Backing up to my garden shed. Bad idea or not?

bremen1874

bremen1874

bremen1874

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I'm self employed and mainly work from home.

My server holds a fair amount of source code and other data I really couldn't afford to lose.

My backup regime is generally pretty good except for getting copies offsite. As I’m working from home I need to make deliberate journeys to rotate the media, so it doesn’t happen as often as I’d like.

I’m looking at backing up some of the most important data to the ‘cloud’, but bandwidth limitations will make this impracticable for everything.

I’m now considering setting up an ‘offsite’ backup facility in my garden shed. I’ve got mains power out there and it’s close enough to run network cables to (although I’m hoping that 200mbps powerline adapters will work).

I’m initially thinking of using a spare PC running Openfiler or FreeNAS to test the concept. If it pans out then I may look at getting a dedicated NAS.

Does this seem like a reasonable plan? My main concern at the moment is the potential temperature extremes within the shed.
 
Temperature, moisture, security would all be major concerns. If you can get around these then it isn't too big an issue to have a easy backup to hand - although I don't think i'd want to rely on them as my only backup.
 
I'd be nervous about relying on an offsite backup where the offsite is the end of the garden. Offsite for me means >100miles away, preferably in a completely different country (and therefore legal jurisdiction).

You've not said how much data you have, but have only said bandwidth makes remote network backups impractical. Does this imply that you're doing complete snapshot backups of a lot of data fairly regularly? Even if so, there's a number of different ways you could reduce the bandwidth overhead (incremental or differential backups) and offsite could be something as simple as Amazon S3 mounted as a network drive.

Unfortunately, if you really do have multiple gigabytes of bandwidth that need to be fully backed up daily to an offsite location, that's going to be expensive. The garden shed would be a sensible compromise, but as above, I'd worry about keeping the humidity and temperature stable, not least preventing people from nicking it.
 
If you can do incremental backups you'll probably find after the first one you're only going to be uploading a few megabytes per day.
 
Whats the shed made of? Is it insulated?
I've seen a shed (wooden structure, insulated etc house a server for many moons and be perfectly fine throughout the year (South Wales = rain!).
As long as the shed is well ventilated and insulated it should be an OK solution.
 
Thanks for your thoughts. The backing up to the shed plan came out of a late night pub conversation, so I thought I'd post it here and see if it was completely ridiculed or not.

My most important data is the source code. This is definitely going to backed up to an online service.

I’ve then got other data that I’d hate to lose but isn’t absolutely critical. The shed idea came up as we considered it unlikely that a disaster would take out the house and the shed simultaneously.

Does anyone have any personal recommendations for online backups?
 
bremen1874 said:
Does anyone have any personal recommendations for online backups?
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Depends what sort of money you want to spend, and how robust you want it to be.

Though it sounds like something along the lines of an S3 / Rackspace service would be ideal for you.

Jungle Disk, Dropbox, those sorts of things... I'm personally not a huge fan of using them for regular backups but they will probably offer you what you're looking for.
 
I quite like the idea actually, it's more practical than online for large quantities of data you'd be annoyed to loose but it's not priceless (I'm thinking ripped media where you have the originals or obtain them again...).

Online backup wise, I like Mozy but Carbonite deserves a mention, both have single user 'home' options which are very reasonably priced all considered...
 
Fireproof Safe!

Much better option than putting a box in the shed which isnt safe, secure or protected in any way. Get a NAS or similar and out it in the safe (you can get ones which take cable's in/out) or put your tapes in the safe, either way better than the shed!
 
The safe option is a good one. You've got to test your restores. No use backing something up to an HDD, sticking it in the safe and finding out 3 years later that it's broken.

As for online, I recommend backblaze. The interface is a bit clunky and backward, and it's tied to an individual PC. But it is only $5 per month for as much as you want. I've currently got 167GB there.

*edit* just looked up Mozy, and I'll give them a try to see if their restore / client experience is better than backblaze...
 
bremen1874 said:
I'm self employed and mainly work from home.

My server holds a fair amount of source code and other data I really couldn't afford to lose.

