, and the primary server has control of it through USB, and shuts itself down before the power dies.
--Mike
Take your backup media to work with you.... (Score:2)
Use the Net (Score:2, Interesting)
No need for big backup tape drives or burners, and no hassle once you have it up and running. (Of course, the usual "test your backups" mantra still applies - no sense backing things up if you're not doing it right).
You can also use a dynamic DNS [dyndns.org] service and client apps so you don't have to constantly updating IP addresses when the ISPs change them.
easy solution (Score:2)
VPN With Friends (Score:2)
Create a VPN with a series of trusted friends. Each person 'donates' a few hundred megs to the project.
Critical data can then be PGP encrypted and stored on the virtual network drives manually or by backup software. This way no one can tamper with the archives.
This works for me as I'm mostly concerned with backing up source code. It's useless for backing up digital video, but I usually don't worry about those assets too much after a given project has been completed.
Won't work for everyone, but I think it's handy. Oh, and backup your PGP keys and keep them in a safety deposite box or something... otherwise you'll really be screwed.
Just use Kazaa (Score:2)
Encrypt your files and name them something like "Hot Goat Sex", and share them on Kazaa/Gnutella/eDonkey/etc. Then, when you lose your data, you just go cruising the the net for your files again! The only problem will be sorting out your files from the real goatse.cx files!
coasters and free windowscd based backup software! (Score:2)
The question I really want answered is, what is a good free windows backup program that does incremental backups to any cd burner? I found one once, but it required I have easy cd creator, which is $100 alone. I have Nero, paid for it any everything, but I can't find anything to serve me.
The paranoid's method (Score:3, Funny)
2) Buy plot of land in extremely rural area close to Canadian border. Use false identity, pay cash.
3) Build small, subterranean concrete bunker (10' x 10'). Install water-tight safe in bunker. Camouflage bunker, make it tamper-evident.
4) Visit with data periodically.
You now have a safe place to store things. Safe from fire, flood, and most importantly from the government. Since you bought the land with false identification, they can't shake you down for what you have stored there, unless they know about it. It's close to the border, so you should be able to get the contents fairly easily from the other side of the border -- or get the data as you go OVER the border.
OK, so its not convenient and illegal, but hasn't true safety and privacy always been that way?
keep them with you (Score:3, Interesting)
Broadcast (Score:3, Funny)
M@
I WORK IN THIS FIELD (Score:3, Informative)
Made by Sony and Plasmon
If you haven't restored, you haven't backed up. (Score:5, Insightful)
When you test your restore, be sure you test it on a machine and tape drive other then the one you used to create the backup. Tape drives easily fall out of alignment. An out of alignment tape drive will generate an out of alignment tape. A mis-aligned tape may work fine in the drive that created it, but may not be readable on any other tape drive. This does you no good if the only tape drive that can read the tape is in a melted ruin.
If you are in a Microsoft network environment or any other environment that uses a central security or configuration database, (domain controller, directory server, etc.) don't forget to have a backup plan for that as well. Recovering the data is only part of the battle; you also have to recover the logins, security rights, and all other configuration aspects of your network.
Did you remember to store a copy of the install media and license codes for your backup software at your off-site location along with your backup media? How about written copies of your hardware and software configurations?
As others have noted, a safe-deposit box at a bank not too physically close to your computers is an economical option. I use this option for my home network. A down side to this is you can only get to your backup media during the bank's operating hours. If you need better access, a professional off-site storage company may be a better option. Many will pick up, deliver, and manage rotations for you.
Finally, don't forget that there are other things then fire and flood and natural disasters that can keep you from your physical equipment. Your data may be safe on your servers, but you might not be able to get to your servers if there is a chemical spill, civil unrest, or some other police action happening between you and your equipment.
offsite record storage (Score:3, Informative)
Practical advice (Score:4, Interesting)
Do your incremental backup at least once a day. Do a full backup once a week on two media. Keep one on site and the second offsite at a records retention service like iron mountain. Change out media at least once a year. I have seen sites that have been using the same tape backup tapes for years religously and have literally worn out their tapes. Make sure that you also backup your security keys for your data to a safe deposit box or that offsite data retention company. It is too easy for the key to be safely stored online on an admin station or server that gets burned in the fire.
Some companies that have very large enterprise data centers will even go so far as to have mirrored backup facilities. These companies effecticely have an entire redundant NOC that is at another physically seperate facility. Treat this much as you would your Internet servers in that you want to make sure that this facility has redundant internet and phone connectivity. Some firms that were wiped out by 9/11 had such facilities available in dedicated host sites and were able to seamlessly transition over within the day. The other firms quickly discovered that such space and facilities were taken by other WTC firms that beat them to the puch. This is by far the most expensive option there is, and is also the most survivable. For a company of sufficeint size though, even a single day down would easily exceed the millions this option can cost. Recommended only for very large operations.
Another option if you have a campus type facility is to lay underground redundant fiber between buildings. Have your redundant servers and tape backups there. This is very expensive if you have to dig up the ground. However once implemented this is probably one of the cheapest to maintain. Many uni's do this as a matter of course. They have enough data to make the occasional tape back up to offsite facilities impractical. This also allows for much higher speed operations that an internet backup. I have worked with (very large) banking facilities and techs from the various vegas casinos, and this practice is fairly widespread there.
