offsite backups
Personal offsite backups stink. I’ve been using a shared hosting account to try and get my backups up and going, which is usually against the terms of service and likely to be cancelled by them at any point. In looking at other options, there are lots of great articles out there covering this topic so I won’t attempt to rehash them. I have 80GB+ of photos, data, etc that needs to be backed up offsite regularly. I used to do this over the internet to my family’s home across the country, but through irrelevant turn of events that’s no longer possible.
I’ve looked at lots of services to support this:
- Mozy
- Carbonite
- JungleDisk
- BingoDisk
- MediaMax – terrible reports about their customer service, and billing practices. Maybe they are run by the ViaTalk folks
- iDrive
- OmniDrive
- Plain Amazon S3
- Buying hard drives and shipping them to a friend
From what I can tell, the only ones here that include support for the Linux-based server which needs to perform these backups for me are: JungleDisk/S3, and BingoDisk. BingoDisk is somewhat pricy and tops out at my current allocation (their top plan is 100GB). Many of the Windows-supporting services allow “unlimited” storage, which is never unlimited but sounds much better. At the size of my data on S3, I’m looking to pay ~$40/month which is getting pretty pricy and makes the hard-drive swapping a much better prospect.
I’ve also considered putting a wifi-capable device at a neighbors house to get me some offsite but allow a LAN connection. This is similar, but much less cool than EJ’s network
For now, I think I’ll just take an encrypted copy of my data to work.
Update:
And for a serendipitous reference to my last post, BingoDisk seems to have had a 10-day+ outage because there was a bug in their super-duper-mega-expensive-Sun-ZFS-data-array-thingy. Which is a big bit of support for my case that more expensive toys aren’t always better. On the upside, they were very open and honest about what was going on. But, they were down for 10-days, wow.
February 6th, 2008 at 7:01 am
That’s what I do. I have a firewire drive that I formatted into one large Truecrypt container. I bring it home for an incremental backup every few weeks unless I’m doing something important like scanning old family photos I inherited when my dad died. I could plug the drive into my computer at work and do rsync over ssh, but I don’t see the need.
The guy in the cube next to me uses and likes Mozy, but he’s only got a few weeks experience with it. I like having the only key to my data so I’ll stick with the firewire drive.
February 6th, 2008 at 7:24 am
I forgot to say that I keep my drive in a desk drawer at work. Archival conditions, fire suppression system, burglar alarm, unlimited storage, although bandwidth is only as good as my memory to bring the thing home to refresh my backup. It does allow me to backup things I probably wouldn’t if I were paying for space or bandwidth like /usr/local, /etc, and VMWare machines. 500GB Lacie drive ~$200.
February 6th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Hi David,
I work for Carbonite. Just a quick comment – Carbonite’s backups really ARE unlimited (at $49.95 per year), and although our average customer doesn’t back up more than 15-20gb (and usually a lot less), quite a few of our customers have backups of 100gb or more. Rather than some hidden upper limit, we let common sense be the limiting factor: the more you back up, the longer it will take to back up and restore.
For example, the 80gb or so that you mentioned in your post could take over three weeks to back up initially (although keeping it up to date afterwards is very speedy due to block-level incremental backups). Restoring tends to go much faster (particularly since ISPs give you faster download rates than upload rates), but 80gb could still take 5-7 days to restore completely.
For $49.95 a year, you can have a full, up-to-date, secure offsite backup. It certainly beats lugging a portable device back and forth between the office, or setting up a wireless remote backup with a neighbor.
Sincerely,
Len Pallazola
Manager, Customer Support Services
Carbonite, Inc.
http://www.carbonite.com
February 6th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Len Pal,
I admire your diligence to stray onto the corners of cyberspace to respond to my quest. Indeed, I realize the long time that backups and restore will take (from a failure event). In a previous experience, it took longer than a week to restore a comparatively small amount of data (we’ve taken lots of photos and video since 2004). Given that I’m not looking for this to be my primary source of backups in the event I do something errant or have a disk failure, but rather in case the house burns down, a hurricane levels it, or my whole machine fries from a power surge (including the disks). The last of which has actually occurred including the frying of both my hard disks (RAID 1) through my UPS.
All of these are fair, and I commend you for reaffirming the commitment to “unlimited” storage for your clients. The main challenge, however, remains that all of my data exists on my Linux server and I haven’t “always-on” Windows machine on which to host these backups. Is there anything in the Carbonite pipeline to address this?
Finally, I would love to know if you have a Google alert, or a trackback handler on the website to alert of you my post last night.
February 7th, 2008 at 10:38 am
You should check out http://www.filebackup.net
This backup service uses Iron Mountain/Connected software which is simply the best in the industry and which usually sells for 10x more. The software is paired with some of the best data centers around and there are no unreasonable limits on uploads downloads. The catch is that it is Windows platform only AND it tops out at 50GB. Does not do server, database backups.
February 16th, 2008 at 9:45 am
[...] in the “bigger isn’t always better” thread alluded to in my offsite backup post. Apparently, Amazon S3 was down for over 35 [...]
February 19th, 2008 at 6:46 am
How do you encrypt 100GB+ disk images?
I’ve been using OS X’s Disk Utility to create encrypted .dmg files, but it’s kind of a pain.
February 19th, 2008 at 8:10 am
There are a few ways to accomplish this in Linux:
1. use “duplicity” and your backups will be stored remotely on FTP, SFTP, S3 or otherwise and in full/incremental backup format.
2. Stack an encrypting filesystem on top of SSH for remote/encrypted backups (encfs+sshfs).
3. Some file archivers support the creation of archives with chunks that can also be encrypted with standalone GPG (like DAR), but this way you aren’t encrypting/decrypting a 100G file at once.