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Ask Soylent: Suggestions for Remote Backup?

posted by janrinok on Friday July 11 2014, @01:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the picking-brains-time dept.

crutchy writes:

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.

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 11 2014, @06:45AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 11 2014, @06:45AM (#67465)

    If you gonna use a cloud service (aka random guy somewhere)

    * Encrypt all your stuff and do it locally before it's on the wire. And you're still bleeding metadata.
    * Use several redundant providers, see Megaupload.

  • (Score: 2) by Open4D on Friday July 11 2014, @04:42PM

    by Open4D (371) on Friday July 11 2014, @04:42PM (#67682) Journal

    * Encrypt all your stuff and do it locally before it's on the wire.

    For backup (not sync), http://tarsnap.com/ [tarsnap.com] may be an option. Deduplication & compression, yet also local encryption. (I can't think of any other paid-for service where you have to build the client software yourself!) It uses Amazon S3.

     

    * Use several redundant providers, see Megaupload.

    Least Authority [leastauthority.com] claim to be working on "Redundant Array of Independent Clouds" (RAIC) [leastauthority.com], which will support Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, Google, and Hewlett-Packard in addition to their existing Amazon S3.

     
    N.B. Worth mentioning: Greenpeace claims [bbc.com] that Amazon's hosted storage is less 'green' than Google's & Apple's. (However, Greenpeace consider nuclear energy to be bad, so you'd have to check the details to be sure.)