Online Backup Solution - Suggestions?
phuschnickens
Beverly Hills, Michigan Member
I'm working on modifying my company's backup plan. I would like to integrate an online back up plan. Our needs are basically a one time per month backup of 2 compressed files... one about 90GB the other about 30GB. Ideally the files transfer one after another in succession (like not one on the 1st of the month and one on the 15th).
We currently have a disgustingly slow T1 speed (about 1.3 Mbps up) so, according to my shoddy math, online backup of this much data might just not be possible without some serious added cost. With that said, we are considering a change in ISP anyway which may also include a slightly faster connection.
I've looked at some of the better rated online backup services but most of them have bells and whistles I just don't care about. All I want is to pay $10/mo to upload 130GB of data without the service's speed being the bottleneck. I also want to feel good enough about the service's reputation that my data will be safe. I don't need mobile access and I don't need to view my photos online in an online photo album. Maybe we just need to rent storage from a regular old webhost and upload via ftp or ssh or something? Hints, tips, experience, etc appreciated. Thanks!
We currently have a disgustingly slow T1 speed (about 1.3 Mbps up) so, according to my shoddy math, online backup of this much data might just not be possible without some serious added cost. With that said, we are considering a change in ISP anyway which may also include a slightly faster connection.
I've looked at some of the better rated online backup services but most of them have bells and whistles I just don't care about. All I want is to pay $10/mo to upload 130GB of data without the service's speed being the bottleneck. I also want to feel good enough about the service's reputation that my data will be safe. I don't need mobile access and I don't need to view my photos online in an online photo album. Maybe we just need to rent storage from a regular old webhost and upload via ftp or ssh or something? Hints, tips, experience, etc appreciated. Thanks!
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We're backing up 9 servers totaling around 300GB. So far I haven't noticed any slowdown. I chose them not for price, because we don't have complex backup requirements, and their interface is fairly simple relative to the other cloud-based backup solutions out there. We don't need bare-metal backups. In 7 years we have had a total of 5 drive failures on 9 servers.
Most "unlimited" web hosts wont back up your files on their shared server unless you use 10gigs or less ... or in that range. This means that if the datacenter burns down so do your backups. They also don't usually guarantee that they back you up regardless, its more of like a ya well do it for most customers because they expect it ... but it isn't covered in your agreement.
I'd really avoid a standard webhost for this sort of thing and go with the company Kwitko recommends or something similar that exists for the purpose of backups. They likely backup your backups to another offsite location and have some sort of agreement in your plan that they will do that. This makes it much easier should the company have to file a claim with their business insurance which includes the costs of recovering your backup.
In general I'd say when making a decision like this try to simulate the worst possible scenario 5 years from now, and does the backup solution you choose work out well?
If you do some research and find what you think is the best one, it would be awesome if you came back here and let us know what and why
Kwitko: What sort of connection speed do you guys have? At 1.5Mbps it looks like it will take us about 4 or 5 days to transfer our files. Any suggestion for an affordable way to get a faster up-speed?
I'd say they're not. Especially Dropbox (not as familiar with SugarSync), if for no other reason than they have access to all your data.
It's going to be damn hard to find a trustworthy, reliable backup service for under $10/mo. For enterprise backups (of non-Windows servers), I'd probably recommend Tarsnap (http://www.tarsnap.com/) but at ~130GB, you're looking at about $39/mo for storage (this would vary depending on how compressable the data is). There's also a fee for bandwidth used. Tarsnap does incremental backups though which should also help keep that number down. Given your network constraints, I'd definitely look into a service that does incremental backups and avoid archiving everything into one huge file before backing it up.
Last I checked (like, two years ago) dropbox did not without some serious hackery (ie encrypt/decrypt all contents before/after sending/receiving)
Tarsnap uses a unique encryption key, which only you have (make damn sure not to lose it) to back your data up before transmission.
At the end of the day, I'm not aware of any tools that will allow you to do an incremental backup of an archive/image/etc. If you want to do incremental backups, you'll probably need to do them directly on the source, not on the image. That or you'll just have to suck it up and do a complete backup of the images each time. Either way, I can pretty much guarantee that you won't be able to find a service that can do what you want for under $10/mo. It's just not a realistic price point.
Since off-site backup is one of the preferences of our backup plan, I'll be doing the OS image backup the old fashioned way (external hard drive, into laptop bag, into house onto coffee table).
Thanks to all for your help/suggestions and maybe I'll post back with any other findings.
Another method I'm considering:
I have VMWare and access to a copy of an unused Leopard OSX install so I'm thinking I might just work on setting up Time Machine to do the mirroring/versioning from D: to E:. One PITA is that I believe Time Machine will only back up HFS+ partitions so that means reformatting the D: to HFS+, abandoning DeltaCopy since it is Windows only (at least on the server side) and using a different rsync receiver. Once I do that I believe a VM of OSX running Time Machine will be able to do the magic I want it to do. Comments, hints, tips, advice, criticism?