jollyreaper writes "Technology moves quickly and what was conventional wisdom last year can be folly this year. But the one thing that's remained constant is hard drives are far too large to backup via conventional means. Tape is expensive and can be unreliable, though it certainly has its proponents. DVDs are just too small. There are prosumer devices like the Drobo, but it's still just a giant box of hard drives, basically RAID. And as we've all had drilled into our heads, 'RAID is not backup.' When last this topic came up on Slashdot, the consensus was that hard drives were the best way to backup hard drives. Backup your internal HDD to an external one, and if your data is really important, have two externals and swap one off-site once a week. Is there any better advice these days?"
Switching off-site backups every week is an unnecessary hassle. Back up to an external hard drive and an online backup service. Anything more than that is overkill unless you have really important data.
That's fine if your ISP doesn't have draconian caps. I have over 2TB of stuff (legal, mind you, lets not get a redundant "You must be pirating" theme going). Mostly photos and video content. My ISP caps at 100GB per month. Online backup is not a viable option except for my most important stuff. I use the offsite backup drive method, however I don't have two sets that I swap, I just have one offsite backup that I bring home from work ever other week.
Some of those online backup services offer the option to send in harddrives or tapes to make the start. If you stick with offsite backups, you can leave one big basis backup at work, and only swap the incremental backups. Then two simple 2.5" usb drives are big enough to handle that.
fine. add $150 for a blu ray burner. gee...wasnt that expensive ?
Now you're up to $550. For that, you could get a whole nother PC w/ 2 ea 1TB drives. Doesn't have to be even vaguely fast, just enough to host the drives. Access time to the entire backup is as fast as booting it, instead of digging through a stack of 40/50/60 disks.
Your average slashdotter is not going to get a cheapy $550 computer. Your average Joe maybe, and then they will complain to us that their computer is so slow...
Interestingly, amazon web services now has a import/export service, where they will accept your USB drive via courier and import it into their "Simple Storage Service" aka S3.
Not the same as external backup, but it provides redundancy against a single drive failure and provides history. Otherwise, run backup overnight every now and then to an external drive and store it away.
Almost 50GB per disc and brand name blanks aren't too expensive if you know where to look [smartimports.net]. (Hey Newegg: surely y'all could save us some nuisance if you'd import a shipping container or two of blanks direct from Japan...) Nero Linux supports Blu-ray drives. RAID1 for primary storage with BD-R DL backup, with the backups ideally stored securely off-site should be sufficiently paranoid for most home users though Blu-ray is too new to have real-world long-term integrity statistics.
Remote backup to a rented dedicated server is also a possibility though not terribly practical in America due to certain monopoly carriers (<cough>AT&T</cough>) being too cheap to build FTTH, at least until they run out of duct tape and bailing wire to keep their WWII-era copper plant patched together, and even then.
All of the online backup strategies are a joke. Due to bandwidth restrictions, it would take years just to make a backup of a typical user's hard drive, and they don't offer enough space (seriously).
The cheapest form of medium currently is hard drives, so my current backup system is to have 2 equally sized 500 GB drives and I use Acronis on a schedule to do a differential backup of one drive to the other once a week during early morning hours. If the differentials start to get too large, I'll do a new full backup and start doing differentials from there again. I haven't found any backup solution that is "totally" automatic in this regard, but since it only requires manual intervention once every several months it's not a huge deal.
Really? I don't think you've looked at this very carefully...personally I use Mozy, it's a couple bucks a month, the initial upload took a week or so, but it was all backgrounded and I never even noticed (yes, you can turn your computer off, etc.). Daily incremental backups take just a few seconds. Retrieval is via downloading, if you just want a few files, or for some money ($50? I think?) they'll overnight you a couple of DVD's with your whole backup on it. So, it's cheap, requires absolutely no thinking on my part, is fire/meteor proof, and has unlimited storage. The choice was obvious, from my point of view.
I decided that I have three main "categories of data":
- easily replaceable: This is stuff that is fairly easy to replace.. for instance I have ripped a huge portion of my DVD collection (for my own use). If I lost this data, it would not be a tragedy.. just a pain in the ass. - hard to replace: This is stuff that does exist "out there".. but would not be easy to replace. This includes old TV shows that you can't buy or if you can are very hard to find. - irreplaceable: Self explanatory.. this is my documents, code, photos, etc that could not be replaced if lost
I keep everything besides OS files on a file server. Raid 6 (two parity stripes).. this is the first layer.. to me this is adequate to protect "easily replaceable" stuff (which in my case constitutes a huge chunk of file space).
I backup everything in the "hard to replace" and "irreplaceable" categories to a seperate (removable but stays in the system) hard disk (so far 1TB has been enough to hold all this data). I make a secondary backup to a second removable drive and store this "off site". This secondary backup does not get updated very often.. which is the trade off I guess... but it provides a "last hope" if something crazy ever happened.. like my house burning down.
I store all of my porn videos and ripped music in the Limewire cloud, and let other people back it up for me. Works great, and I often realize I have backed up songs that I don't even remember ripping!
Exactly! When it comes down to it the really important stuff I have could be backed up on paper tape. My resume, my tax returns and some other odds and bits. I use to try to save all sorts of crap, tried to "download the Internet." Ya know, I never looked at it again. Once in a while I'll find an old drive in a drawer, mount it up and then wonder why I was saving all my killer CGI scripts from '96. (Most of those "send a comment" scripts today would be called a spam-proxy:)
If the stuff is that important then that is what hard-copy and fire safes are for.
Rule one: If you got it from bit-torrent, then you don't need to archive it. If it ever was on TV, it will be again. If it's porn, there is lots more where that came from.