My backup regime is generally pretty good except for getting copies offsite. As I’m working from home I need to make deliberate journeys to rotate the media, so it doesn’t happen as often as I’d like.

I’m looking at backing up some of the most important data to the ‘cloud’, but bandwidth limitations will make this impracticable for everything.

I’m now considering setting up an ‘offsite’ backup facility in my garden shed. I’ve got mains power out there and it’s close enough to run network cables to (although I’m hoping that 200mbps powerline adapters will work).

I’m initially thinking of using a spare PC running Openfiler or FreeNAS to test the concept. If it pans out then I may look at getting a dedicated NAS.

Does this seem like a reasonable plan? My main concern at the moment is the potential temperature extremes within the shed.
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I was in a similar situation: Desktop backed up to Server, but both reside in the same location. Office and Attic in the same house (before anyone says the attic is stupid I've had no issues in nearly 2 years of this, hardware is in a good condition today as it was when first bought). The idea of using USB drives etc... wasn't an option as I know I'd forget to swap them round and wanted something automated. I now upload all my docs to Mozy.

It's 4$ IIRC a month for unlimited storage, sure the first initial upload took me nearly two weeks (30GB) but I can potentually upload about 3GB a night of changes, which would only be rare with most changes being a few meg (unless I go photo shooting and do heavy photoshop).

Unless your upload is rubbish or doing other vital things uploading over night is good enough for me.

I have mozy use my full connection upload between 00:00 and 07:00 which gives me roughly 3GB.
 
I tend to go with off-site being in a different fire zone.

If it's unavoidable to store something in the same fire zone, then you can pop it in a fire proof safe. Though I imagine if a house collapsed on top of it, you may not get your data out in one piece.

A shed at the end of the garden sounds fine (assuming the house could collapse and it wouldn't hit the shed), as well as uploading it once in a while.

This is your livelihood, you don't want to think about having to pick up a copy of your work when the house is on fire.
 
Yamahahahahaha said:
I tend to go with off-site being in a different fire zone.

If it's unavoidable to store something in the same fire zone, then you can pop it in a fire proof safe. Though I imagine if a house collapsed on top of it, you may not get your data out in one piece.

A shed at the end of the garden sounds fine (assuming the house could collapse and it wouldn't hit the shed), as well as uploading it once in a while.

This is your livelihood, you don't want to think about having to pick up a copy of your work when the house is on fire.
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If your house burns down the the garden shed is unlikely to survive, a firproof safe is both fireproof, waterproof and pretty much bomb proof, once you dig it out it'll be fine!
 
If going fire proof safe just make sure you don't get one that's just rated fire proof for paper only if you're putting discs or other non paper items in there :)
 
Removable drive stored in the shed nightly inside a photographers dry cabinet in order to protect from temps and humidity.

Nas in the shed is a fairly good idea but you need to find a way of protecting it from theft and nature.

How about a car boot safe. Will be off site depending on where you are.

Backup to another family members house. Stick a NAS in their closet / attic / basement, fund a little to their internet connection, off site and hopefully in a trustworthy location.

RB
 
I do offsite backups to a Linux server at a family members house.

Nice and easy, I have a Linux server and a NAS at my place where data is stored and they have a Linux server at their end.

A few simple shell scripts mount the NAS on to the Linux server and then rsync copies parts of that and parts of the server, which are of high enough importance to need backing up offsite, over to the remote server via a SSH tunnel.

It helps that I built their server originally so the initial data load was run straight over a gigabit lan link.

At my parents old house they had a couple of servers out in the workshop behind the garage with a wired network link back to the house. Worked pretty well; the workshop had a dehumidifier though and the window between the garage and workshop (old external wall) was kept open in the summer with a fan circulating air to keep the air temperature down for the computers.
 
if your only going as far as the shed, why bother going outdoors at all... use the loft or a spare room

A shed might be out of your house in the event of a fire but its also a lot less secure
 
n3vrmind said:
if your only going as far as the shed, why bother going outdoors at all... use the loft or a spare room

A shed might be out of your house in the event of a fire but its also a lot less secure
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You'd have to get spectacularly unlucky to have your house burn down and your shed broken into in quick enough succession that you lost both the primary and backup copy though.
 
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