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Don’t Keep All Your Data in One Stash
nytimes.com — What happens to those beloved family photos or your extensive music collection if something should happen to your PC and your backup? Seagate is trying to solve the off-premises backup problem.
supernova17- 635 diggs
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- Xtant, on 10/12/2007, -2/+34I was shocked at how much it costs to get storage space online; $100 a year for 5GB on Xdrive. I remember when they were a free service. Regardless, though, i think this'll be a booming market. The fire alarms went off in my building yesterday, and i made it out the door with my external HD, but not the cat. Luckily it was a false alarm.
- gweedo767, on 10/12/2007, -2/+50Yeah, luckily for your cat!
- b0wl0fud0n, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9@Xtant
You can always mod your computer to make it fireproof (albeit ugly):
http://www.g-news.ch/articles/nhp200nc/ - kderby2000, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Mozy is free, and it's also 5GB. It's still in beta, but it works well.
- Imagine3, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Yeah, I use Mozy. I think it is great. It will automaticall backup my files at 3am (or whenever else you choose to do it). There is a paid service (30 GB for $4.95/mo) or 2 GB for free. Either way, im happy.
https://mozy.com/?ref=2KD6M
or just mozy.com if you don't want to go there by referal. - angusm, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2You can do better than $100 for 5GB for a year. Amazon's S3 [http://aws.amazon.com/s3] is $0.15 per GB per month. Transfer charges are $0.20/GB, so if you just put 5GB on S3 and left it untouched for a year you'd be paying $10, not $100.
It's intended for developers who can roll their own tools, but desktop clients for the service are starting to emerge. - DuoPros, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4@b0wl0fud0n
That thing would be such a pain in the ass to upgrade. - chaley, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1@kderby2000
Mozy is only 2G isn't it? At least the free version. They offer 5G, 10G, 20G, etc at yearly pay rates but I think the free version is only 2G. Great alternative though! - kalbanan, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1True, 5 gigs at Xdrive is $100 now, but they will offer the same service for free "in early September".
- placain, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1It doesn't cost very much at all, actually. How about $0.15/gigabyte for storage at Amazon S3?
http://www.digg.com/software/Jungle_Disk:_mount_Amazon_S3_as_a_drive_for_cheap_reliable_infinite_storage
Jungle Disk is a free front-end for S3 that lets you use it as a disk drive. It works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and there's GPL'd code that lets other people develop alternative compatible front-ends.
- Crossbar, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6carbonite.com is $5 a month for unlimited storage. They seem to cap you at about 3 gigs uploaded a day, but that just means you have to upload your mp3 collection over a few days or weeks. Dead simple to set up and doesn't seem to take up very much resources. Windows only for now.
- seanb724, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2I recently tested a few of the online storage services. Carbonite is $5 unlimited, and Mozy is free for 2GB, $4.95 for 30GB, and $9.95 for 60GB, and both are simple to run, but PC only. I found streamload's client was not useable.
I also use a small Linksys NSLU2, reflashed to run linux, and rsync to it nightly from each PC and MAC in the house, and then have a 2nd drive mirror that one nightly. And then keep a 3rd drive offsite. Probably overkill, but then again, there are business photo's on some of it...
- seanb724, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2I recently tested a few of the online storage services. Carbonite is $5 unlimited, and Mozy is free for 2GB, $4.95 for 30GB, and $9.95 for 60GB, and both are simple to run, but PC only. I found streamload's client was not useable.
- Civil44, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3Get an external or an ipod Its what I tell ppl at my work all day. I replace fried HD's alllll the time its scary really.
- dygitaljoe, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4For photos, I like to have redundancy and host it myself, Flickr, AOL pictures, and Google's Picasa. Seems pretty reliable
- trylleklovn, on 10/12/2007, -11/+5Time machine!! :D
- Khuffie, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8OFF-PREMISE backup solutions. Time Machine sits on your computer/hard-disc. Jeez.
- brint, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0No it doesn't - Time Machine requires an external hard disk.