Rule two: If it's for work, then ask your boss how she wants it backed-up. Then you're covered.
Rule three: If it's 3 TB of video of the first year of your kid's life then edit it down to 5 minutes because that's all that anyone will watch (willingly) anyway.
Rule four: If it's killer code then tar-zip-gmail is your friend. Ask some other project if you can stash a copy on their CVS server.
Rule five: five-nines of everything is crap. Live now, not in the past.
(emphasis mine) [[snip]] Steve: MacBreak Weekly, just as we were getting ready to do this. And he made a comment about - you were talking about ripping DVDs. And he said, yeah, you know, you can get a terabyte drive now for 90 bucks.
Leo: Exactly.
Steve: And I'm thinking, yeah, and that's what SpinRite costs. And he said so, you know, there's really no need to burn all those. Just rip them all onto t
Windows Home Server actually has very good backup options.
a)It allows for folder duplication on shared folders, protecting your shared files against a single hard drive failure.
b)It allows you to add a hard drive as a backup drive, basically to dump all the shared folders, which can then be taken offsite.
c)Jungle Disk has a WHS plugin, and there's an alternate Jungle Disk plugin which is allegedly better on whsplus.com, which provides your online protection.
Automated daily backups mated with Volume Shadowing means that not only is your data safe, but previous versions are available too.
I've re-purposed a computer as a backup server, which lives at my parents house. It runs Ubuntu, with ZFS running over FUSE. Each night, a scripted CRON event will run zpool scrub on my storage pool, and if there is a problem, it will send me a text.
My MacBook Pro will use Time Machine over NFS over SSH to make the actual backups from my dorm/wherever I happen to be.
I'm kinda a 'option 1' guy, but stuff that's really important, I just burn on to DVD every so often.
The other option, now that most folk now have halfdecent connections is to set up an rsync to a buddies machine, (and reciprocate) , using encryption, you now have an automatic off site back up.
Get an old P3 for free somewhere and load this up on it with a big disk or two for storage, put it on your network, and run it. That's what I do and it works like a charm. I went through all the options over the years, tape, DVDs, manual copying to a server.
Backuppc backs up all my windows and linux PCs. It backs up only what I tell it to, and it does both full and incremental. Sort of a pain in the ass to set up (I use cygwin rsyncd on the windows boxes, and regular rsyncd on the linux boxes), and it works well.
Once upon a time, the computer you wanted always cost (at least) $5,000.
This trend ended in the late 80's. All of a sudden, package system prices started trending seriously downwards, because due to Moore's law, computer speed started outrunning almost everything you'd want to run on it. Not true for certain specific apps, including graphics and games, but for office use it was perfectly fine.
I remember buying a 200 MB hard drive for $500 and thinking about what a great price it was.
Up until recently hard drives were one of the more expensive components left in a computer package. Now? Most are under $100. That's lower than tape backups used to be at their lowest prices. It's true, right now the best way to back up your hard drive is a second hard drive.
IMO the big question now is where that second hard drive will be. You can stick it in your computer and mirror your main drive in real time easily enough, but that means a virus or software issue will ruin both drives simultaneously. Better to sync them once a week? Perhaps.
Of course, this won't help you if there's a house fire. The fireproof hard drives are still darned expensive. Internet-based remote backup is great, if your broadband can handle it.
Since when is tape unreliable? My DLT has a MTBF of 250,000 hours. I've used DLT, DDS, and Travan for years and I've seen far more HDD failures. I've seen plenty of tape drives fail, but not the tapes themselves. I trust my tapes far more than any spinning platter. Come to think of it, I trust my tapes more than any other backup I use (Optical disc, HDD, and Cloud). Once my station wagon full of tapes caught fire on the highway, but I blame that cheap-ass roach clip.
For really valuable files (the ones I won't ever be able to replace if I lose them: my own documents, my photos), I burn a monthly DVD and drop it alternatively at my parents' and brother's.
For the rest of the junk (media files: music, videos, books...)that are very large but not that important (or easily replaceable), I have a large external HD to which I clone my main HD once a week. I then keep the Backup HD off-line until the next time.
Backups are: - off line (viruses, power surge, sabotage...) - off site (fires, theft...) - tested (i've got horrors stories of people that THOUGHT they had backups...) - multiple (... and of backups that turn bad at the worst possible moment)
So backing up data is a hassle, and can be expensive depending on what you need: a DVD, a BD, an HD... But pretty much the only foolproof solution anyway is to burn your data onto a media you then send away to your parents' or other trusted 3rd party. Once a month is the very minimum.
If you're using HDs, you may want to re-use them after a while, but don't forget to keep some very old ones, for when you realize ages after the facts that one of your files got corrupted.
2. If you lose this data, your business will be impacted.
3. If you lose this data, you will have less options for entertainment.
#1 tends to be a megabyte or less.
#2 tends to be a few hundred megabytes of documents.
#3 tends to be terabytes.
My company has a PDF of every document that we've touched in the past decade (federal law requires this retention), and our entire business continuity backup fits easily on four LTO-4 tapes, plus a very less-than-full tape that we rotate for offsite storage weekly. We've explored every backup system out there and this is by far the most cost-effective for us.
I don't understand why the OP claims "tape is unreliable", as I have not heard of a single instance of in-service failure of an LTO-4. As for it being expensive, it is, but before we went to tape we were using Firewire800 external drives, much more expensive than tape cartridges, and not as reliable as some people have been led to believe.
USB and FW external drives almost never fail as long as they are powered on. They fail in storage, which seemed pretty weird to me, since they should be able to sit on a warehouse shelf indefinitely. My low-sample unscientific data from experience says otherwise.
