Online backup

[Adcadet]

Anybody using an online backup service? I'm considering something like Mozy, based on my father-in-law's recommendation. My upload speeds at night are typically 1-2 Mbs which I would think is more than sufficient. $60/year is cheaper than a new hard drive. If I recall, Handy has used Mozy in the past.

Thanks!

 

[Howell]

A coworker is using Carbonite and likes it. My concern with online backup is restore speed.

 

[ddrueding]

I share Howell's concern on restore. I'd make sure that they can send you a DVD/HDD with all your data for a fee.

 

[Mercutio]

Handy says Mozy will ship you drives if you need to restore NOW.

 

[Fushigi]

$60/year is cheaper than a new hard drive.

You can get a 250GB external drive for $60 delivered. No recurring fees although you would want to move it off-site; maybe just put it in your car each morning.

My concerns with the online backup services are twofold:
1. Their viability as a profitable company. Will they be around when you need them? Will service be cut or crappy to keep costs down? Many hosted services, including some offered by the bigger companies like SAP, have come & gone, stranding the customers who used them.
2. Security. How is your data secured on their servers? Who has access? Will the data be mined with (like Google) or without your consent? What does their business continuity plan look like?

Unless you do gigs of new data every day I don't really think performance is much of an issue. The first backups will take a while but the incrementals will be fast since for most people the amount of data doesn't radically change from day to day.

Also, are you looking for a system backup or just a data backup? Both have value but a system backup lets you do a restore of not only the OS but your apps and their settings. That can save a decent bit of time and a lot of effort during a recovery. With an online service you will at a minimum have to restore the OS before you can consider getting your apps & data.

 

[Handruin]

Handy says Mozy will ship you drives if you need to restore NOW.

They will ship disks (CD/DVD), not drives...but at a cost. You can also download via their website for short order items.

Here are the details on the DVD restore option:

DVD Restore (Recommended for large restores)

When restoring large amounts of data, avoid long download times and slow connection speeds by ordering a DVD restore. MozyHome will recover your data and burn it to CDs within 2-5 business days, then ship your DVDs via FedEx Next Day delivery.

Please be aware that the current FedEx Next Day shipping rate will be charged to your credit card, as well as a $29.95 processing fee plus $0.50 per GB of data.

So if I needed my data in a hurry...it would cost me $325.95 + shipping to have them send me my data (at roughly 600GB stored on Mozy) overnight after their 2-5 day processing.

I do still use their service and it gives me an off-site backup in case of severe loss of property. That could be accomplished with a removable drive if you remember to take it to a friends or family members on a routine schedule.

Fushigi, regarding your concern #1:
You're right...a company could go away. I'd hope that there was some warning and that each customer was notified. I don't rely on them as my primary storage backup, so in the event that Mozy (since I use them) goes under, I will still have at least one backup and can begin to look for an alternate source location.

Mozy has at least some decent backing as being part of Pi and EMC under a formed company called Decho which includes Pi with Mozy being the flagship product. They would need to remain profitable to keep their service working which makes complete sense. They've been around since 2005 which is still somewhat new. EMC acquired them for $76 million in 2007, so they must have thought there was some value in the company. For whatever it's worth, my company has now twice given out free accounts (time-based) to employees to use their service. I would think if they weren't profitable, we wouldn't be getting these. I would even pay the $5/month.

Fushigi, regarding your concern #2:

(I know this is marketing copy & paste, but relevant):

* Encryption
– Blowfish: At the beginning of the backup process, all files are locally encrypted with 448-bit Blowfish encryption.
– AES: MozyPro users have the option of supplying a personal key utilizing military–grade 256–bit AES encryption en lieu of 448–bit Blowfish encryption.
– SSL: These encrypted files are then sent via 128–bit SSL–the same encryption used in online banking–to a Decho–managed data center where they remain in their encrypted state.
* Data centers: All data centers employ state-of-the-art security and are SAS70 certified.
* Near Continuous Data Protection: Mozy automatically detects and backs up new and changed files.

 

[Handruin]

Also, you can try Mozy for free for up to something like 2GB of data. That's at least enough to backup documents and important papers while you decide what you want to do.

 

[Howell]

If there was a router with a Usb port that would do rsync....
Put another one at your friend's house and now you have offsite backup.
Encrypt it at the file level and Im not sure what more you could want for home use.

 

[Handruin]

Why even bother with USB at that point. Just have some application that both friends can communicate with. Have that application rsync between the two. I would do that if it was an option.

 

[ddrueding]

Forget routers, I've run fiber along the back fence from one house to another on the same block. Here I have gigabit fiber buried for a mile to my backup location

 

[Handruin]

If I had that option I'd consider that also. My closest trusted friend is 10 miles away.

 

[ddrueding]

If I had that option I'd consider that also. My closest trusted friend is 10 miles away.

