[clug-talk] Offsite Backup Solutions - What are you doing?

[Evan Cortens]

Hi Dave,

I'm just going to ramble on a bit, in the hopes that it might be helpful to
you...

What do I use? I use subversion, actually... I have it set up to sync
manually, but it's easy enough to set it up to work with cron ( a simple svn
-m "" ci run nightly, or whatever).

1. Subversion, with a repository (run over http, unencrypted, but an ssh
tunnel is possible too) stored on my dreamhost account (one click setup,
very easy).
2. Pros: Versioning, comments, supports binaries better than cvs, change
logs, etc.
    Cons: A little tricky for the non-technical user if it's set up
manually... I just use the svn command line, but I imagine there are
web/graphical interfaces if you want as well.
3. Dreamhost is commercial, but I suppose I could host my own too (I used
to, actually, but gave up)... It's nice to have off-site though...
4. Costs are just the dreamhost costs, it's $120 USD/year or so, pretty
cheap for full-featured web-hosting... Their email service isn't great (I
don't use it anyway), but I've never had any problems on the web end. The
basic plan (the price I quoted) gets you 150GB disk and 1.5 TB bandwidth.
5. Subversion is free and open-source...

I realize my setup is probably a little quirky... On windows/Mac OS X
machines, I've had good luck with Mozy (2GB for free, unlimited for
$5/month). It's a great per-system solution, in my opinion... will find your
files automatically and backup automatically. Restore could be easier, but
isn't difficult.

Another option would be something like Amazon S3 (*Storage:*$0.15 per
GB-Month of storage used; *Data Transfer: *$0.10 per GB - all data transfer
in, $0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out, $0.16 per GB -
next 40 TB / month data transfer out, $0.13 per GB - data transfer out /
month over 50 TB)* Requests:*$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests,$0.01 per
10,000 GET and all other requests). It's basically just a large rented hard
drive... I know there are open source libraries to access it, but I'm not
sure about backup programs that make direct use of it.

Anyway, I'm sure you can do what you want for less than $4k!

Hope this helps a bit anyway,

Evan


On 6/27/07, Dave Watkins <dave at abacustechnologies.ca> wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
> I've just started looking at various offsite backup solutions for a couple
> of clients and have been surprised at the pricing offered by some
> providers.
> One provider quoted me $3900.00 to store 15GB of data initially with all
> the
> backups and services I'd like.
>
> Basically, I have 2 clients in particular that would like to have the
> following:
>
> 1. store data off site
> 2. incremental backup nightly
> 3. ability to search/recover previous versions of a specific file
> 4. data recovery tool should be relatively simple
> 5. cost effective
>
>
> My questions are:
>
> 1. What solution are you using presently?
>
> 2. What led you to chose that solution?
>         a. Pros
>
>         b. Cons
>
> 3. Is your solution a commercial vendor or one you host yourself?
>
> 4. What are the costs involved?
>         a. initial setup
>
>         b. monthly charges
>
>         c. "incident" fees ie: I need help finding x.
>
>         d. other
>
> 5. Is there an OSS solution that is reliable, robust and easily
> administered
> by the end user?
>
> 6. Any other comments/suggestions?
>
>
> For those of you that would like to remain anonymous you can always email
> me
> directly if you like. I'll compile the results and post them to the list
> in
> a generic format with all the identifiers removed if there is a desire for
> such a compilation.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Dave Watkins
>
>
>
>
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