- jasper976, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5I like to keep copies on my hdd, copy to thumb drive, copy to my mp3 player, upload to my gmail account, upload to my flickr account, print them, copy them to cd, copy all cd's to dvd, upload to my gmail account, and store everything in a safety deposit box.
- Hush, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5Dang, how do you get any free time to find new content to back up?
Sounds like you're making a career out if it.
- Hush, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5Dang, how do you get any free time to find new content to back up?
- doktorrocket, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3I burn periodic (and incremental) DVD backups, and take one copy into work with me. It's in a metal file cabinet and protected by a sprinkler system. I figure it's a good plan B in case the home backups are lost in a fire/earthquake/meteor strike/whatever.
- altcountryman, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4This is a good, free, and simple way to go.
- SeanFL, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5my wife is a heavy digital picture taker. So every couple months, I take an external drive over to a friends house. Even if you back up to an external drive, if it's on premises, you could still be wiped out by a fire.
Fios would sure be nice to move a couple gig's each week! - kderby2000, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Not to go all 'black helicopters & tinfoil hats' on this subject, but what happens when the government determines that they "need" to look at an offsite backup company's content, to search for 'someone suspected of something'.
Also, Mozy is free for 5GB, and is actually a pretty cool system. The Windows client uploads stuff on schedule or automatically, and you can encrypt the data with your own key, if you wish.- WaterDragon, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3"what happens when the government determines that they "need" to look at an offsite backup company's content,"
What happens is that all the fools who blindly bought into the new technology without asking such questions -- just become part of the giant bot-net of the NSA or other anti-human being, anti-freedom groups. Then they can be used as part of the illegitimately bloated central government's invasive forces to go to your house and get YOU! Or your sister.
It is similar to the effect of everyone getting rid of their land line, and keeping just cell phones. Why? Because cell phones are way easier to tap!
Could that be why there is such a big push, by corporations, to get everyone involved --while eliminating the older, more privacy-friendly technologies?
Now drink the Kool-Aid and shut up! ;-)
Just one more point:
The article failed to mention one other enormous cost of using such offsite, internet-based storage: You pay by sacrificing all your bandwidth that could have been used for other things!
How many people have a problem with too- much- unused- bandwidth?
- WaterDragon, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3"what happens when the government determines that they "need" to look at an offsite backup company's content,"
- VaamYob, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I use rsync with
http://bqbackup.com
$5/month gets you 10 Gig with no transfer limit.
I backup my email/photos/music/code - mortxcore, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2The illustration on that site is so ***** creepy.
- Matadon, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5I wouldn't be one to trust Seagate with my data; I've currently got three Seagate/Maxtor (same company, now) drives out for RMA. All from different batches, one was even an external USB drive, all three failed in different ways. Considering that two of these drives were part of a RAID (to guard against drive failure), and that one was a backup (to guard against the RAID going TU), I am very not pleased.
Managed to recover most of my data, but not all.
Of course, my ancient Western Digital and Fujitsu drives are just cranking along without a care in the world...
The big problem as I see it for the home user is that we've got insane amounts of storage space (500G or more is not uncommon), and almost no way to back this up without dropping over USD $2,000 on a backup solution.
And, no, internet backups aren't necessarily the answer; I do a lot of photography, and a day of shooting can easily generate 10G of data. Uploading 10G of data on any home connection is Very Much Not Fun. - astrotrain, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12This method is older then dirt. I don't need no stinkn' Symantec or New York Times to tell me that.
Online Storage = BLAH!
Too expensive for such little space, and not as fast enough if you need recovery, let alone it does not guarantee your privacy of your data. Some schmuck in the data center could always peek into your account.
Cheap and Easy Backup / DR Method:
01. Create batch script to perform a backup using a standard file compression
to another hdisk partition. Using a standard file compressor (zip, winrar, etc)
will save you from being stuck with a discontinued backup product (aka
Iomega's "1-step backup").
02. Burn your backup data down to CD/DVD.
03. Create database of your backups and when they occurred.(a simple .txt
document will do).
04. Take another copy and store it at a relatives house for off site storage. make
sure to mark what version of the backup and where it is stored. (i.e. Backup
from 20060821 @ Uncle Donald's House).
