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?"
usdatatrust.com (Score:3, Informative)
great solution (Score:5, Informative)
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.
xdrive (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.xdrive.com/ [xdrive.com]
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.
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.
Connected DataProtector (Score:3, Informative)
Google it (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.consumersearch.com/www/computers/onlin
Data Protection Service (Score:1, Informative)
DAR - Disk Archiver (Score:1, Informative)
http://dar.linux.free.fr/ [linux.free.fr]
Step 1 - perform a full backup using 2GB DAR Slices (in case you have a 2GB filesize limit)... If you are low on space you can FTP/SCP/RSYNC the slices offsite DURING the backup, which is great!
Step 2 - generate a DAR Catalog file against the full backup/snapshot and store it on your machine.
Step 3 - The next day (or whenever you decide your filesystem has changed enough to warrant another backup), create a DAR Differential backup against the full backup catalog, and only the differences in your filesystem will be saved.
Step 4 - Store the diff offsite
Step 5 - in case of failure, restore the full backup/snapshot followed by a restore of the diff (with overwrite=on). You may also want to store your MBR in case of full failure - just use dd to do that (google for instructions)
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 hot-sites within each others facilities.
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:Backups online (Score:3, Informative)
for personal image backup... (Score:1, Informative)
They also offer an archive CD [shutterfly.com] service if you need periodic hard copies.
Cheers
AC
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:Offsite Co-op? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Offsite Co-op? (Score:2, Informative)
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 problem, and may be attempting to use the same method for data recovery at the same time. You might reduce that number further depending on QoS issues, etc.
Be it LTO, DVD/RW, or scribbling bits onto pieces of ivory, there is a greater chance of recovering your data in a reasonable amount of time, when using local removable media.
You must, however, be diligent in retaining a COMPLETE copy of your data off-site. It only takes one week of lollygagging to cause you to lose two weeks (or more) of data.
My corp. uses "Connected" (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Backups online (Score:1, Informative)
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 time it has happened. In fact, it is the first time ANYONE on our team of 12 has seen it. Some of these guys have 20+ years of experence, so it is *very* rare.
Re:Backups online (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Offsite Co-op? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Online backup? - Capacity (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Offsite Co-op? (Score:1, Informative)