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

n3vrmind · 9 Mar 2010 at 13:23

No but the change of his shed getting robbed is higher than his house burning down. Might as well keep the server in the house and opt for the lesser of the two risks

On the basis that the information is important enough to back up, id also say its important enough to not want it stolen

bigredshark · 9 Mar 2010 at 13:27

n3vrmind said:
No but the change of his shed getting robbed is higher than his house burning down. Might as well keep the server in the house and opt for the lesser of the two risks

On the basis that the information is important enough to back up, id also say its important enough to not want it stolen

But you're missing the central point, if he keeps it in the house and it burns down he's lost it all. If he keeps a backup in the shed and it gets stolen, then he's just lost the backup, the original copy is still fine in the house.

RimBlock · 9 Mar 2010 at 13:40

Use something like truecrypt to encrypt the data and even if it is stolen, you have only lost the medium (i.e. external HD) and no one can play around with the code.

RB

dave-lew99 · 9 Mar 2010 at 17:29

Might be a bit old fashioned, but why don't you post/courier your backup media to your offsite location instead of having to go visit?

matthab · 9 Mar 2010 at 18:34

Ive seen a fireprof safe which had a ethernat cable and a power cable running into it so u could store a nas in it etc. I think its used so trickiry trips and fuses tostop the fire coming up the power and ethernet. Sadly I cant remeber where i saw it.

bluebox · 9 Mar 2010 at 23:54

What about an IOsafe? Waterproof and fireproof although clearly not theft proof. It's a USB drive but with an option for a NAS adaptor. Could well be OK sat in the shed.

bremen1874 · 10 Mar 2010 at 01:52

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...

ecksmen · 10 Mar 2010 at 08:15

bremen1874 said:
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...

A UK summer will not kill low powered, well vented PC. It's the damp you'd want to be more concerned about.

The good news is unless you want to run anything fancy, any old P3 based system with modern disks and a half decent network adapter would be more than sufficent for backups. If it does die, simply replace bad parts for next to nothing off a famous auction site.

blueacid · 11 Mar 2010 at 00:28

The original poster still hasn't (afaik) explained:

1 - How large the entire volume of data to back up is
2 - How much of it changes per day
3 - How much it grows per day.

If we've got 2 and 3 being fairly low, then the use of an ADSL connection's upload is a viable option. If they're high, well, time to see what else can be done

bremen1874 · 11 Mar 2010 at 02:14

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.