Off site backups?

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NZVengeance

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#129106 4-Sep-2013 07:24

I am looking to do this soon as I have a lot of data that I want to keep safe.

Biggest thing I'm looking for is the ability to go on site and dump the initial data onto their system so I don't have to upload 4TB of data. Incremental uploads after that wont be a big deal.

Any suggestions?

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#889374 4-Sep-2013 07:30

iBUS. I use these guys and they are great. Good service, reasonable price. Data stored in NZ.

http://ibus.co.nz/IBUS/Home.html

timmmay

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#889402 4-Sep-2013 08:42

More information required. Personal or business? Real time, daily, weekly? SLA required for restoration? Mac/PC/Server farm?

Do you need real time cloud backup, or can you use a hard drive? Hard drives are MUCH cheap, faster, and if you have two of them are probably as reliable. Software like Robocopy or similar works well, though be careful not to let it removed deleted files from the backup as you can lose stuff that way. It doesn't provide versioning, so your primary hard drive corrupting can ruin your backups. I get around that by having manual backups as well as automated mirroring.

For cloud I use CrashPlan, but they only do 1TB initial seeding. Amazon Glacier would be a good option, and support hard drive upload to some regions. I don't recommend Mozy, their software stopped working and despite third level engineers trying to get it going it wouldn't pick up new files immediately - sometimes it found them a week later, sometimes not at all.

davidcole

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#889410 4-Sep-2013 08:46

Crashplan to a friend. Costs $0 (to you) but your friend needs 4tb as well.

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timmmay

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#889417 4-Sep-2013 08:50

I wonder if you could put your computers on the same gigabit network and copy using CrashPlan over the local network rather than via the internet. That would be pretty fast to seed, though still may take overnight.

Crashplan can also back up to a hard drive.

davidcole

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#889430 4-Sep-2013 09:01

timmmay: I wonder if you could put your computers on the same gigabit network and copy using CrashPlan over the local network rather than via the internet. That would be pretty fast to seed, though still may take overnight.

Crashplan can also back up to a hard drive.

I ran a backup to another "folder" in my system. Which happened to be a a dedicated drive. I then took that drive to a new computer, and re-attached it. And the backup carried on. A similar principal is possible over the internet....ie backup to a local (internal or USB drive) and take that to someone's house and reattach it using the internet friend code in crashplan and after it verifies, it will carry on.

Therefore not requiring seeding the initial backup over the internet.

NZVengeance

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#889432 4-Sep-2013 09:02

timmmay: More information required. Personal or business? Real time, daily, weekly? SLA required for restoration? Mac/PC/Server farm?

Do you need real time cloud backup, or can you use a hard drive? Hard drives are MUCH cheap, faster, and if you have two of them are probably as reliable. Software like Robocopy or similar works well, though be careful not to let it removed deleted files from the backup as you can lose stuff that way. It doesn't provide versioning, so your primary hard drive corrupting can ruin your backups. I get around that by having manual backups as well as automated mirroring.

For cloud I use CrashPlan, but they only do 1TB initial seeding. Amazon Glacier would be a good option, and support hard drive upload to some regions. I don't recommend Mozy, their software stopped working and despite third level engineers trying to get it going it wouldn't pick up new files immediately - sometimes it found them a week later, sometimes not at all.

Personal use. Photos, copies of documents, etc.

I am happy to have it backup the changes once a week over the web. I will also be backing this up to a drive at home.
I like the idea of storing it in NZ for a couple of reason (relatively speaking we have less natural disasters, no war and I would be supporting a NZ company)

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NZVengeance

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#889433 4-Sep-2013 09:04

The other possibility I suppose is a network attached drive at a friends house connected over a secure VPN to my house

macuser

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#889434 4-Sep-2013 09:05

You could keep a copy of the drive at home, or at another off site location

Geektastic

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#889442 4-Sep-2013 09:32

NZVengeance: I am looking to do this soon as I have a lot of data that I want to keep safe.

Biggest thing I'm looking for is the ability to go on site and dump the initial data onto their system so I don't have to upload 4TB of data. Incremental uploads after that wont be a big deal.

Any suggestions?

I use Backblaze.

The data is stored in the USA fully encrypted and it backs up entire computers and drives (you pay a fixed fee annually for each one unless you have a lot of them when I think there are other charging structures)

It all happens in the background in real time and I have found it excellent and reliable.

In the event you need to restore there are a number of options from downloading small files to requesting that they ship you a drive with all your data on.

Noodles

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#889448 4-Sep-2013 09:42

NZVengeance: The other possibility I suppose is a network attached drive at a friends house connected over a secure VPN to my house

You shouldn't need a secure VPN. Just use CrashPlan and backup to your friend (by entering their backup code). This is free and encrypted, you just need to make sure that they have enough bandwidth and storage. You could even get them to bring around their computer and do the initial backup over ethernet to speed up the process.

With CrashPlan you could also backup to their service and/or to a portable hard drive. I pay $12 a month (although current pricing is $15/mo) at the moment to use their online backup, which is unlimited storage for up to 10 computers.

timmmay

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#889501 4-Sep-2013 10:15

Hard drive at a friends house (or two of them) is cheap, reliable, but more work. Over the net your initial backup is the issue. Using an NZ company sounds nice in theory, but being smaller there's a higher chance they'll disappear with your data, and less performance and security auditing. Probably also many times more expensive.

If you backup to another hard drive with CrashPlan is it encrypted on that drive? I'm pretty sure it is if you send to a friend, so they don't have access to your data. Also taking up 4TB of data on a friends computer is a big ask.

4TB is pretty massive, is that a lot of downloaded movies, RAW camera files, etc? Maybe a more selective backup system is a good idea... anything you can get back easily, don't back up. RAW files, back up the absolute best, for the rest back up the jpeg versions you create to share.

I back up everything to hard drives (3 offsite copies), but documents (financials, contracts, work in progress) goes into Crashplan. I don't bother backing up image online, too slow given how many images I produce.

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davidcole

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#889510 4-Sep-2013 10:25

I backup everything to another folder in the same machine (fastest backup, solves the Id10t errors), almost all to aother machine at home (2nd fastest, solves machine failure) and most important content to crashplan online.

All done within crashplan. To have differing backup sets like this you need crashplan+ which is the paid $50 a year option for a single computer. Otherwise you get one backup set that you can splattergun everywhere, but you you can't set different sets of files to different location.

Yes a backup on someone else computer (and your own and a folder) is encrypted.

nate

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#889562 4-Sep-2013 11:24

I'm in the same boat, wanting to back up all my parent's data.

I'm wondering if I get them a NAS for on-site backups, and then have that stream to something like crashplan?

The whole thing has to be low maintenance as they won't know what to do if something breaks.

davidcole

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#889563 4-Sep-2013 11:27

nate: I'm in the same boat, wanting to back up all my parent's data.

I'm wondering if I get them a NAS for on-site backups, and then have that stream to something like crashplan?

The whole thing has to be low maintenance as they won't know what to do if something breaks.

Crashplan to USB/internal harddrive
and Crashplan to a machine at your location.

Simple

NZVengeance

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#889564 4-Sep-2013 11:33

Ive been doing a bit more reading/thinking

I think I will do something like this.

Keep my data on my Current Qnap NAS
Back up my photos and essential documents to an ioSafe drive which is water/fire proof. then have that drive replicate to someone like crash plan.

That way I minimize the amount I have to keep redundant to just the most important things (photos of my kids) and this reduces the volume I am uploading.
Also I will have the iodrive which will survive a house flood or fire. and just incase it gets destroyed I will also have crashplan

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