Online Backup vs. Tape Backup? 62
hashbox asks: "I work for a small non-profit (about 100 staff members) and management has decided that they want to use an online data backup system instead of our existing tape backup system. After a meeting with one of the many vendors providing this service, I must admit that I am impressed with the promise of the technology (ease of use etc). However the sysadmin side of me has a few reservations. Has anyone here on Slashdot used an online backup service, and what were your experiences?"
Great Online Backup (Score:2, Funny)
g
Keep the tapes. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Keep the tapes. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Keep the tapes. (Score:2)
Re:Keep the tapes. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Keep the tapes. (Score:2)
The point being, online backups are more bandwidth efficient, because they have to be. So, using online backup, your 40Gigs per night may drop to 1G, or even less.
Regarding security, there are ways to backup data so that the data itself is kept completely encrypted on the remote site, in such a wa
Re:Keep the tapes. (Score:2)
Wrong, the data is constantly changing. That db has a 16 drive array that actually needs more because even those are constatnly thrashing. The data is changing, not adding. So the math doesn't work out, because it never really grows(well maybe a little)...just changes
Re:Keep the tapes. (Score:1)
Question to ask.. (Score:3, Insightful)
- How much data can the offsite carry?
- Any type of compression
- What about encryption?
- What if you need your backup, how much time will it take the vendor to bring you a copy of your data on a CD or DVD ?
- Does the compagny have a secure storage ?
You can also try "easeBackup" Easy to use, support Encryption and Compression.. I am using it..
Re:Question to ask.. (Score:2)
I would not trust the security of data unless the vendor published their encryption and security standards and algorithms.
They state they use 2048 bit PGP encryption, which says nothing really, because they do not state how it is used.
Quote the Linus (Score:5, Funny)
Very apropos.
Bandwidth limitation and other concerns (Score:5, Insightful)
The popularity of both Storage Area Networks and Network Attached Storages somehow seems to show that most organisations prefers to keep backup within their own control. And tapes are dirt cheap on today's standards.
Both tapes and solid state solutions can be have cheaply and some have great user friendliness. You get excellent bandwidth thrown in as well.
The only upside I can think of for online storage is that it is truely redundant, that is you will not lose your backups in event of a fire or other calamities.
But bear in mind that vendors do have the tendency to promise you the earth and deliver pebbles.
It depends... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you ask me it is not worth the trouble, you are better of investing in your own backup system.
Re:It depends... (Score:2)
Don't forget about subpoenas (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Don't forget about subpoenas (Score:3, Interesting)
Uh, so are your own backup tapes. As Microsoft certainly discovered.
I could imagine that a small online backup company might roll over more quickly than you would. But the opposite case is more plausible to me.
If I were running an online backup company, I'd want people to feel that there data was very safe with me, and part of that wou
Watch those terms... (Score:5, Insightful)
Spend some time thinking about the circumstances under which you might need a restore service; how often, how quickly, how to verify it works, etc. This may help to clarify the issues for you.
Re:Watch those terms... (Score:5, Interesting)
Amen. I'm working on a project involving management of multimedia assets, and one key part of the functionality is to archive and restore old artwork. My project leader and other stakeholders went through half a dozen providers, and they kept coming back to the same problem. They all stored data that was handed to them, but none of them provided an easy or programmable means of restoring that data. It seems backup providers seem to think that data restoration is a manual, labor-intensive process when for our needs we required it to be done on an automated, systematic basis. (We have much more data than we have capacity to keep accessable, hence a regular archive/restore cycle for many projects.)
Re:Watch those terms... (Score:3, Informative)
There were a couple of vendors that began to address this.
They were bought out by others, and quietly EOL-ed, or market-segmented into uselessness.
The problem is - there's really a bunch of loosely-connected problems that are solved by Tape backup. Or backup, in general. There's backup, disaster recovery, Storage mitigation, like HSM, replication, versioning, open-files, database backup (synchronization of relational files) etc. And differences in
Re:Watch those terms... (Score:2)
Ask your vendor... (Score:3, Funny)
"If online backups are so good, why don't you use them?"
Roll your own... (Score:5, Insightful)
Standard PC components are insanely cheap these days. Get a 4U box, chuck it full of lots of IDE drives, an IDE RAID controller or two, and Linux. Then toss samba + tar + bzip2 + yyyrsa + rsync on a local box.
Said 4U could be located at a remote office (if you have one), or possibly find another business who would be willing to swap remote storage devices with you. If all else fails, you can get colo for $50/mbps + space.
Re:Roll your own... (Score:2)
Don't forget to tunnel it through SSH or the encryption-scheme-of-your-choice.
Or do you want everyone to be able to snarf all your files out of the ether?
Re:Roll your own... (Score:2)
Another advantage is everything is encrypted localy with a public key before it crosses the wire. Private key (for restores) can be kept in a safe place, and even printed out and kept in the companies safe deposit box.
Slowdown? (Score:2)
I am not so sure that SSH would slow things down enought that you would notice.