Since everybody is going from LTO-2/3 to LTO-4, you should be able to get LTO-3 transports pretty cheaply.
But my first advice is to identify the data in categories #1 and #2, where you might realize that it's a good practice in any case, to store the important stuff with its own priority. This is the hard part. Identifying what's actually important. If you don't do this, no matter what backup system you end up using, you're going to be burying the important stuff in the noise, introducing risk.
The OP also mentioned Drobo. I have a Drobo and I love it, but I must warn you that it's pretty slow, even with really fast drives. Don't expect to be able to copy a terabyte to it in less than 40 or 50 hours, even with firewire 800. This is the problem that drove us to tape, which is much faster than any filesystem we can feed it from.
Ghost Virtual Machine [g.ho.st] gives 15gigs of Amazon.com data storage and right now if you use the promotion code of "launch" you get 10Gigs more as a bonus for 25Gigs. If you want to give me a referral my id is orion_blastar there, and each person you referred grants you 5Gigs more in a bonus.
Google Docs [google.com] also has document storage but does not give as much as G.ho.st does. The Ghost Virtual Machine can access your Google Docs drive as well.
I hate to be that bitter old pessimist, but this has been debated to death and back here on Slashdot many times over. I swear, it should be in the FAQ by now.
There is not one backup strategy that covers all situations, even if you think there ought to be.
You have to do the work to find one that fits your needs, or hire someone else to.
Cheap, easy, reliable. Choose any two.
Slashdot: Not your personal army.
All of the times this question has come up (feels like at least once a month), there have been many very good suggestions. Why should we rehash them for the nth time?
i use rsync + samba on a linux box over the network with 2TB drives in a mirror (encrypted, mirrored with debian) for primary backup and have a LG Blue Ray burner for secondary backup. I get 50GB DL blu rays for $10 each from ebay (shipped from japan in 10 packs) mostly using verbatims. I burn two blu rays at a time with copies of the sam data on both and store them separately. $20 for 50 gig is not a bad bargain.
And honestly I'm not all that worried about backing up with modern operating systems.
Modern operating systems don't protect you from:
Oops. Didn't mean to delete that.
Oops, my wife/kids didn't mean to delete that.
A bug in the new release of Gnomovision ate my existing Gnomovision files.
Break-ins, electronic or otherwise.
Your hard drive eats itself.
Fire, flood, etc.
Best thing at the moment for home backup is to mount an encrypted external hard drive and copy to it, then take it off-site. If you think that sounds over the top, then I predict one day you'll be sitting at your terminal saying "aw, shit".
Ok, that covers the <5% of users who can set up and maintain a backup systems based on rsync. What about the other 95%?
As an interface to set up a backup system for a moderately adept geek with sufficient focus to set up and maintain a recurring rsync backup, an above average grasp of the layout of their filesystem, and the presence of mind to alter their rsync script as their computer changes over time, rsync is extremely powerful. For everyone else, it's next to useless.
As an interface to set up a backup system for a moderately adept geek with sufficient focus to set up and maintain a recurring rsync backup, an above average grasp of the layout of their filesystem, and the presence of mind to alter their rsync script as their computer changes over time, rsync is extremely powerful. For everyone else, it's next to useless.
On the other hand, if you thought you could ask on/. you probably match this description...
"What about the other 95%?" Over the years I became an old and bitter sysadm... you know what ? They just need to do what the 5% did: Put their asses in a chair and Read The Fucking Manual... and read again, and again until they understand the subject.
That's not what they did.
First, they were born/nurtured in such a way to have above average technical aptitude.
Second, they were interested enough in how computers work to tinker and learn and gain a broad base of knowledge about their computer and OS.
Only then did they "put their asses in a chair and Read The Fucking Manual... and read again, and again until they understand the subject."
If you expect the 95% who did not go through the first two parts to skip right over into the third part, you're in dire need of taking your ass out of the chair and meeting some Real Fucking People.
No, I'm not user friendly, I do not need to be... people are asking me for help anyway.
Do what I do. Tell them, "yes, there's a way but it's rather complex. Do you want me to explain it?" The answer is almost always "no". Because they really don't want you to explain it, they want you to do it. If they say yes, you'll probably be asked to stop in less than 60 seconds.
I think the OP's post arose from a misunderstanding of what "RAID is not backup" means.
The adage isn't an admonition not to use hard drives as a means of backing up data. Rather, it is concerned with the fact that any change to your data is committed to each duplicate volume in a RAID, so if you delete an important file, for example, it's just as gone as if you weren't running a RAID.
That's completely different from mirroring your drive onto an external hard drive and putting it on a shelf somewhere. If you delete a file on your live system, you can restore from that backup.
We must lay out the kinds of failures and goals of a backup to determine how best to back up.
1. We would like to protect against mechanical drive failure. This can be done with a RAID.
1.5. We may also want to protect against the failure of other components of the computer. I recently had a computer die because its motherboard died, and it took about two weeks to get a new computer, and the new computer was a significant upgrade so it had SATA instead of IDE. In the mean time, I needed my data on other systems, and when the new computer came, I needed to borrow a USB-IDE bridge to recover some stuff that I wasn't backing up.
2. We would like to protect against accidental deletion of files, file corruption, or edits to a file that we have now reconsidered. This can be done with snapshotting. In source code, to reconsider and edit to a file is fairly common, and is the reason why most programming projects use revision control systems. Other options like nilfs or ZFS snapshots can also fill this goal. This goal is accomplished more easily if the backups area automatic and the backup device is live on the system.
Depending on your needs, this goal may be counterbalanced by a need to not retain the history of files for legal or other reasons, and this should inform your choice of backup strategy.
