Ask Slashdot: Simple Backups To a Neighbor? 285
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?
How close? Within WiFi range? (Score:3, Interesting)
If so, any remotely accessible computer (*nix box) with a wifi card will work.
Re:How close? Within WiFi range? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, better to just have a friend across the country, buy them a hard disk for their server, and swap rsync cron jobs.
Btsync (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:How close? Within WiFi range? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:How close? Within WiFi range? (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I've started syncing my files to a USB hard drive running off a Beagle Bone, via wifi, that sits in my vehicle. It syncs at night after I pull in. Now there is the possibility that the house will burn down, take my vehicle in the garage with it, but I figure I'm covered for a large part of the time when I'm at work (since my car is with me then).
Re:Colo? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Colo? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
LAS just had this (Score:4, Interesting)
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.