If you are not backing your data up, you are asking for trouble!- aarons44, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I backup to an external hard drive or CD that I store in my bank's safe deposit box. Should be safe there, although I do wonder sometimes if they have a master key in case law enforcement come knocking. Definitely meets my fire and flood prevention needs though.
- joevill, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5External Harddrives are a savior!
- Brajeshwar, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Cool, the article is talking about Fabrik, the software part of the Hardware backup solution and I was talking about Fabrik here
http://digg.com/tech_deals/Marriage_of_an_online_offline_media_storage_MyFabrik - reyitocazador, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I just spent US$2000 getting 85GB of data recovered from a Seagate external drive that had lost its partition. You can bet that I'm looking for a better alternative. This is a huge business that is going to be booming in the next 3-5 years.
- StigT, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Duh, Amazon S3. pay for what you use at $.15 a gb/month. 20GB for a year is $36, plus $4 in upload costs.
- Veamon, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Why is this some big convuluted process?
1-copy to external hard drive/dvd
2-Take it to friends/safety deposit box/fireproof safe
The End.
Who wants to upload data constantly to a remote server, who "promise" that your data is secure? What happens when they burn down?- Matt2k, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Because it's a pain in the ass to remember to do that, and time is valuable
- catoutfit, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Don't keep all your porn in one stash either...
- Veamon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1too bad it wont work with locked files.
- fucknut, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10all these methods are silly.
- Take an old PC
- slap a huge HD inside
- install linux
- store it in your parents' basement.
- periodically rsync over ssh to that PC.
Voila! rsync will only copy files that have changed and ONLY portions of the files that have changed.
Burning DVDs and all that nonsense is so last century.- tempusrob, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8"- store it in your parents' basement."
Or a friend's basement ... we're talking about *offsite* backups here. ;) - Eccles, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Granted, it's your parents' electricity bill and not yours, but how much are you raising their electric bill to run this backup server? For relatively small quantities of data, some of the commercial vendors are quite price-competitive. And it doesn't require your parents to have an always-on connection.
There's always the Linus alternative; store redundant backups on thousands of computers all around the world. The only problem is it requires your data to be open and of public interest. (Which is why backing up porn has always seemed silly to me...)
- tempusrob, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8"- store it in your parents' basement."
- handband2, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2How to auto rsync with ssh passwordless: http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=238672
Also: http://www.streamload.com/ - chriskzoo, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2For pictures, I think Flickr is the best. $30 a year for upto 2 GB of transfers a month and you can have all your pictures sent to you on DVD at any point. If you have a Mac, the easiest thing to do is use Carbon Copy Cloner. I basically clone my HDD once a month or so, swap it at the safety deposit box, and I'm good to go.
- kbarrett, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Another option for photo storage is http://www.zoto.com. They offer a free account with 2GB of storage and unlimited transfers. A paid account is less than $30 and offers 10GB of storage. It's a pretty good deal. They also have blogging, online photo editing tools, and galleries.
- SkippyDoorknob, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1or Smugmug.com. $40/year for unlimited storage for a basic account.
- VinceNoir, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Actually... if you're smart and you run either Unix or Cygwin on Windows, the tools are already in place for offsite backups that are automated. I have a cron job that runs the 'rsync' command every hour to back up all of my photos of my daughter to a box at my parent's house (yes in their basement ;P ). It's simple to do and well worth it if you value your growing data. I actually pushed 27 gigs worth of data in about five or six days, so it's not bad at all. Probably even better if you have cable modem. Here's the basic layout of what you do:
Assumptions:
a. You have a cable or DSL line on each end with one end having a static IP
b. The connection is routed through some kind of DSL/Cable "router" that handles the login process and then switched to the rest of the machines on both ends
1. Have a box at each endpoint with either some falvor of Unix-like OS (Linux, BSD, etc...) or Windows running Cygwin
2. Get OpenVPN http://openvpn.sourceforge.net working on both ends so that you have an "always up" connection between both boxes
3. Set up a cron job to run as often as you like that performs the following rsync command (make changes as needed for your case):
00 * * * * (rsync --delete -auvlxHSz -e ssh remote_source:/home/VinceNoir/Photos/TheSprog /mnt/data/ && chown -R root:users /mnt/data/) > /var/log/photo_sync.log
In the above 'rsync' command the --delete flag will delete any files in your local copy that no longer exist on the remote site so that things sync up properly. It only does this if the rsync command actually executes properly. You could leave it out though if you feel unsafe with it. The -e option forces the use of ssh for transfering the files which is better than the default.