3. We would like to protect against filesystem corruption, whether by an OS bug, or by accidentally doing cat/dev/random >/dev/hda. This can be done by having an extra drive of some sort that isn't normally hooked up to the computer. Tape drives, CDs, and DVDs have traditionally fulfilled this purpose, and this is where the use of additional hard drives is being suggested. Remote backups, via rsync can also accomplish this. For this I use git.
4. We would like to protect against natural disasters. For someone living in New Orleans, it would be nice to have a backup somewhere outside the path of Hurricane Katrina. Remote backups may be pretty much the only way to accomplish this, unless you're a frequent traveler and can hand-deliver backup media to remote locations.
5. In addition to any of the above, the code you use create said backup may be buggy, or may become buggy or misconfigured over time. Checking the integrity and restorability of your backups after creating them, and keeping several (independent) previous versions of a backup may help here.
You may not be concerned with the various modes of failure described here occuring simultaneously. For example, it may be unlikely that you need to deal with file system corruption at the same time that you regret one of the edits you made on your file. In that case, your offline backup device doesn't need to hold all of your snapshots.
Actually I read the summary and decided it was stupid. Sort of like, "I want to make a ham sandwich. Conventionally these contain bread and ham, but I'm an idiot so I want to make it from dog hair and epoxy resin".
by Anonymous Coward
on Sunday July 19, @02:59PM (#28749613)
Are you joking? S3 is perhaps the most overpriced way to backup data.
You're paying at least $0.15/GB/month for the space, and then paying $0.10/GB transferred in and $0.17/GB transferred out.
So if you were to use 1TB of storage over 5 years filling it perhaps 3 times over that period and reading it 10x, it would cost $1800 for the space alone, $300 bw in, $1700 bw out, for a total price of $3800.
Meanwhile, you can get 1TB hard drives for $80 everyday (you could almost buy 50 of them for the price of your online service). I'd love to hear how you can twist the math around so badly that it looks like you're actually saving money! Ever considered a career in politics?
This is a bad idea. Other than the ludicrous cost of the SSD, flash drives tend to fail all at once. bam! and all your data is gone. This is also why i do not use a USB key for backups. On my system everything is dumped on a 2TB mirrored system (simple 2 x 2TB HDDs running debian software encryption + RAID lvm) and periodically backed up to blu ray DLs in duplicate. At $10/disk from japan (see ebay) two verbatims back up 50GB in duplicate for $20. Typically it takes 2-3 months to generate that amount which means its cost effective. DVDRs (Taiyo Yudens) fill the gap if there is not enough data to justify a bunch of blu rays.
A flash drive is probably the most stable technology. The drawback is the high expense. My strategy is several fold:
- Nearly all my home movies are recorded on Super VHS tape. Being analog if the tape gets damaged, it will still be watchable (wrinkles appear as momentary scanlines).
- My downloaded porn is backed-up on an external USB drive. If the c: drives fails, I can just copy the stuff over (and vice-versa).
- Stuff that I can buy on DVD or CD like Babylon 5 or Star Trek, I buy. These discs are physically pressed with pits so they won't self-erase themselves like DVD-Rs or CD-Rs tend to do. They should last the rest of my life.
Unfortunately none of these strategies protect my from a major accident like a house fire. I just need to make sure not to do something stupid like fall asleep with a cigarette in my mouth.
I've got a pretty large collection of old games. One of the things I've noticed about them is that, even for factory-pressed discs, you have to deal with the following factors:
- Unsealing. If the disc wasn't sealed properly, it will begin to oxidize. Several of mine have done this. It moves from the edge inwards.
- Plastic clouding. Even if it's stored in a cool, dry place and kept out of sunlight, clouding can and will occur. The cheaper the disc was produced, the sooner this happens. Many of my older titles (Civ 2 among them) suffer from precisely this problem and that's one reason I began taking them all and making ISO backups just in case as well.
- Physical usage. If it's something you use often, wear and tear occurs. Games have access patterns that are clearly different from music CD's. For one, music CD's tend to spin at the standard 1X rate (unless you're seeking), which doesn't cause the disc to deform much (as opposed to full-speed data access... see the high-speed footage from the Mythbusters ep on this if you want). Two, data CD's access a lot more erratically - and the more "back and forth" you have, the more likely you are to scratch the disc from ordinary use. If you put an older CD (not physically designed for higher-speed drives) into a modern higher-speed drive, you can make the problem worse.
Of course, sure, you could abuse them. I saw a Rock Band disc once that looked like an LP - someone had put it in at a convention 15 feet away from the DDR setup, and the room had been bouncing so violently that the disc read head had literally put grooves into the disc. But I doubt that's what happened to the gpp's Civ 2 disc.
External and Online (Score:5, Informative)
Switching off-site backups every week is an unnecessary hassle. Back up to an external hard drive and an online backup service. Anything more than that is overkill unless you have really important data.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That's fine if your ISP doesn't have draconian caps. I have over 2TB of stuff (legal, mind you, lets not get a redundant "You must be pirating" theme going). Mostly photos and video content. My ISP caps at 100GB per month. Online backup is not a viable option except for my most important stuff. I use the offsite backup drive method, however I don't have two sets that I swap, I just have one offsite backup that I bring home from work ever other week.
Some of those online backup services offer the option to send in harddrives or tapes to make the start. If you stick with offsite backups, you can leave one big basis backup at work, and only swap the incremental backups. Then two simple 2.5" usb drives are big enough to handle that.
