How to protect your data guide

[Charlie98]

At what temperature does a HDD become unuseable? That's actually where I keep my #2 backup... although I'll admit that's for theft reasons, not fire. If my house catches on fire, I'm screwed anyway.

Still think this is major sticky material... Just sayin'.

 

[taltamir]

I've heard of backblaze and will look into them more due to your post; thanks.

What do you do for local storage? Or DO you do anything for local storage anymore?

It varies by the importance of data.
Most important data gets stored on RAID6 ZFS NAS + local backups + online backups (backblaze AND google docs for a few things)

At what temperature does a HDD become unuseable? That's actually where I keep my #2 backup... although I'll admit that's for theft reasons, not fire. If my house catches on fire, I'm screwed anyway.

every drive has operating and storage temperature listed by the manufacturer.
For example caviar red 2GB: http://www.wdc.com/global/products/specs/?driveID=1086&language=1

Still think this is major sticky material... Just sayin'.

That has been proposed, a mod (I don't remember which) told me this is too confusing and needs to be written more accessibly to be made a sticky.

I said I made it as simple and clear as I can think of and I have no idea how to make it clearer and if someone can volunteer a simpler explanation that is still factually accurate I will incorporate it. Nobody offered such a rewrite and this never got stickied.

 

[KingFatty]

Maybe chart the info in Excel. For example, each row could be a proposed storage solution (offsite, external drive, optical media, etc.). Then, each column could be a typical problem to be solved (bit rot, flood, fire, etc.).

So you'd have a concise chart where you could see which solution solves the most problems.

Then you can get fancy by overlaying info like price/complexity as a heat map.

So maybe you'd see that offsite protects against fire, etc. etc., because those columns would have a circle in them. And the color of the circle would indicate how complex/costly it was, so maybe it would be yellow. but something like USB external backup would have circles that were green because it's cheap.

 

[taltamir]

that is a neat idea. But it loses a bunch of info... could always have a chart in addition to existing data.

Also price and ease varies based on how much you are trying to store and what services you are using.

 

[bigi]

Sticky, please.

 

[blastingcap]

It varies by the importance of data.
Most important data gets stored on RAID6 ZFS NAS + local backups + online backups (backblaze AND google docs for a few things)



every drive has operating and storage temperature listed by the manufacturer.
For example caviar red 2GB: http://www.wdc.com/global/products/specs/?driveID=1086&language=1


That has been proposed, a mod (I don't remember which) told me this is too confusing and needs to be written more accessibly to be made a sticky.

I said I made it as simple and clear as I can think of and I have no idea how to make it clearer and if someone can volunteer a simpler explanation that is still factually accurate I will incorporate it. Nobody offered such a rewrite and this never got stickied.

I'd vote for a sticky.

Also, to those interested in this topic, look into Skydrive. Microsoft made it so that if a PC with a Skydrive desktop client is on and set to share all files, then you can log in via the skydrive website and access all files on the desktop client. Yes, ALL files, every folder. Of course you don't HAVE to do that and can restrict access, etc. but it's still very cool and freaky at the same time to be able to access your entire PC's data content via a smartphone.

Skydrive also comes with 'undelete' options, and you get 7GB of Cloud storage that auto-syncs for free, though that is more for syncing rather than a full blown backup service (obviously, with a lowly 7GB limit).

http://www.pcworld.com/article/254537/5_reasons_microsoft_skydrive_is_better_than_google_drive.html

 

[Phynaz]

This got me thinking, and I just snagged a Crashplan account.

They are offering a year free to Carbonite users. Although I was told their special algorithms for determining if your are a current Carbonite user may need some work, as many (read: all) email addresses are working here https://www.crashplan.com/carboniteswitcher/

:biggrin:

Now my ISP is going to love me running my upstream full tilt for well over a month to get four machines fully backed up.

 

[taltamir]

IIRC Carbonite considers abuse to be using more then 3GB for backups.
I currently backup over 200GB on backblaze.
7GB on skydrive isn't gonna cut it either.

And I am being "nice" to backblaze and not backing up my 2TB of unimportant stuff like bluray rips to their site (I have those stored on a RAID6 ZFS array at home with no backups)

 

[Phynaz]

3GB??

By the time I'm done I'll be backing up 3TB.

 

[taltamir]

3GB??

By the time I'm done I'll be backing up 3TB.

yea, its a joke

 

[blastingcap]

IIRC Carbonite considers abuse to be using more then 3GB for backups.
I currently backup over 200GB on backblaze.
7GB on skydrive isn't gonna cut it either.

