Off site data store

andicole0

andicole0

andicole0

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For a small business how 'off site' should 'off site' storage be?

Doing backups for a small business and needing to keep an archive copy for some years, how far off site should it be? Is it simply a different building - secure shed/garage at the bottom of a garden - or does it have to be miles away?

Andi.
 
very open question.

It really depends on what your BAU/Legal/Professional requirements are.

We support companies that just have a tape in someone's sock drawer to companies that require geo-located online data.

Its a business decision at the end of the day based around the above and budget.
 
You should take into consideration why you are backing up this data and taking it off-site. If it's to protect against fire for example, then it should be far enough way so that a fire in that building wouldn't affect it.
 
We have an on site copy, a "local" offsite copy in a different building and a final copy miles away. For the company critical database we also have a failover server about 200 miles away.
 
These days, with services like CrashPlan costing $6 a month, I would just (and do) back everything up onto an online service.

CrashPlan and Backblaze are both very popular and very cheap and will cover all your backup and off-site backup needs.
 
Crashplan or similar is useful especially for day to day accidentally deleted file recovery etc, but the data is still online which means it's corruptable or can be deleted accidentally, overwritten etc - nothing beats a long term storage format in a fireproof safe in a building ideally in a different town but certainly a distance away from the primary site with a planned rotation.
 
There's versioning on CrashPlan. You can set it to back up every 1 minute if you want (if the file changes that often) and it'll keep a ridiculous amount of versions for you.

I suppose it is corruptable, or you could lose your encryption key / data rendering the backup useless, but the likelihood of that happening at the same time as your NAS or hard drive breaking is tiny. You could always have a local (external drive or something) if you want to protect against that small chance.


http://support.code42.com/CrashPlan/Latest/Configuring/Specifying_Version_Settings
 
LiveDrive may be UK based, there's also Mozy but I've only heard of that one - never tried it and don't know if the prices are any good for what you get.

Both CrashPlan and Backblaze encrypt backups, not even the company can read them. But I guess if your company has a policy that needs them to be UK based, then you'll have to find something else!
 
Interesting... I don't get how a tape in a store room somewhere is safer/more reliable than a dedicated cloud backup provider. A million things can happen to a tape, and the more tapes you have, the likelihood of one of them developing a fault goes up. Tapes are well and truly on the way out, most places are going towards disk-based backups that are replicated to the DR site. Disk-based gives you compression, deduplication, automatic rotation (deleting backups after 1 week/1 month/1 year/7 years according to policy), and the best thing of all there is no messing around with tapes, which is HUGELY time consuming (guy from Iron Mountain coming every week to pick up the tapes, getting tapes back for restores, etc).

Not saying tapes don't have their place, but would definitely not be where I would start for a small/medium business with no backups at all.
 
The interesting thing about the linked article, is that 0.000001% of disk space was lost (which would be irrelevant in any replicated backup scenario), and in any case is multiple orders of magnitude smaller than the chance of losing any given tape.
 
By tape ours are actually RDX cartridges, but same principle (30 year archival life) - they are not connected to anything - so can't be hacked, corrupted, overwritten, fried etc. etc. etc.

Tape/cartridges will be around for lot lot longer than people think.

And don't forget that the speed of recovery is very important with a backup - if you're small business is on a bog standard ADSL connection how long would it take to download all that data to get back up and running?
 
rotor said:
The interesting thing about the linked article, is that 0.000001% of disk space was lost (which would be irrelevant in any replicated backup scenario), and in any case is multiple orders of magnitude smaller than the chance of losing any given tape.
Click to expand...

It would be interesting to know how much that actually is, wouldn't it? But the point is, if google can lose data in a very expensive data centre, anyone can.
 
We use a tape company called Recall. They come and collect the backup tapes every day and we store 12 months of month ends and two weeks of dailys and 4 weeks of friday tapes. It costs a fair amount but if the building blows up they still have all their data.

Another option is online backup from a company like databarracks or mozy.
 
nutcase_1uk said:
By tape ours are actually RDX cartridges, but same principle (30 year archival life) - they are not connected to anything - so can't be hacked, corrupted, overwritten, fried etc. etc. etc.

Tape/cartridges will be around for lot lot longer than people think.

And don't forget that the speed of recovery is very important with a backup - if you're small business is on a bog standard ADSL connection how long would it take to download all that data to get back up and running?
Click to expand...
Good point about the speed of recovery. At home I have 60Mbps BT Infinity, which translates to 400-450 MB (megabytes) per second, or around 600GB/24h. i.e. under ideal conditions you could restore a fair amount of data in not too much time (you would obviously prioritise). This is a small business so wouldn't expect massive amounts of data. But still, it is an extremely important point, so must be considered when designing the solution.

For a small business, I would do the following:

- Have a local on-site backup to disk
- Have a cloud backup in the case of building burning down/robbery

In my experience small businesses are TERRIBLE at managing tape backups. What I've seen multiple times, is that something is wrong with the backups, the employee dutifully puts in a new tape every day, but in fact they haven't had backups for months. In one place, the receptionist had been taking the tapes home every night, but they hadn't had a valid backup for something like 18 months.
 
nutcase_1uk said:
By tape ours are actually RDX cartridges, but same principle (30 year archival life) - they are not connected to anything - so can't be hacked, corrupted, overwritten, fried etc. etc. etc.
Click to expand...
Agree that they can't be hacked, but they most definitely can be corrupted and overwritten (by accident). The labels can fall off, they can get lost, misplaced, stolen, water damaged, burned, go mouldy, etc. etc. etc.

Also, I have never trusted vendor archive life claims, they used to say that CDs (let alone DVDs or Bluray) would last for many decades, until the CD fungus hit (https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cd+fungus&tbm=isch) and then they were instantly useless. Not to mention that for something to be readable in 30 years you need a device that can read it, and the chances of that still existing (when it comes to tape, anyway, where there are so many standards) is approaching zero/very expensive.

It's a fun topic!! =)
 
60Mbps = 7.5MBps without taking off overhead ;)

You're absolutely right, archive copies can be corrupted etc. but the risk is very very low - combine it with a ready access backup similar to crashplan and you're in the negligible risk levels. I'm not saying an online archive is wrong, I'm saying it should be considered part of the solution, not THE solution.

Bear in mind it would be rare for an archive copy to actually be kept for 30 years - some of our data we have to legally retain for 40 years. The company is 25 years old, we have data that old. All our tapes (force of habit to call them that) are under 4 years old as we've moved with technology changes. We have some older DLT tapes but there's nothing on them that isn't on a more modern media - in theory we could destroy them. I see no reason why this won't continue - we're considering moving over to LTO 6 because RDX cartridges aren't big enough for our needs any more and we're having to span.

Frequently a backup is described as 3 copies, with at least one on a different media. We have the live data, a NAS copy and then the RDXs - most of the data on the RDXs which are run daily overnight is repeated 5 times so we have loads of backups really. I'm introducing shadow versions shortly when I've added some disk space to the main server to remove the annoyance of restoring from the NAS.

rotor said:
It's a fun topic!! =)
Click to expand...

Agreed and something I'm quite keen on at the moment :)
 
Archiving onto Amazon Glacier should fit 99.9% of business data archiving requirements. Outside of that you have stuff like Iron Mountain if you really want to use tapes.

If the internet connection isn't good enough to archive to a cloud service then get that upgraded as you're just holding the business back in so many other ways without decent connectivity.
 
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