Re:External and Online (Score:5, Insightful)
Now you're up to $550. For that, you could get a whole nother PC w/ 2 ea 1TB drives. Doesn't have to be even vaguely fast, just enough to host the drives. Access time to the entire backup is as fast as booting it, instead of digging through a stack of 40/50/60 disks.
Parent
Re:External and Online (Score:4, Insightful)
Your average slashdotter is not going to get a cheapy $550 computer. Your average Joe maybe, and then they will complain to us that their computer is so slow...
Parent
Re:External and Online (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, because work is going to complain about the hard drive in my desk drawer.
I also keep a pair of shoes there as well; my manager's never complained about that either.
Unless you work for a fast-food type company, I'd imagine most places are cool about this.
Parent
Re:External and Online (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, it'll take a while to upload your initial 2TB
His service is capped at 100 GB a month.
Uploading 2 TB would take the better part of two years - assuming 100% of his traffic was dedicated to the process.
It would be simpler and cheaper to use a courier service.
Parent
Re:External and Online (Score:5, Interesting)
Interestingly, amazon web services now has a import/export service, where they will accept your USB drive via courier and import it into their "Simple Storage Service" aka S3.
http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/ [amazon.com]
--jeffk++
Parent
Re:Most likely you have 1.9TB of crap. (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Raid 1 + version control (Score:3, Insightful)
BD-R DL discs aren't too bad (Score:4, Informative)
Almost 50GB per disc and brand name blanks aren't too expensive if you know where to look [smartimports.net]. (Hey Newegg: surely y'all could save us some nuisance if you'd import a shipping container or two of blanks direct from Japan...) Nero Linux supports Blu-ray drives. RAID1 for primary storage with BD-R DL backup, with the backups ideally stored securely off-site should be sufficiently paranoid for most home users though Blu-ray is too new to have real-world long-term integrity statistics.
Remote backup to a rented dedicated server is also a possibility though not terribly practical in America due to certain monopoly carriers (<cough>AT&T</cough>) being too cheap to build FTTH, at least until they run out of duct tape and bailing wire to keep their WWII-era copper plant patched together, and even then.
Differential + hard drive - online (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Differential + hard drive - online (Score:5, Interesting)
Really? I don't think you've looked at this very carefully...personally I use Mozy, it's a couple bucks a month, the initial upload took a week or so, but it was all backgrounded and I never even noticed (yes, you can turn your computer off, etc.). Daily incremental backups take just a few seconds. Retrieval is via downloading, if you just want a few files, or for some money ($50? I think?) they'll overnight you a couple of DVD's with your whole backup on it. So, it's cheap, requires absolutely no thinking on my part, is fire/meteor proof, and has unlimited storage. The choice was obvious, from my point of view.
Parent
I like my layered approach.. (Score:5, Informative)
I decided that I have three main "categories of data":
- easily replaceable: This is stuff that is fairly easy to replace.. for instance I have ripped a huge portion of my DVD collection (for my own use). If I lost this data, it would not be a tragedy .. just a pain in the ass.
- hard to replace: This is stuff that does exist "out there".. but would not be easy to replace. This includes old TV shows that you can't buy or if you can are very hard to find.
- irreplaceable: Self explanatory.. this is my documents, code, photos, etc that could not be replaced if lost
I keep everything besides OS files on a file server. Raid 6 (two parity stripes).. this is the first layer..
to me this is adequate to protect "easily replaceable" stuff (which in my case constitutes a huge chunk of file space).
I backup everything in the "hard to replace" and "irreplaceable" categories to a seperate (removable but stays in the system) hard disk (so far 1TB has been enough to hold all this data). I make a
secondary backup to a second removable drive and store this "off site". This secondary backup does not get updated very often.. which is the trade off I guess... but it provides a "last hope" if something
crazy ever happened.. like my house burning down.
Oh.. and backups are encrypted!
I use Limewire to backup my multimedia (Score:3, Funny)
I store all of my porn videos and ripped music in the Limewire cloud, and let other people back it up for me. Works great, and I often realize I have backed up songs that I don't even remember ripping!
You're the first to ask "WTF am I backing up?" (Score:5, Funny)
I just can't be bothered with slashdot any more. It's full of dummies with mod points. How do I get off the Internet?
Do I need a megabyte of backup capacity for every megabyte of storage? No, I decide what's important and how long it's important for.
Parent
Re:You're the first to ask "WTF am I backing up?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly! When it comes down to it the really important stuff I have could be backed up on paper tape. My resume, my tax returns and some other odds and bits. I use to try to save all sorts of crap, tried to "download the Internet." Ya know, I never looked at it again. Once in a while I'll find an old drive in a drawer, mount it up and then wonder why I was saving all my killer CGI scripts from '96. (Most of those "send a comment" scripts today would be called a spam-proxy :)
If the stuff is that important then that is what hard-copy and fire safes are for.
Rule one: If you got it from bit-torrent, then you don't need to archive it. If it ever was on TV, it will be again. If it's porn, there is lots more where that came from.
Rule two: If it's for work, then ask your boss how she wants it backed-up. Then you're covered.
Rule three: If it's 3 TB of video of the first year of your kid's life then edit it down to 5 minutes because that's all that anyone will watch (willingly) anyway.
Rule four: If it's killer code then tar-zip-gmail is your friend. Ask some other project if you can stash a copy on their CVS server.
Rule five: five-nines of everything is crap. Live now, not in the past.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Your post reminded me of this discussion on "Security Now!".
original transcript: http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-198.htm [grc.com]
(emphasis mine)
[[snip]]
Steve: MacBreak Weekly, just as we were getting ready to do this. And he made a comment about - you were talking about ripping DVDs. And he said, yeah, you know, you can get a terabyte drive now for 90 bucks.
Leo: Exactly.