Re: Why yyyrsa instead of gpg? (Score:2)
Seems like if your organization's admins already have GPG/PGP keys, it would be easier to use those. (And you can even encrypt the backups so that any one of the admins could recover.)
sysadmins moto (Score:4, Funny)
Backing up is the eleventh commandment (Score:3, Informative)
One way or another, it doesn't really matter *what* you do. If you don't back up to tape, cd, ftp, scratch monkey, reams of paper to be rescanned later, or whatever - if if you don't backup, you're fscked. To be perfectly honest, it's like mirroring - optimally, the backup copy is in a safe location offsite that only certain people can get to, and even more optimally is that if it's something that can be dismounted from a network and put in something like a safe deposit box at your bank or something. (They're less convenient than an FTP mirror or a disaster recovery shop, but much cheaper and perfect for those who has the initiative to run to the deposit box once per week with the 'granddaddy' backup.)
Re:Backing up is the eleventh commandment (Score:1)
Re:Backing up is the eleventh commandment (Score:2)
Your "reams of paper" is humorous hype, of course, but it kind of points up the weakness of most backup systems -- it's too hard to get the lost data back. If you experience delays, problems getting the right version of the file back, etc., etc., you incur additional costs that have to figure into the equation.
That's why offline backup vendors are so tempting, despite the security a
Tapes may not be worth it because: (Score:3, Interesting)
2) They don't have the shelf life they claim. If it ain't 100% reliable, you better have a backup of your backup.
3) The tape hardware can be really unreliable too.
4) Make sure you can really retstore just that one file you want as opposed to the entire tap.
As for Network Backups...point 4 definitely applies. All the other posts talking about network connectivity definitely apply.
I did a contract for a network backup solution. The kept buying really high end dirk arrays. However, you probably can get away with cheap disks for backups. Assuming 1 TB of slow IDE is about $250 right now (I haven'r priced in a while) You can back up 4 TB with no redundancy for $1000. Using AMANDA, you can do the partials etc for weekly, daily, monthly.
Depending on how you set this up, it can be more or less labo intensive than the tapes.
Re:Tapes may not be worth it because: (Score:1)
Is this post from the mysterious future that the Slashdot front page is always talking about? :-) 300 gigs of slow Maxtor 5400 RPM IDE hard disk is around $279. A terabyte of IDE disks is around $1000, or $1 per gigabyte. A 4 port 3ware IDE raid controller is about $400. Still, not terribly expensive for 1 TB of disk space.. 750 gigs with RAID-5 and 4x250 GB disks.
Re:Tapes may not be worth it because: (Score:1)
Yeah, need to learn that Higher Math. I sit corrected.
Take your pick (Score:4, Insightful)
USB - Hard drive (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:USB - Hard drive (Score:1, Insightful)
Wow, that's great - until someone steals your truck and gets access to all of your data.
Where do you live again?
Re:USB - Hard drive (Score:2)
Sensitive stuff gets TAR'd and then GPG'd. Less sensitive stuff just gets mirrored.
Tape drives are too expensive ($800 for the unit, $80 per tape if I wanted a 50/130Gb system) for my needs. 160Gb drive, shock mounted in the USB enclosure is only $150. If I want long-term archival, I can burn to DVD-R (with some QuickPar recovery data for good measure).
I put together an entire online-backup system once (Score:3, Interesting)
I put together an entire online backup solution once. The braintrust of the project didn't want to spend a ton of money and wanted to just find another stream of income based on the internet. I told him that he'd end up spending tons of money on hardware and it'd have to be moved offsite (all of the standard backup strategy stuff) and if he wanted to be competitive, he'd have to do it securely (encryption) and reliabily.
His answer to this was to buy an IDE raid and a T1 (no tapes!). I scoffed at the idea, but wrote the entire system for him anyway. Needless to say, the whole thing worked and he has a few customers and they get their important data backed-up fine, but if he were to get any real customers or have a crash of some sort, he'd be out of business and out of luck.
My advice (similar to a previous poster) is to foll your own. I know that backups can be costly and a pain to maintain, but getting amanda running on a linux machine with a huge raid and a tape changer is a LOT better than putting your faith in an anonymous company. If you're still stuck on the online solution, see if you can take a tour of the company to see that they actually have the capacity and hardware to back up their claims.
Just my $0.02 and no, I'm not telling the name of the backup service that I built. It's not something that I'm very proud of.
Both (Score:3, Interesting)
Backups are done via rsync, and restores are done with cp. (The whole system is run on linux with php and mysql). The files are backed up from/restored to windows servers over samba.
This is all great and makes the users happy. However, any intelligent business will also have offsite backups. Right now, if a (pick your natural disaster/accident) happens, the company is basicaly out of business since no data resides outside the server room.
Of course since all the client data is stored in a central location, it would take nothing to add some tape backups/hot-swap HD/etc. and take them offsite once a week.
Re:Both (Score:2)
However, any intelligent business will also have offsite backups.
