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Offisite Backup

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by arthur.acopians

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I am trying to find the best and most "economic" way to setup an offsite backup. I have a client that does not want to spend money on it so I am exhausting all of my options before I tell her the bad news. She has about 50GB of data that needs to backup at least once a day to an offsite machine located in her house.

Please let me know if you have any opinions or advice on this. Anything at this point would be helpful.

Thank you in advance folks!

15 replies

by oh smeg

That's a lot of Data to transfer over the net on a daily basis.

I would be personally backing up to one of several different HDD and then taking it home at the end of the day. Relatively fast and no bandwidth Issues or Excess Usage Fees involved.

Col

by arthur.acopians

Seems like the general opinion is to get an external drive and do a daily back-up to it. Thanks for your help Col.

-Art-

by santeewelding

Fifty gigabytes of data amounts to whether she lives or dies, daily [i]or[/i] occasionally?

Personally, I don't lend data to whether I live or die.

by arthur.acopians

The data changes daily as the client DB is updated along with the accounting software. It looks like I am going to setup an external drive as that seems to be the popular opinion for an economical solution. Thank you for the input!

-Art-

by nexs

Pile of "Stiff Biscuits, Love(or Bozo!)", and jam it down her throat.

Either that, or she could;
a) Spend money.... Tight arse...
b) Use lots of DVD's

:D

by arthur.acopians

Im going to setup an external drive. It seems to be the best solution. Thanks for the input.

-Art-

by robo_dev

Does she generate 50GB of new data per day that needs to be backed up?

Or does she have 50GB of data altogether, and the incremental changes to the data need to get backed up?

Normally you do a full backup like once per week, and do an incremental backup on a daily basis.

50GB is a lot to transfer over a WAN link, and a portable drive would be infinitely faster and less prone to failure. Plus you would make more than one copy of the data, keep one in a safe place, and use the other for daily backups.

Plus, if the home network does not have proper power protection and so forth, the backup may fail at the worst possible time, and not be all that safe to begin with.

The transfer time depends on the Internet speeds involved. If she's got a 'DSL-Lite' circuit at home, then it's going to take six or eight hours to transfer that data.

by arthur.acopians

Its mainly the same files that are changing everyday. You are right, to do a daily backup over the net to an offsite location or to one of those companies would be quite pricey. I am just going to set her up on an external drive and set that up for a daily in house back-up.

by oh smeg

Rotating them on a daily basis.

If you rely on just the one drive when it dies you have a problem that is expensive to get around.

I had one customer who had their NB Stolen and who ever stole it dislodged the External Drive in the back seat of the car so that when the owner got home he dropped the drive a story or so. As he needed the data off that drive for a Tax Department Audit in 2 days time I had to pay a Recovery Service to recover the Data off the damaged HDD urgently.

56K latter I walked into the Tax Department with the Data for the Audit only an hour late. ;)

I would have at least 3 drives in the Backup and have one at her home, one for that Days Backup and another in the Office waiting just in case.

That way when a external drive fails you still have what's on the server as well as at least the previous 2 days worth. It may hurt loosing a days processing but it's a lot cheaper than needing to recover a dead drive.

So have one at her home which she brings in and replaces the one in the office every morning, that one gets written to the next day and taken home and the last one is the one written to that day.

Col
[i]edited to add[/i] Remember with all external Drives that they should only be left running when they are being used and you [b]Always[/b] need to use the Safely Remove Option on the Windows Task Bar or you run the risk of corrupting the Partition tables on the HDD.

Also if any external Drive is left running it will overheat and become less reliable to downright dangerous to use for [b]Important[/b] Data so you need to make sure that all external drives are carefully treated and only used when required, and never bumped or packed away while still spinning.

If the heads make contact with the Platters there is no way to recover any data on the Damaged Area of the Platter and the Read/Write Heads get mashed up into the bargain. While external Drives are great they need to be understood and treated accordingly. ;)

by churdoo

I have never seen a backup solution deployed on an external USB device that has worked long enough to be practical. And as Oh Smeg has eluded, especially if she'll be whipping out the USB connector and tossing the disk into her purse or onto the passenger seat of her car for the ride home.

There are way too many posts on the forums where users have their critical data on USB external disks and looking for recovery methods, and too many times I've seen the devices or drivers get hosed and the external device is no longer detected on the workstation or server performing the backup, requiring break/fix labor to troubleshoot and get things rolling again.

And I completely agree with the others that have eluded that not having a budget for disaster recovery, including but not limited to offsite backup of critical business data is completely irresponsible and bad business.

I have seen success with "internet" based backups though as you and robo have suggested you need to identify exactly how much data needs to be sent over the skinny WAN pipe daily during the backup window to determine its effectiveness. Plus based on the average monthly cost for 50GB via said solution, payback of a practical removable physical media solution, like a SATA or eSATA interface RDX solution for example, may be less than a year, backup software notwithstanding.

Just my two cents, and possibly what it's worth. :-)

by dsarowski

Check out a client of mine www.offsiteimagemgt.com They just announced a Rural Health Initiative that may be of interest to you....... Good luck
David Sarowski
EMG, Kansas City

by dsarowski

Does your client just require a daily back-up? or do they need to view the data as well? Either way, Cloud Storage may the solution. Offsiteimagemgt.com allows you to pay for only the data stored without obligating you to a long term contract with unreasonable storage requirements...If the data needs to be accessed, you can view it from any viewing station anywhere you can connect to the web. Check them out.....Good LUCK

by markp24

I agree with making this web accessible or let the user vpn and use RDP (or use ssh tunnel with rdp)(or use logmein free edition) to access the office copy.
And make your own backups to keep offsite.

by icebergtitanic

You might try using software such as StorageCraft's Shadowprotect.

This type of block-level backup would allow you to do the types of backup you want over the 'net (most likely).

It works by first taking a full image of the drive to be backed up. You would probably want to do a USB drive "seed" for this part.

Then, during the rest of the day, it sends an occasional incremental update to the backup destination. This incremental update only contains the changes made to the hard disk itself since the last incremental update.

Finally, software on the backup destination will consolidate those changes into an updated full image on a set schedule.

You would still want some sort of secure method for connecting the two sites, such as a VPN tunnel.

One of the nice things about this type of backup software is that it gives you very good versioning control. Depending on how you configure the Image Manager (the part that consolidates the incrementals to the full), you can have a large number of possibly restore points. So you could have the ability to restore back to a specific hour, or specific day, or specific week for example.

I'm sure there are other programs similar to this one, but this is the one we use. (Is there an OSS program that works similarly?)

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