Online Backup Solutions?

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

[Hansele]

Be really careful with this. What happens if the provider gets hacked?

Re:Backups online

[Fjornir]

There's this really, really neat thing called 'encryption' you might want to look into.

Re:Backups online

[ReverendHoss]

Compare with the probability of the locally stored data being hacked.

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.

Online backup? - Capacity

[tacokill]

So, umm, how long - exactly - does it take to upload 560 GB over a broadband connection?

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:looking as well

[Anonymous Coward]

You think tapes are expensive?

Try NOT having them.

Re:great solution

[dancedance]

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 them.

Remote mirroring

[AnonymousJackass]

While it would be a lot more convenient to have someone else taking care of your backups, I daren't think of how much it will cost you! I don't know how small you are, and how much data you are looking to backup, but unless it's on the order of multiple terabytes, you should consider setting up your own remote mirroring. "Empty" (ie OS free) RAID boxes really are surprisingly cheap, especially for a Tb or two. If the mirror is purely for backup purposes, you could just keep it in the room next door. If you were thinking more along the lines of disaster recovery, you'd need to locate it in a separate building at the very least. Worthwhile doing, especially if you're in a hurricane affected area...

Re:A lifeguard!?

[grammar fascist]

What part of "don't ask" is beyond you?

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?

Re:Use gmail.

[ForumTroll]

Considering most hard drives sold today are in the 120GB-160GB range I don't think everything is going to fit into 2.42 gigs of storage. Furthermore, you have to break that up into small pieces in separate emails if you want to do this via Gmail. People with large backup files are not going to want to saturate their upload bandwidth in order to perform backups using Gmail, not to mention once it gets over 2.42 GB of storage you would need to span across multiple accounts. This may work for a very small subset of users but it's not a good solution for most people and better services are available.

On another note, I imagine Gmail wouldn't be too happy too if all of a sudden everyone had 15 accounts all filled up to the maximum capacity because they were just storing their weekly backups there. The reason they can give so much space is because the vast majority of users don't use 1/100th of that amount of space. Also, deleting a large number of emails becomes a real slow process on Gmail. This would always happen as you're backups need to be divided into small files in order to work with Gmail. For example one backup could be spread out through 30 different emails. They really need some kind of mass delete option or delete by query. Maybe, I'm missing these options if so someone please mention it.

Re:Online backup? - Capacity

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

So, umm, how long - exactly - does it take to upload 560 GB over a broadband connection?

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:Offsite Co-op?

[skraps]

Oceanstore [berkeley.edu] is exactly what you described. From the website:

"OceanStore is a global persistent data store designed to scale to billions of users. It provides a consistent, highly-available, and durable storage utility atop an infrastructure comprised of untrusted servers."

Re:Backups online

[Kevin DeGraaf]

unless there's some contract guarenteeing the integrety of the data, storing stuff with a third party is just as stupid as not doing any kind of backup.

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% chance you have of recovering your data from a nonexistent backup target. "Just as stupid"? As if.

Re:Apple's .Mac offering

[Nutria]

The internet was never made for storage.

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 month's tapes.

Re:Backups online

[poopdeville]

I'll probably get modded down for this, but I have excellent karma anyway. The moderation system is broken. Specifically, a lot of people with mod points are idiots. The easiest way to fix this is to metamod them all to hell. A few negative metamods, and they can't mod for six months. Another, less straight forward way to help is to troll the living hell out of the forums. Benign trolls, like First Post trolls, work best. Getting people to waste mod points on inane posts keeps them from wasting them on good ones.

Re:Offsite Co-op?

[mtutty]

I'm working on this problem [myiback.com], too. And I'm looking for a few dozen testers for version 0.2. Please go and sign up if you're in the mood.

I might get flamed for saying this out loud, but from the testing I've done and the thought process that led to my project, I don't see a huge value in dividing up files if they're encrypted. First of all, you need more than one successful retrieval to get the file. Second, you're likely going to lose much of the economy of breaking the file up because you're adding the bloat of encryption to each copy.

Looking around, I see that there are lots of other solutions to this problem. Consider mine if you want to help me bootstrap this [davinciinstitute.com] into something really great.

Re:FedEx

[Wiseleo]

Ask the managers at BofA, CITI etc... who tried using that approach with private shipping carriers.

Oh yeah... You'll be famous the day someone can't account for that tape after it has been shipped.

You confused backups with availability.

[arete]

Time to get the backup back up is a valid consideration, but it's not the only one. How easy it is to MAKE the backup (and therefore how current it will be) is arguably more important because having more frequent backups IS more important. Driving to a different town every day is probably not an efficient use of your time unless you can't get enough pipe to xfer just the changed files. Hence online backups.

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:Backups online

[Sun]

Our solution:
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 /. crowed, your next question is "do you expect me to trust an encryption method you developed?". Good question.

No, that's why we are still using AES, and have somewhat modified CBC. If you want to test what we've done, feel free to download the program. We've open sourced it. http://sourceforge.net/projects/rsyncrypto [sourceforge.net].

Shachar