The best thing is that any time I add more photos, I don't even have to think about backing up since it takes care of itself. I've also got a local backup as well for quick access. But the one at my folk's house is for major disasters. I'm also going to set up a reciprocal system between my house and a mate of mine's system. He will have remote backups of his kid's photos at my place and vice-versa. Just make sure you've got the drive space... It's very easy to implement if you know how to properly use a computer.- VinceNoir, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Wow... so much for sharing information on Digg. I got "dugg down" just for posting some helpful tips that were relevant to the topic. I guess that's what "democratizing news" gets you. The idiots run the show.
- ceoandpresident, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I use Picasaweb for pictures, 6 gigs for $25, no fee on bandwidth
- BobMysterioso, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Its funny, just last week I decided to implement a basic backup at home.
I decided that the things to backup would be pics and mp3 - so I write a batch script using robocopy - and it works great.
I didn't bother compressing - its jpg and mp3 - not too much savings there. All in all about 30 gig of data I'd like to keep a while. - JohnboiWaltune, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1RAID5
- tempusrob, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I really wish people would stop spouting "RAID" every time backup comes up. It's nice and great for high-availability, but RAID is *NOT* backup. If I accidentally delete/overwrite a file, if my HDD's are fried in a power surge, if my house burns down ... I'm SOL if I was depending on RAID as a "backup."
- VinceNoir, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@tempusrob
Too true. But I have to guess the people who spout off "RAID" also spout off "WiFi", "Bluetooth" and "Fiber" as solutions to other problems just to keep up the appearance that they actually know what they're talking about. Heh... imagine this:
IT Drone 1: "Man our connection to the net is lagging today. I wish we'd never installed Flash on everyone's PCs if only it weren't for that one web application we use that acutally calls for it. Now everyone here is surfing Youtube all day and the boss refuses to filter content because of free speach"
IT Drone 2 (The Idiot): "Dude... if we throw out some WiFi access points that'll solve the problem"
IT Drone 1 (Rolls eyes and walks back to his cubicle): "Yeah. You're absolutely right"
This is a typical day in IT for anyone in the entire world. - JohnboiWaltune, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1So, if your offsite backup site burns down, or they have an equipment failure, you lose all your data too... what's your point?
- axiomata, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1One option I tried over the summer was a combination of an old PC running a Serv-U FTP server in conjunction with a number of both off and on site PCs and laptops running a program called SyncBack. You basically create a FTP user for each PC you want to back up and then create a folder on the backup server machine for each user. Then SyncBack allows you to schedule automated backups to take place and it gives the option to upload those backups to a FTP. It also automatically checks to make sure that only new or changed files are uploaded.
I do think there is a market foran EASY hardware/software setup for tasks such as these. I'd like to see some consumer models with less than 500GB and a cheaper price tag though. - ecksman321, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I prefer to use the Handy Backup app with FTP to my 1and1.com account. $7.50 a month gets you 100GB
- zeabrid, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Where are THEY hosting their backups? Aren't you just as ***** if their servers crash?
- zenmoon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Been to fried mobo and back. I now use a second HD but still have no off-site storage. Thanks for all the good tips - altho I'm a non-geek and cannot implement the more tech savvy solutions. Guess I'll go with Veamon's - burning CDs I can do and then store them with a friend. Caveat: Choose your friends wisely. ^_^
- aaron8tang, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0what?
- Wasyu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0If you are really pariniod use flash drives they are very reliable.
Tape backup is still valid esp with tapes holding over a TB on the market the drives are expensive but the tapes are very cheap and they less suceptible to damge then a dvdr disc.
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