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Long term backup solutions
Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2009 1:47 am
by matthijs
So what are you people using as back up strategies? And what will future solutions look like?
In the early days it was burning CD's. But CD's don't last long and combined with increasing capacities of harddisks it soon made no more sense to do that. So now I only use harddisks. But harddisks have a limited lifetime as well. So you always have to build in some redundancy.
For example, at the moment I have my personal photos on at least 4 separate harddisks. But what I don't do (yet) is keep one of those in a safe some where else. So if my house burns down I still loose everything.
In the end, the current sata harddisks are not a real long term solution I think. I mean, if I would put one of the disks in a box in my cellar, and I'd pick it up in 10 years from now, would it still work? My guess is not.
What about the next generation solid state disks? Will they be more durable?
It's funny. At one side it's cool you can have all you stuff - photo, film, music, documents - digital nowadays, but at the same time it's all very vulnerable. Paper documents will last hundreds of years. Vinyl records probably as well. Paper photographs will loose some of there color but still last a long time. But this digital data is just a bunch of magnetic zero's and ones on a fragile disk. One scratch or encounter with a magnetic field and it's gone.
Re: Long term backup solutions
Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2009 2:25 am
by Apollo
I use automated backups to several external servers. That way, if one would crash, I still have a few others, and if my office burns down, I don't lose my data AND the backups (which would be the case if I use external harddisk backups and keep them in the same building, and taking them home every day is too much hassle).
Re: Long term backup solutions
Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2009 2:35 am
by matthijs
And those external servers, are those your own (dedicated) servers you rent some where, or are they from a backup company?
I've looked at online backup solutions, but at the moment the prices are way too high. Like $100-$300 for maybe 10-100 Gb each year. If you have a few hundred Gb of data (and growing) which you want to store indefinitely, those digital family pictures suddenly aren't that cheap anymore.
Re: Long term backup solutions
Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2009 2:56 am
by Apollo
I just put everything on a normal hosting account. I've got some pretty much unlimited accounts (some for even a few €/month), diskspace is almost free nowadays. Of course for really HUGE amounts of data this may not be appropriate, but for family photos, I think I can keep shooting and backing up for the rest of my life and not end up wasting several hundreds GB. I'm backing up way more than just family photos though, currently a few hundred MB each day or something.
Some hosting accounts also have a "growing disk space" policy - you start off with a certain amount of diskspace, and the space limit increases every month.
Re: Long term backup solutions
Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2009 3:20 am
by matthijs
Normal hosting accounts are pretty cheap in disk space, you're right about that. I had not thought about those.
But the problem is that space like that is not meant as backup space. Sure you can use it like that, but it's not as safe and secure as you'd want from a normal backup solution. Of course what you want is all up to you. But personally I wouldn't want to put my whole digital life (including important documents) on some cheap shared server which can be hacked into any moment.
Re: Long term backup solutions
Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2009 4:24 am
by alex.barylski
Like $100-$300 for maybe 10-100 Gb each year
Just curious, but what would you consider reasonable for backup storage space?
Per GB/Month?
I have actually considered renting a co-located server somewhere near by and offering backup storage...about $1/Month/GB is the price I arrived at too, but it is a little pricey considering $150 will buy you a 500GB external HDD.
I don't know though, the convience of having the data remotely stored and accessible, not to mention the additional security, environmentally controlled and daily backups, it's hard to beat, except in price.
Re: Long term backup solutions
Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2009 4:59 am
by matthijs
Haven't exactly figured out how much I am willing to pay, but what I have seen so far is too expensive. Consider that a normal harddisk of 1000 Gb costs about €100 nowadays, paying €100/year to store 10 - 100 Gb seems a bit steep. Of course you pay for the whole setup, the people working in the storage company, etc so I understand my comparison isn't exactly fair.
But still. With things like these it is about scaling. A backup company might not make a lot of profit on one customer, but after you have filled a data center with a few hundred or thousand hard disks and automated a few processes, there's not that much work to be done anymore.