Steve: And I'm thinking, yeah, and that's what SpinRite costs. And he said so, you know, there's really no need to burn all those. Just rip them all onto t
Windows Home Server + Jungle Disk (Score:4, Informative)
What I'm doing this fall... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've re-purposed a computer as a backup server, which lives at my parents house. It runs Ubuntu, with ZFS running over FUSE. Each night, a scripted CRON event will run zpool scrub on my storage pool, and if there is a problem, it will send me a text.
My MacBook Pro will use Time Machine over NFS over SSH to make the actual backups from my dorm/wherever I happen to be.
Commence CDDL/GPL/BSD Flamewar.
not really. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really, keep doing it like that. for how to do that read this: http://jwz.livejournal.com/801607.html [livejournal.com]
I'm kinda a 'option 1' guy, but stuff that's really important, I just burn on to DVD every so often.
The other option, now that most folk now have halfdecent connections is to set up an rsync to a buddies machine, (and reciprocate) , using encryption, you now have an automatic off site back up.
Mozy is good (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Mozy is good (Score:4, Insightful)
Except its also a-ok on Mac OS X. I use it to backup my home mac server just fine. It appears to use some hack based on rdiff-backup.
Parent
Easy (Score:4, Interesting)
I have an external harddrive attached to my Macbook and Time machine takes care of the rest. And my important document and photos I upload to my dropbox That way I have a local backup of my entire harddrive in case something happens to my Macbook and one stored on the "cloud" that I can reach if my house burns down. [getdropbox.com]
backuppc (Score:5, Interesting)
http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
Get an old P3 for free somewhere and load this up on it with a big disk or two for storage, put it on your network, and run it. That's what I do and it works like a charm. I went through all the options over the years, tape, DVDs, manual copying to a server.
Backuppc backs up all my windows and linux PCs. It backs up only what I tell it to, and it does both full and incremental. Sort of a pain in the ass to set up (I use cygwin rsyncd on the windows boxes, and regular rsyncd on the linux boxes), and it works well.
Only drawback is it is still on site.
RAID (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because the backup solution _uses_ RAID doesn't mean the old adage applies to it. As long as you are using it as external backups all is well.
What that phrase IS telling you to do however is not use RAID on the machine you want to back up and expect it to do what you want.
cost (Score:5, Informative)
Once upon a time, the computer you wanted always cost (at least) $5,000.
This trend ended in the late 80's. All of a sudden, package system prices started trending seriously downwards, because due to Moore's law, computer speed started outrunning almost everything you'd want to run on it. Not true for certain specific apps, including graphics and games, but for office use it was perfectly fine.
I remember buying a 200 MB hard drive for $500 and thinking about what a great price it was.
Up until recently hard drives were one of the more expensive components left in a computer package. Now? Most are under $100. That's lower than tape backups used to be at their lowest prices. It's true, right now the best way to back up your hard drive is a second hard drive.
IMO the big question now is where that second hard drive will be. You can stick it in your computer and mirror your main drive in real time easily enough, but that means a virus or software issue will ruin both drives simultaneously. Better to sync them once a week? Perhaps.
Of course, this won't help you if there's a house fire. The fireproof hard drives are still darned expensive. Internet-based remote backup is great, if your broadband can handle it.
Shoot for long term reliability (Score:5, Funny)
Cuneiform tablets work well for me. Don't store them in a flood zone, though.
Tape can be unreliable (Score:4, Interesting)
Depends on the files (Score:4, Interesting)
For really valuable files (the ones I won't ever be able to replace if I lose them: my own documents, my photos), I burn a monthly DVD and drop it alternatively at my parents' and brother's.
For the rest of the junk (media files: music, videos, books...)that are very large but not that important (or easily replaceable), I have a large external HD to which I clone my main HD once a week. I then keep the Backup HD off-line until the next time.
Let's define backups.. again... (Score:3, Informative)
Backups are:
- off line (viruses, power surge, sabotage...)
- off site (fires, theft...)
- tested (i've got horrors stories of people that THOUGHT they had backups...)
- multiple (... and of backups that turn bad at the worst possible moment)
So backing up data is a hassle, and can be expensive depending on what you need: a DVD, a BD, an HD... But pretty much the only foolproof solution anyway is to burn your data onto a media you then send away to your parents' or other trusted 3rd party. Once a month is the very minimum.
If you're using HDs, you may want to re-use them after a while, but don't forget to keep some very old ones, for when you realize ages after the facts that one of your files got corrupted.
Levels of importance (Score:5, Informative)
There are three kinds of data:
1. If you lose this data you will go to jail.
2. If you lose this data, your business will be impacted.
3. If you lose this data, you will have less options for entertainment.
#1 tends to be a megabyte or less.
#2 tends to be a few hundred megabytes of documents.
#3 tends to be terabytes.
My company has a PDF of every document that we've touched in the past decade (federal law requires this retention), and our entire business continuity backup fits easily on four LTO-4 tapes, plus a very less-than-full tape that we rotate for offsite storage weekly. We've explored every backup system out there and this is by far the most cost-effective for us.
I don't understand why the OP claims "tape is unreliable", as I have not heard of a single instance of in-service failure of an LTO-4. As for it being expensive, it is, but before we went to tape we were using Firewire800 external drives, much more expensive than tape cartridges, and not as reliable as some people have been led to believe.
USB and FW external drives almost never fail as long as they are powered on. They fail in storage, which seemed pretty weird to me, since they should be able to sit on a warehouse shelf indefinitely. My low-sample unscientific data from experience says otherwise.
Since everybody is going from LTO-2/3 to LTO-4, you should be able to get LTO-3 transports pretty cheaply.
