SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
This is probably one of those topics that gets regurgitated periodically, but it's always good to get some fresh answers.
The small consultancy business I work for wants to set up a new file server with remote backup. In the past we have used a Windows XP file server and plugged in a couple of external USB drives when space runs out. Backups were performed nightly to a USB drive and taken offsite to a trusted employees home.
They are looking to Linux for a new file server (I think more because they found out how much a new Windows file server would be).
I'm not a server guy but I have set up a simple Debian-based web server at work for a specific intranet application, but when I was asked about ideas for the new system the best I could come up with was maybe ssh+rsync (which I have only recently started using myself so I'm no expert by any means). Using Amazon's cloud service has been suggested, as well as the remote being a dedicated machine at a trusted employee's home (probably with a new dedicated line in) or with our local ISP (if they can offer such a service). A new dedicated line out of the office has also been suggested, I think mainly because daily file changes can potentially be quite large (3D CAD models etc). A possible advantage of the remote being nearby is that the initial backup could be using a portable hard drive instead of having to uploading terabytes of data (I guess there is always courier services though).
Anyway, just thought I'd chuck it out there. A lot of you guys probably already set up and/or look after remote backup systems. Even if anyone just has some ideas regarding potential traps/pitfalls would be handy. The company is fairly small (about 20-odd employees) so I don't think they need anything overly elaborate, but all feedback is appreciated.
(Score: 2) by jackb_guppy on Friday July 11 2014, @02:15AM
I personal use two methods.
One, like you had before, multiple machines backing up in one location/machine w/ USB drives (a total of 6 Linux boxes in-home). This has worked well except when I loose a USB drive (just last weekend). But I do make 3 copies, so losing one was not a hard hit, just re-adjust the backup location and copy function, until new drive arrives, then up to 18 hours, to bring 3TB back on-line.
Second, is my wife's and my oldest daughter's machines. They are both Win8.1, been using BackBlaze along with common "save" drive. Wife's SSD drive is backed up to internal save drive, along with daugther's machines. There is secondary, backup on an USB external on my wife's (all the accounting books and pictures). Finally over all is BackBlaze, It copies all changes files every 3 hours to their cloud storage. Original up load took almost week with 5Mb up link speed (home connection 30Mb down/5Mb up). Cost $50 per year, unlimited storage, as long as it local to machine (so Internal and USB drives). So a file change on my wife's makes 2 copies locally, then all 3 copies are upload. Daughter’s, one copy in-house, then up to the cloud. If we lost it all, we could pull it back down, to they will load it a USB drive and ship it to me for $99.
I do a friend local that we have talked about sharing "cloud" services. We are looking at what an above post talked about, to machine one local / one remote with rsync running keeping them in sync.
Thee is also a world of personal/private cload options, including ReadyNAS. And there is also owncload that has a versioon that runs on RPi :) http://blog.bittorrent.com/2013/05/23/how-i-created-my-own-personal-cloud-using-bittorrent-sync-owncloud-and-raspberry-pi/ [bittorrent.com]