And I am being "nice" to backblaze and not backing up my 2TB of unimportant stuff like bluray rips to their site (I have those stored on a RAID6 ZFS array at home with no backups)

Out of curiosity what are you using? FreeNAS? If it weren't for ZFS I would not even consider FreeNAS, and as it is, I'm about to choose an OS for my file server. What do you think about an Ubuntu 12.04 + ZFSonLinux combo?
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_zfs_june2012&num=1

 

[taltamir]

I am using Solaris Express 11 at the moment. I am going to switch from it on my next hardware upgrade to either FreeNAS or FreeBSD. Haven't quite yet decided.

 

[ch33zw1z]

Great thread. I use Truecrypt with hidden partitions, and Create synchronicity to create multiple back ups off my main drive. The only thing I'm missing IMO is an offsite backup....soon...

 

[Phynaz]

Great thread. I use Truecrypt with hidden partitions, and Create synchronicity to create multiple back ups off my main drive. The only thing I'm missing IMO is an offsite backup....soon...

Did you miss the part above where Crashplan is free for a year? Not soon, now!

 

[ch33zw1z]

Did you miss the part above where Crashplan is free for a year? Not soon, now!

Yea, I missed that part.

I don't know how I feel about backing my critical data up to machines I don't have control over. I prefer to keep my critical data local. I have roughly 100GB of family pictures/movies/etc. Not a whole lot. I definitely would backup my 2TB storage drives, ha!

I'm currently prepping an external drive to store at my in-laws.

 

[Using OpenBSD]

I too recommend Backblaze, in addition to uploading truecrypt images as a protection of privacy, Backblaze itself allows you to encrypt your files client-side with Backblaze having no way to recover your data for you if you enable that option, if you lose your long-character-length passphrase, your backup files will also be useless to you, the end-user.

Most of the advice here I learned over the years, but the Silent data corruption and checksumming solution is very good and useful advice. I also believe my next server will be FreeNAS based. Oh, and that brings me back to backblaze, I first heard about them a couple years ago (been using them on every client's computer since then) when I was researching how to build a decent file server and came across their free guide/blueprints that they offer of their own infrastructure, down to the exact SATA HDD cables they use...

Their 1st design:
http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/

Their 2nd design:
http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/

Their 3rd design:
http://blog.backblaze.com/2013/02/20/180tb-of-good-vibrations-storage-pod-3-0/

This is a great thread, and even though I am new to being a registered user on these forums, I have read anandtech threads/articles for many years.

I vote for a stickied status of this thread.

 

[taltamir]

I also believe my next server will be FreeNAS based.

Take a look at NAS4Free
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAS4Free#Name_change_and_fork
Its a fork of FreeNAS.

I just (a couple of hours ago) switched to it from Solaris 11.1. I meant to switch to FreeBSD but it was being a PITA so I went with the simple GUI option.
Also its tiny and I was able to install it on an old 2GB USB stick that is too small for full blown OS like FreeBSD.

 

[holden j caufield]

make sure you can restore it? Does anyone know how to restore a full backup of a vm from symantec backup exec. I've done files but I've never had to restore a full vm from scratch.

 

[ArchAngel777]

Great information. I vote sticky too.

 

[jimhsu]

Backblaze / crashplan. Make sure your client also has some way to protect the settings panel (with a password DIFFERENT from your account password). A malicious attacker could possibly wipe out your backups, if determined/spiteful enough.

 

[taltamir]

Backblaze / crashplan. Make sure your client also has some way to protect the settings panel (with a password DIFFERENT from your account password). A malicious attacker could possibly wipe out your backups, if determined/spiteful enough.

Funny thing, just the other day I uninstalled a browser and it deleted my user data for another related browser (it was a chrome derivative, it deleted the chrome user data when uninstalled), then backblaze client detected the change and "updated" the online data (deleting it there too) and second copy deleted it from my fileserver.

Luckily I had a manual only backup which hasn't "updated"

 

[Jeff7181]

I recommend SpiderOak for offsite/online backup. They're the only cloud storage/backup provider I've found that does not have the ability to decrypt your data, even under court order. They also give you the option of pointing the software at a local repository to keep a local copy of your backed up data for faster restores when you haven't suffered a complete disaster. In addition, they also do sync folders and shared folders (you can send someone a link to a file they can download from your SpiderOak space). And finally, they leverage deduplication, so if you have some data that dedoups well, you benefit from the space savings - they don't just save space on the back end. It also keeps a version history of your files... so in the event you wipe out all the data in a folder, you just roll back to a prior date.