But my first advice is to identify the data in categories #1 and #2, where you might realize that it's a good practice in any case, to store the important stuff with its own priority. This is the hard part. Identifying what's actually important. If you don't do this, no matter what backup system you end up using, you're going to be burying the important stuff in the noise, introducing risk.
The OP also mentioned Drobo. I have a Drobo and I love it, but I must warn you that it's pretty slow, even with really fast drives. Don't expect to be able to copy a terabyte to it in less than 40 or 50 hours, even with firewire 800. This is the problem that drove us to tape, which is much faster than any filesystem we can feed it from.
Back up the Data Files to the Cloud (Score:5, Informative)
Ghost Virtual Machine [g.ho.st] gives 15gigs of Amazon.com data storage and right now if you use the promotion code of "launch" you get 10Gigs more as a bonus for 25Gigs. If you want to give me a referral my id is orion_blastar there, and each person you referred grants you 5Gigs more in a bonus.
Google Docs [google.com] also has document storage but does not give as much as G.ho.st does. The Ghost Virtual Machine can access your Google Docs drive as well.
Here is a review of the top 5 online cloud storage sites [readwriteweb.com] so you can take your pick.
MyBloop [mybloop.com] offers unlimited free storage, but I am not 100% sure of that or their privacy policy.
Lifehacker talks about using your Yahoo Mail account for unlimited storage [lifehacker.com] and also that Google's GMail almost offers the same service as well.
Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate to be that bitter old pessimist, but this has been debated to death and back here on Slashdot many times over. I swear, it should be in the FAQ by now.
All of the times this question has come up (feels like at least once a month), there have been many very good suggestions. Why should we rehash them for the nth time?
Re:Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Do we have to bring this up over and over again (Score:4, Insightful)
rsync.
That's the protocol. Now what media do you recommend? Another hard drive?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
i use rsync + samba on a linux box over the network with 2TB drives in a mirror (encrypted, mirrored with debian) for primary backup and have a LG Blue Ray burner for secondary backup. I get 50GB DL blu rays for $10 each from ebay (shipped from japan in 10 packs) mostly using verbatims. I burn two blu rays at a time with copies of the sam data on both and store them separately. $20 for 50 gig is not a bad bargain.
Re:Do we have to bring this up over and over again (Score:5, Insightful)
And honestly I'm not all that worried about backing up with modern operating systems.
Modern operating systems don't protect you from:
Best thing at the moment for home backup is to mount an encrypted external hard drive and copy to it, then take it off-site. If you think that sounds over the top, then I predict one day you'll be sitting at your terminal saying "aw, shit".
Parent
Re:Do we have to bring this up over and over again (Score:3, Interesting)
rsync.
Ok, that covers the <5% of users who can set up and maintain a backup systems based on rsync. What about the other 95%?
As an interface to set up a backup system for a moderately adept geek with sufficient focus to set up and maintain a recurring rsync backup, an above average grasp of the layout of their filesystem, and the presence of mind to alter their rsync script as their computer changes over time, rsync is extremely powerful. For everyone else, it's next to useless.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
As an interface to set up a backup system for a moderately adept geek with sufficient focus to set up and maintain a recurring rsync backup, an above average grasp of the layout of their filesystem, and the presence of mind to alter their rsync script as their computer changes over time, rsync is extremely powerful. For everyone else, it's next to useless.
On the other hand, if you thought you could ask on /. you probably match this description...
Re:Do we have to bring this up over and over again (Score:5, Funny)
On the other hand, if you thought you could ask on /. you probably match this description...
If you had to ask on /., you already don't match the description.
Parent
Re:Do we have to bring this up over and over again (Score:4, Insightful)
They should use Time Machine.
Parent
Re:Do we have to bring this up over and over again (Score:5, Insightful)
"What about the other 95%?" Over the years I became an old and bitter sysadm... you know what ? They just need to do what the 5% did: Put their asses in a chair and Read The Fucking Manual... and read again, and again until they understand the subject.
That's not what they did.
First, they were born/nurtured in such a way to have above average technical aptitude.
Second, they were interested enough in how computers work to tinker and learn and gain a broad base of knowledge about their computer and OS.
Only then did they "put their asses in a chair and Read The Fucking Manual... and read again, and again until they understand the subject."
If you expect the 95% who did not go through the first two parts to skip right over into the third part, you're in dire need of taking your ass out of the chair and meeting some Real Fucking People.
No, I'm not user friendly, I do not need to be... people are asking me for help anyway.
Do what I do. Tell them, "yes, there's a way but it's rather complex. Do you want me to explain it?" The answer is almost always "no". Because they really don't want you to explain it, they want you to do it. If they say yes, you'll probably be asked to stop in less than 60 seconds.
Parent
Re:say what? (Score:5, Informative)
I think the OP's post arose from a misunderstanding of what "RAID is not backup" means.
The adage isn't an admonition not to use hard drives as a means of backing up data. Rather, it is concerned with the fact that any change to your data is committed to each duplicate volume in a RAID, so if you delete an important file, for example, it's just as gone as if you weren't running a RAID.
That's completely different from mirroring your drive onto an external hard drive and putting it on a shelf somewhere. If you delete a file on your live system, you can restore from that backup.
Parent
Different kinds of backups for different failures. (Score:5, Interesting)
We must lay out the kinds of failures and goals of a backup to determine how best to back up.
1. We would like to protect against mechanical drive failure. This can be done with a RAID.
1.5. We may also want to protect against the failure of other components of the computer. I recently had a computer die because its motherboard died, and it took about two weeks to get a new computer, and the new computer was a significant upgrade so it had SATA instead of IDE. In the mean time, I needed my data on other systems, and when the new computer came, I needed to borrow a USB-IDE bridge to recover some stuff that I wasn't backing up.