That would require single-mode fiber. Does your friend own a trencher?

 

[Howell]

Its nice to backup to a constant presence. It increases the level of coordination necessary to backup to a workstation that can be rebooted on a whim or turned off while gone for vacation. Laptops even more so. this only really hold for a reasonable amount of data.

Also restores are faster if the data is local. I very rarely need to restore data and when I do it is the entire machine.

I like my backups like I like my Ronco: set it and forget it.

 

[Adcadet]

Forget routers, I've run fiber along the back fence from one house to another on the same block. Here I have gigabit fiber buried for a mile to my backup location

Huh?

 

[ddrueding]

Huh?

Routers (and therefore internet connections) are slow. Instead of sending data to your friend via the internet, run a point-to-point fiber-optic cable to their house and use that for data transfer. I helped a couple friends do this. They lived on the same block but about 6 houses away. I just walked down the top of the fence (between everyone's back yards) and let the fiber just sit on the top rail the whole way. It has worked for 3 years now without issue.

 

[LunarMist]

What about permits and such? That does nothing for a natural distaster.

 

[ddrueding]

What about permits and such? That does nothing for a natural distaster.

Nothing was installed, and the wire never crossed public property. By the time the natural disaster happens, I would hope you already have your information at your backup site. Recovery is as easy as walking over with a USB drive.

 

[blakerwry]

Forget routers, I've run fiber along the back fence from one house to another on the same block. Here I have gigabit fiber buried for a mile to my backup location

Did you buy a pre-made length or did you terminate it yourself?

I've thought about running a line to a friend's house, but at ~ 100 yards straight line (and probably 200 - 300yards going along property lines) copper is out. Wireless is a bit tricky since there is a house in the way, and I don't want to build a tower.. That leaves fiber, which is probably the best way to get there anyway.

I've terminated fiber before, but it was a while ago and I never put it through any tests beyond a basic optical one. I'm also a bit hesitant to look at the cost of such an endeavor (cable, connectors, media converters, permission from neighbors).

 

[ddrueding]

I got a rough measurement and had one made to length. The whole deal was about $700, but that was many years ago.

 

[Adcadet]

I got a rough measurement and had one made to length. The whole deal was about $700, but that was many years ago.

How much data are you sending that you need your own fiber as opposed to just using an internet connection that you likely already pay for?

 

[ddrueding]

How much data are you sending that you need your own fiber as opposed to just using an internet connection that you likely already pay for?

The fiber line I installed for them did more than backup. They shared the internet connection, and a file server, and use it for LAN games. I think they even got a slingbox and are splitting a cable subscription.

My fiber is in a pressurized armored sleeve in a hardened conduit buried 4 feet down next to a road with warning markers. That did require permits

I push about 1TB a night over it in server images and backups.

 

[Howell]

Argggg, I had a whole nice long post typed up but now the crashing computer breeds brevity.
I spent some time looking throught the online backup services offerings here.

Mozy and Carbonite are nearly equivalent for my needs except that Carbonite requires you to manually provoke a backup of files over 4G. I don't particularly like that deleted files are deleted from the backups but I couldl get over it.

Many of the other services were much more expensive but tended to be focused more on synchronization and sharing than backup repository.

I am going to give Memopal a try. They say uploading files larger than 5G can be problematic but it should also just pickup where it left off if the connection drops. We'll see.

 

[Mercutio]

Several of my customers would love to do off-site online backups for their servers, but at $.50/GB/month, that is not a very sane option.

 

[Handruin]

Several of my customers would love to do off-site online backups for their servers, but at $.50/GB/month, that is not a very sane option.

I couldn't agree more. We wanted the same thing here and even though we own Mozy...they won't let us use it. We do an alternative with software from Avamar which does deduplication.

 

[time]

$0.50/GB/month would be way too expensive for a personal user with lots of video, but I can't see why it would be a problem for most businesses. Sounds overpriced for such a basic service, though.

You're mainly paying for the provider's traffic costs, they average it as a function of the storage size.

 

[ddrueding]

Being a company with more than one site, there is no need to pay someone else for off-site backup. Just stick a server with a bunch of drives at another site and back up to it.

 

[Mercutio]

I have one customer with two physical locations and $1200 a year for a secondary backup system is... harsh.

 

[ddrueding]

I have one customer with two physical locations and $1200 a year for a secondary backup system is... harsh.

True enough, but that would only be 2TB of online backup service.

 

[time]

1. $1200 pA is peanuts compared to half a dozen other expenses that any business faces.
2. What on earth do they need >2TB for? That is, given they're a small enterprise, what file types are they storing that take so much space?

Of course, online backup isn't much use if you want to use it for a large database.