This is the crux of the problem.
MyCorp is large enough to be blessed with a really fast network infrastructure (10-g), but only locally.
So a backup server somewhere on the network is an enticing option. Cheap, fast, convenient, less labor intensive that having techs rummage through boxes of tapes.
But the fast network doesn't extend out far enough away for the paranoid that fear the worse of site disasters.
"Let's see, we'll put our back
Situation here in .be: insurance! (Score:2)
Tapes are expensive (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Tapes are expensive (Score:1)
You do of course have to buy a fairly expensive tape station before you can use them, but once you got that you also have the benefit of it being much easier to handle IMO. (It is much easier to change a tape than it is to change a disk)
Re:Tapes are expensive (Score:2)
Disks have other benefits
* they are random access, so incremental backups can easily merge into a complete backup.
* they are faster than tape, both for restoring and backing up data.
Re:Tapes are expensive (Score:1)
Are you going to save old backups? In that case, harddisks aren't convinient.
And yes, that is 40 cents per GB, which is still half price of what the harddrives offers, you don't need many tapes before the price difference gets really noticeable.
What about writable optical discs? (Score:1)
Are you going to save old backups?
This made me think about write-once solutions. Read on for my suggestion.
that is 40 cents per GB, which is still half price of what the harddrives offers
How much per GiB does blank CD-R Data or DVD+/-R media cost in countries such as the United States that don't put a copyright levy on blank media? Of course, a DVD-R backup solution won't scale to situations where the increment is much bigger than 4 GiB, but it's still worth considering.
Re:What about writable optical discs? (Score:1)
I am not sure about the price on dvds, but in many situations they are waaaaaaaaaaaay too small, slow, and difficult to handle. And i don't think a WORM solution is much good anyway, considering the some tape rotation/recycling is done, else it would take up too much space and by too costly
The tapes i am talking about have a capacity of 200Gb uncompressed, and a write speed of 20 Mb per second. And it gets even m
CircuitBreaker: contact me? (Score:1)
I'd like your permission to quote your comments [slashdot.org] about your experience with SCons (from the Slashdot thread [slashdot.org] back in July) on the SCons web site. Could you drop me a line at webmaster@NOSPAMscons.org to let me know if that's cool with you? Thanks!
Sorry for the OT post, I couldn't find another handy way to get in touch.
Present the risks (Score:2)
I've looked at started such a company, it sounds like a good idea. However...
Make sure management understands the risks. I know of more than one company no longer in buisness because the outsourced accounting/HR to someone who took their tax money and ran. The IRS put them out of buisness when the money that was supposed to go to the IRS went to some crooks no longer in the country. The same situation can happen to data. Then there is the risk that your data will be sold to someone else. Maybe not a
It depends on what you are after... (Score:2, Informative)
I will make the assumption that you are looking at a disk based system. There are a number of factors you need to look at:
1, Capacity required. That is, how much space will you need now and in the future? Tape systems offer advantages in being (generally) able to handle large amounts of data, particularly if it's compressable.
2, Restore time. This
burnin' down the house... (Score:1)
rsync, arcserve, etc. (Score:4, Insightful)
We did this because the tape system has a long history of reliability problems. We've since fixed the tape problem (we still do tape backups) but tape is used for off-site storage and disaster recovery at remote sites -- for typical "I deleted an excel file I didn't mean to" requests we can just drill into the xraid and pull the file over without having to mount tapes, get the offsite people to bring them back etc.
Tape might seem expensive, but you have to look at the business benefit, not the cost of drives, software, etc. For example -- point-in-time backups -- our online system is great for yesterdays data, but useless for files from 3 months ago. Our tape system has monthly tapes for a year, weekly tapes for a month, and daily (full-not differntial) for a week. This has 'saved the bacon' more than once and I highly recommend it. Another good point of tape is database backups -- sure you can dump a database to disk and then rsync it offsite, but it requires that all of your database servers have much more disk capacity, and depending on how rsync treats the backup file, it could kill the entire online concept unless you've got a T3 or something.
The killer is restores though. You have to practice them and get the process nailed, otherwise your backups (online or tape) are useless.
Re:rsync, arcserve, etc. (Score:2)
A good online backup system will keep many months/years of data in an easily accessible manner, because when you are only ever storing the delta data, storage is very efficient.
Re:rsync, arcserve, etc. (Score:2)
As far as getting nothing in terms of features, I disagree completely. We've fulfilled the business requirement, didn't spend a ton of money, and don't have a vendor siphoning cash every month for 'features' we don't care about since we use tape backup anyway.
The mandatory great open-source tool for this-post (Score:1)
Three very important considerations (Score:2)
Most companies only think of dollars when it comes to backup solutions, without ever thinking of what would happen if their vendor becomes financially insolvent. If, for example, your vendor goes bankrupt, their equipment could be sold to the highest bidder.
The
Personal vs Corporate Backups (Score:1)
Netapps (Score:1)