I guess it will take one or a few more years before this online backup really takes up and the market becomes big enough for companies to scale things and solutions to become cheaper. Most people have only recently, say the last 5-10 years, started to do more with their pc's, taking digital pictures and movies, putting all their music on it, etc. It will take some time before people have gathered so much stuff that they start to realize the value of it and the benefits of other backup solutions online.
Re: Long term backup solutions
Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2009 5:00 am
by Apollo
matthijs wrote:Normal hosting accounts are pretty cheap in disk space, you're right about that. I had not thought about those.
But the problem is that space like that is not meant as backup space. Sure you can use it like that, but it's not as safe and secure as you'd want from a normal backup solution. Of course what you want is all up to you. But personally I wouldn't want to put my whole digital life (including important documents) on some cheap shared server which can be hacked into any moment.
Of course I encrypt* everything, I don't trust
anyone with my data. Even if I used an official backup solution, I wouldn't store a single bit of my data unencrypted. Same for backups on external harddisks, they can get stolen - replacing some cheap hardware is one thing, but having your data on the street is another.
(* using
7-Zip with 256bit AES encryption and a completely random 50 character password)
Re: Long term backup solutions
Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2009 5:02 am
by Apollo
PCSpectra wrote:Just curious, but what would you consider reasonable for backup storage space?
Per GB/Month?
I have actually considered renting a co-located server somewhere near by and offering backup storage...about $1/Month/GB is the price I arrived at too, but it is a little pricey considering $150 will buy you a 500GB external HDD.
I don't know though, the convience of having the data remotely stored and accessible, not to mention the additional security, environmentally controlled and daily backups, it's hard to beat, except in price.
With many regular hosting providers (no dedicated servers or official backup services) you can get
hundreds of GB for only a few € per month.
The security is not an issue as long as you encrypt your backups (which you should do anyway, imho).
The stability is not an issue since you can afford two or even more of these accounts (with different providers) and still be way cheaper off than with those ridiculous $1/Month/GB services.
For little over € 100 per year I have all the backup space I need, on multiple servers in different countries.
Re: Long term backup solutions
Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2009 5:22 am
by alex.barylski
Hehe...I don't think it quite works that way with shared hosts.
Sure they advertise that you get 30GB of monthly transfer and maybe 20GB HDD space but what they don't tell you is that if you were to upload your entire 20GB storage more than once a month, they'd have to ding you for excessive CPU usage, which is how most hosts calculate your fees.
If they have 100 users on a single physical machine they partition that machine equally among the 100 users. CPU power is the catch and if you go above your threshold, they'll temporarily close your account or ask you to pay more.
It's in the fine print for most hosting companies, your only real option if you plan on backing up daily or more than once a month is to rent a dedicated server.
Comparing remotely hosted data to local HDD is like apples and oranges, maybe even steak.
Local HDD is the cheapest route and the odds of theft, fire, destruction, etc are minimal enoufgh that for home use a local HDD still makes more sense unless you are trying to virtualize your desktops, in 10 years there will be no local HDD.
For a business though, remotely hosted data is almost mission critical.
Re: Long term backup solutions
Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2009 5:35 am
by Apollo
PCSpectra wrote:Sure they advertise that you get 30GB of monthly transfer and maybe 20GB HDD space
More like 5 TB monthly traffic and 500 GB space

(
example)
but what they don't tell you is that if you were to upload your entire 20GB storage more than once a month, they'd have to ding you for excessive CPU usage, which is how most hosts calculate your fees.
Sure, if I were to upload the entire 500GB (or a significant fraction of it) each month, they'll probably start nagging. In fact I doubt if the upload speed is high enough to actually reach the 500 GB within one month, even when uploading 24/7. But I've been using this setup for quite some time now, uploading several hundreds of MBs every day (I think I upload about 10GB each month) and never had any issues.
I'm currently using about 160 GB on one hosting account and 190 GB on another. Occasionally I'll go through some old backups and delete deprecated crap.