2. We would like to protect against accidental deletion of files, file corruption, or edits to a file that we have now reconsidered. This can be done with snapshotting. In source code, to reconsider and edit to a file is fairly common, and is the reason why most programming projects use revision control systems. Other options like nilfs or ZFS snapshots can also fill this goal. This goal is accomplished more easily if the backups area automatic and the backup device is live on the system.
Depending on your needs, this goal may be counterbalanced by a need to not retain the history of files for legal or other reasons, and this should inform your choice of backup strategy.
3. We would like to protect against filesystem corruption, whether by an OS bug, or by accidentally doing cat /dev/random > /dev/hda. This can be done by having an extra drive of some sort that isn't normally hooked up to the computer. Tape drives, CDs, and DVDs have traditionally fulfilled this purpose, and this is where the use of additional hard drives is being suggested. Remote backups, via rsync can also accomplish this. For this I use git.
4. We would like to protect against natural disasters. For someone living in New Orleans, it would be nice to have a backup somewhere outside the path of Hurricane Katrina. Remote backups may be pretty much the only way to accomplish this, unless you're a frequent traveler and can hand-deliver backup media to remote locations.
5. In addition to any of the above, the code you use create said backup may be buggy, or may become buggy or misconfigured over time. Checking the integrity and restorability of your backups after creating them, and keeping several (independent) previous versions of a backup may help here.
You may not be concerned with the various modes of failure described here occuring simultaneously. For example, it may be unlikely that you need to deal with file system corruption at the same time that you regret one of the edits you made on your file. In that case, your offline backup device doesn't need to hold all of your snapshots.
Parent
Re:say what? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Better Oblig. Futurama Quote (Score:5, Funny)
"I want to make a ham sandwich. Conventionally these contain bread and ham, but I'm an idiot so I want to make it from dog hair and epoxy resin".
Leela: And that sandwich you're eating is made of old discarded sandwiches. Nothing just gets thrown away.
Fry: The future is disgusting!
Parent
Re:I use... (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you joking? S3 is perhaps the most overpriced way to backup data.
You're paying at least $0.15/GB/month for the space, and then paying $0.10/GB transferred in and $0.17/GB transferred out.
So if you were to use 1TB of storage over 5 years filling it perhaps 3 times over that period and reading it 10x, it would cost $1800 for the space alone, $300 bw in, $1700 bw out, for a total price of $3800.
Meanwhile, you can get 1TB hard drives for $80 everyday (you could almost buy 50 of them for the price of your online service). I'd love to hear how you can twist the math around so badly that it looks like you're actually saving money! Ever considered a career in politics?
Parent
Re:SSD (Score:5, Informative)
This is a bad idea. Other than the ludicrous cost of the SSD, flash drives tend to fail all at once. bam! and all your data is gone. This is also why i do not use a USB key for backups.
On my system everything is dumped on a 2TB mirrored system (simple 2 x 2TB HDDs running debian software encryption + RAID lvm) and periodically backed up to blu ray DLs in duplicate. At $10/disk from japan (see ebay) two verbatims back up 50GB in duplicate for $20.
Typically it takes 2-3 months to generate that amount which means its cost effective. DVDRs (Taiyo Yudens) fill the gap if there is not enough data to justify a bunch of blu rays.
Parent
Re:SSD (Score:4, Insightful)
A flash drive is probably the most stable technology. The drawback is the high expense. My strategy is several fold:
- Nearly all my home movies are recorded on Super VHS tape. Being analog if the tape gets damaged, it will still be watchable (wrinkles appear as momentary scanlines).
- My downloaded porn is backed-up on an external USB drive. If the c: drives fails, I can just copy the stuff over (and vice-versa).
- Stuff that I can buy on DVD or CD like Babylon 5 or Star Trek, I buy. These discs are physically pressed with pits so they won't self-erase themselves like DVD-Rs or CD-Rs tend to do. They should last the rest of my life.
Unfortunately none of these strategies protect my from a major accident like a house fire. I just need to make sure not to do something stupid like fall asleep with a cigarette in my mouth.
Parent
Re:SSD (Score:4, Informative)
Bullshit.
I've got a pretty large collection of old games. One of the things I've noticed about them is that, even for factory-pressed discs, you have to deal with the following factors:
- Unsealing. If the disc wasn't sealed properly, it will begin to oxidize. Several of mine have done this. It moves from the edge inwards.
- Plastic clouding. Even if it's stored in a cool, dry place and kept out of sunlight, clouding can and will occur. The cheaper the disc was produced, the sooner this happens. Many of my older titles (Civ 2 among them) suffer from precisely this problem and that's one reason I began taking them all and making ISO backups just in case as well.
- Physical usage. If it's something you use often, wear and tear occurs. Games have access patterns that are clearly different from music CD's. For one, music CD's tend to spin at the standard 1X rate (unless you're seeking), which doesn't cause the disc to deform much (as opposed to full-speed data access... see the high-speed footage from the Mythbusters ep on this if you want). Two, data CD's access a lot more erratically - and the more "back and forth" you have, the more likely you are to scratch the disc from ordinary use. If you put an older CD (not physically designed for higher-speed drives) into a modern higher-speed drive, you can make the problem worse.
Of course, sure, you could abuse them. I saw a Rock Band disc once that looked like an LP - someone had put it in at a convention 15 feet away from the DDR setup, and the room had been bouncing so violently that the disc read head had literally put grooves into the disc. But I doubt that's what happened to the gpp's Civ 2 disc.
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