I have also had a number of facilities that had mirroring in use and never realized that the primary disk had failed and that they had been living off their mirror for some time. So check your mirror every now and then to make sure it isn't running off backup. Also, if you have a raid array, make you have a hot swap
Last and most important. Test your backup! I can't tell you how many times I have worked with people that had backups that were worthless. I have probably referred at least one hundred facilities over the years to ontrack for data recovery when their tape backups, hard disks or raid facilities failed.
rsync rsync rsync! And offsite... (Score:3, Interesting)
This is all done by a cron job when everyone's gone home. No need to mess with physical media and having to remember to do the backups. The cron job makes tarfiles of everything in
I do the same thing for home, too (except it backs up over ADSL to my webserver which is a continent away).
Well, since we're talking about home networks... (Score:5, Interesting)
...for my personal data, I just burn it to CDs every now & then, and then throw the CDs into the glove compartment of my car. Of course, I'm not backing up pr0n, so all my data fits onto 2 CDs, and since I've already got a few music CDs in the glove compartment, might as well drop the other CDs there too. My car is enough "off site" (I don't park in my house's garage) that the data will be fine if my house burns down. I've never had the summer heat bake the CDs into oblivion, they've always been fine. Low end, sure. But it's good enough for home use.
Lets not overreact now. (Score:3, Funny)
Is it 100Gb of a.b.p.e or will your livelyhood be destroyed?
If your house burns down, making sure you still have copies of your "disgusted from Tunbridge Wells" complaints to Channel 5 will be the least of your worries.
my home network back system (Score:5, Interesting)
You need either a cdrom burner or tape drive on your server. You should be able to get a used 4/8GB DAT tape drive and scsi card off ebay for $100 max or a 48X burner for around $60. Then you'll need to get some 4/8 dat tapes which are dirt cheap at like $3-5 per tape, or some 50 packs of cdr discs which cost around $15. You'll of course need a hard drive big enough to store all your stuff, but considering you can get a 80GB one off pricewatch for under $100 that shouldn't be a problem. Also I personally use software RAID 1, which is nice, but if your short on funds you can do without it.
Basically on your server either linux or windows 2000, you have two shares or volumes dedicated just to your data. One is your read-only permenant share of mp3's,docs and crap you've downloaded. This share is readonly as an extra precaution. You can just pull what you need off it and copy it to your temp share if the file has been changed and needs to be backed up. The other is a read/write "temp" share which besides being a area to store New data you've downloaded, is for files you've worked on from your readonly share and as a result now need to be backed up. After they are backed up, you will then move them back to the readonly share.
On the temp share you will be using a quota system that should come with your OS. You will set this quote for say 650MB for cdrbackup and say 3.75GB if your backing up to a 4/8GB tape drive.
Now what this system does is stops the most common problem for backups. Since most people A) don't remember to backup and B) just stuff file after file on their server, is stop them cold if they exceed their temp storage space, which now is the same exact size as their backup media. At that point you HAVE to backup, and then you can move those files to your read-only share for further safe keeping. I constantly see people who put off backing up and then realize they have 25 GB that need to be backup up to Cdr. One additional step which although like RAID 1 most people won't due, is to make 2 copies everytime you backup. This is actually really easy and it then allows you to keep one set of backups offsite and one onsite. Offsite can be anywhere, that isn't in your same dwelling.
This system isn't one I would ever use at a client, but it works well enough, is cheap, and doesn't let the user's datasize grow widly unless they override the quota, which at that point nothing can help them.
Hopes this helps.
What I do (Score:4, Funny)
1. If I have no space left on any harddisk, burn some of it to a CD.
2. Ehhh... ok, not two steps...
Re:Fireproof safes... get a media safe (Score:3, Interesting)
From their description:
While paper chars at 450 F (232 C), damage to computer media can occur at temperatures as low as 125 F (52 C). The interior of a Fire-Safe Media Chest or File remains well below this damage level during an average fire.
If I remember correctly, they're only rated to keep the temperature in a safe range for about 30 or 60 minutes - hopefully enough for the firefighters to have done their work.
One thing about the fire safes - make sure to keep them locked. A lot of people don't think of this, because they're only worried about fire, not theft - but if the floor/table they're sitting on gives way and they drop and the door pops open, it doesn't really matter how good the container is at resisting fire.
Re:Firesafe not good for data... (Score:4, Informative)
If your house burns down, it will burn all night and into the next day.
And for what you spent on all those safes, you could easily rent an insured safety deposit box at your local bank.
Of course, you know, that means going outside.
Re:Firesafe not good for data... (Score:3, Informative)
If your house burns down, it will burn for a short time until the fire department puts the fire out. And even if it takes time for the entire house to burn, the portion with the safe will likely be Real Hot for a relatively short time (per this informative FAQ [datalinksales.com]).
And your safe might not even be near the fire.
And although a safety deposit box is a good idea for level 0 or level 1 backups, what is the point of it being insured wrt data storage?
Next time you call someone names, know what you are talking about. And a "fireproof" safe can be a good part of an entire data safety plan.
What bothers me about all the people stating "get a fireproof safe" is that NO ONE has said if the normal kind actually work (or not) for protecting media from a fire. One person said he heard horror stories, but that's it. Ref. the previous FAQ link.
And please, if you get a "fireproof" safe, consider bolting it to something strong (e.g. cement in basement) because having someone steal your computer and your backups sucks!
Re:Just an outsider's opinion.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Generally a lot cheaper and easier to simply have an emergency relocation location; a backup of your server room and equipment, if you will, in a different geographical area. This is commonly done for business that need it, and can afford it.