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

[bremen1874]

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.

 

[bremen1874]

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]

I’ve been considering getting a fire safe for a while. I’ve looked at them again since starting this thread and there are some affordable options out there. I just need to find out whether 30 minutes of protection is sufficient.

I’m still considering options for my shed backup idea. Of all the potential issues raised my main concern is the temperature in the middle of summer (assuming we have one). This will probably be the one thing that kills the project off. I think I may end up doing something similar in the garage instead...

 

[bremen1874]

Okay, this all started from a post pub 1.39am posting. I’m amazed at the response, but it has given me chance to consider my options from a disaster recovery point of view.

My really important data fits onto a single DAT40, and I run a full backup every night on a 10 day rotation. For some reason this came up in conversation (it was a Sunday in a dull local pub), along with the suggestion that the tapes could be stored in the shed to get them ‘offsite’. I decided that this was a bad idea but it did make me think of putting some sort of data storage out there.

As my important data fits onto DAT40, is fairly static, and my upload speed is just over 1200 kbps there shouldn’t be any issue with my backing it up to an online provider. This will be happening as soon as I’ve decided who to go with.

I also have access (with full admin rights) to a client’s network via a site-to-site IPsec VPN. I know there’s plenty of spare capacity on one of their servers (backed up to LTO and stored in a 2 hour fire safe) so this is also a possibility if I can find suitable backup software. In this case I could easily transfer the initial data whilst onsite.

I’ve then got data that would be annoying to lose. The most important would be about 200GB of virtual drives that I use for development. They aren’t irreplaceable, but they would be very time consuming to recreate from scratch. These are currently backed up daily to an eSATA drive using Acronis.