 

[Howell]

Coincidentally, but probably not, within 16 hours of signing up with Memopal I was sent an email by Symform. Maybe I should have actually read the privacy policy.
It looks like a really interesting concept. Essentially it is shared, encrypted, online backup storage in a P2P flavor. You get as much backup storage as you make available cumulatively, 1:1 it seems. You can then designate a particular local client to maintain a complete backup-set of a node or nodes. So you can keep a local copy backup of all of your nodes for fast restores (part 4). I can't tell what the process would be for a full restore so that might be a problem for my purposes. Also, It is still too expensive for me individually.

The Symform Cooperative Storage Cloud service carries an estimated street price of between $30 and $50 per month per server, regardless of the capacity of the stored data, Brown said.
Solution providers get the technology from Symform for about $15 per month per server regardless of capacity, giving partners margins of 50 percent to 100 percent, compared to 15 percent for a typical storage service, he said.

 

[Howell]

Bleh, Memopal was not really what I was looking for. The service was priced pretty well at ~$30/year/200G but there was not an easy way to do an incremental restore. It was essentially just another file repository. It also, like Carbonite, required manual initiation to back up very large files.

What I really want is wireless near CDP backup for my laptop (250-500G) with the ability to finish off a full restore after I restore from a local image (for speed) and I haven't found it yet. I would even pay $1/G/yr for it.

 

[Handruin]

I've decided to drop my beloved Mozy service now that they no longer offer unlimited storage. By my estimations, if I want to renew and continue under their new pricing plans, it would cost me $110/month to keep my data backed up with them. There is no way in hell I'm doing that. I could by a 2TB drive every month and express mail it to someone for less money.

Due to this change, there was a post made on LifeHacker which gave some alternatives to Mozy. I first tried the demo of BackBlaze to see if their product would work for me. The interface is small, light and very basic. Their claim is to backup everything, so they offer a very minimal amount of customizing the items I actually want backed up vs everything they decided to backup. I did not like this arrangement at all. I also noticed they have a hard coded exclusion list which includes vmdk files, ISO files, and exe files. I do back up all three of those, so BackBlaze was a no-go.

I moved on to a product called CrashPlan and I have to say so far I like what it offers in configuration, features, pricing, and also performance. The configuration options were far easier to set than Mozy. I had all the items I wanted into a backup set within a couple minutes. Soon after I was uploading my data, but at first in a snails-pace of 200KB/s. After digging in the advanced settings for a couple of minutes I found out how to disable the upload limit and soon after I was uploading over at over 5Mb/sec. I also like that they support numerous OSes including Mac, Windows, Linux, and Solaris. For a little extra per month you can do a family plan which gives you unlimited storage and up to 10 computers at a reasonable rate of $10/month if you pay for a year. Like Mozy, they also offer an expodited recovery service, but with some better options. They offer a DVD or even a hard drive they will send to you for a little over $120 which is decent. if anyone is still interested, it looks like they are offering a 15% discount until the 15th of this month for ex-Mozy users. They also offer a service for users to ship their data via a hard drive if you don't want to consume all that upload bandwidth.

 

[timwhit]

Doesn't your employer own Mozy? No discounts to be had?

 

[Handruin]

Yes, they own Mozy, and no, they aren't offering any discounts for this.

 

[Santilli]

?
Why not just setup a backup with SATA disks, removeable, write to them, throw them in a safe, and use duplicates?

That, or an offsite mirrored raid. With 2 gig Sata drives being 100 bucks, these I'm kind of confused as to any value of the other options.

 

[Stereodude]

That, or an offsite mirrored raid. With 2 gig Sata drives being 100 bucks, these I'm kind of confused as to any value of the other options.

Simplicity & appealing to people's laziness are salable features.

 

[Handruin]

?
Why not just setup a backup with SATA disks, removeable, write to them, throw them in a safe, and use duplicates?

That, or an offsite mirrored raid. With 2 gig Sata drives being 100 bucks, these I'm kind of confused as to any value of the other options.

Simplicity & appealing to people's laziness are salable features.

Where does one easily find an online, off-site mirrored raid that can be accessed easily?

 

[Stereodude]

Where does one easily find an online, off-site mirrored raid that can be accessed easily?

Got me. I was trying to explain to Greg why people pay for services like Mozy.

 

[Handruin]

Got me. I was trying to explain to Greg why people pay for services like Mozy.

Can you clarify for me why you think it is lazy?

 

[Stereodude]

Can you clarify for me why you think it is lazy?

Most people are lazy. I know I am. People will pay money to be lazy. Look at Pay Per View, pizza delivery, etc...

Greg's idea that the average person is going to get 2 2.5" USB HD's and manually back up their data, take them offsite, and rotate them weekly (or whatever) is laughable even if it saves them money. Mozy and the like are easy. It sits in the system tray and works in the background without any user interaction. A lot of people will pay money for that convenience.

Although it seems a lot of them aren't willing to pay Mozy's new rates. :rotfl: