P2P backup solutions?

Linkex

Linkex

Linkex

Associate
Joined
4 May 2011
Posts
1,065
One of the chief complaints of the users in our organisation is that there is no backup solution - there is actually, but its not automatic, so it doesn't count in our users eyes :) We have policies and processes in place to help users perform backups, but of course they don't pay any attention until after their hard drive has failed catastrophically.

The other related issue is that when a user gets a new machine, they have to transfer their own data to the new machine, because it isn't stored centrally, it doesn't just appear. This means tracking down USB sticks and all that fun stuff.

I've come across the concept of P2P storage and I'm going to investigate it, so I thought I'd check here to see if anyone had any experience with it. In my head, the solution looks like this:
-Software is deployed to each client through the software management system
-Each machine then automatically creates a "Backup" folder in the "My Documents" area
-Anything placed into this folder is encrypted and distributed to multiple peers
-Anything that's backed up that is not present on the system is automatically pulled down (So users getting new machines would pull down all their files automatically)

I realise that to have backups be remotely reliable, I will need to allocate 2/3 times more storage on each machine than I provide backup space for. I also realise that this is not bullet proof, that if all machines holding data die for some reason, that the data is lost.

To pre-empt a couple of questions:
I cannot use 3rd party cloud storage (Drop box etc), because security will not allow it. End of. Full stop. Conversation will not be entered into etc (Security hate 3rd party cloud)
I'm appreciate that there are other options and these are also being investigated, but for the purposes of this thread, I am only interested in the pros, cons and experiences of P2P backup.
 
Sorry, should have mentioned this. We have 8000ish users. If this works, there is potential for it to be adopted by the parent company, some 60,000 users. Its why we don't simply have a central automated backup - the costs would be astronomical, not to mention we would require dedicated data centres to manage it. The initial impression of p2p backup is that because it utilises existing but unused space, its basically free.
 
Either that or a system that is managed by a central server, but yes, that's the idea.

Yes, we are over a number of offices/locations and generally have good connectivity. However, this isn't intended to be a disaster recovery option - those are going to cost serious money whatever you do and are outside the scope of what I'm looking at. This is only meant to cover the "Damn, my hard drive died, and I was just going to do a backup tomorrow I swear" crowd. If the software is configurable to prefer different sites based on subnet or similar then great, but its not a primary concern.

And yes, I acknowledge that this is going to involve educating users not to use this to store business critical data. The reality is that we have some users who do backup to SharePoint like they should, who will pay attention, and we have some users who ignore anything IT related that they don't NEED to do in order to do their jobs. Best we can do for these users with this solution is provide the backup and hope that anything critical will be recoverable.

While I agree a cloud solution seems ideal, its also very expensive. Take for example dropbox. Their business pricing is 125USD per user. That would work out to 7.5million USD if adopted across the company.
 
Little_Crow - Don't worry, I know its not personal. Much of what you say is true. However, as I mentioned, this is just one workstream among many being investigated as a solution. I don't envisage this being the final answer to the problem, but rather a potential piece of the puzzle.

For example, lets say we lock down all the desktops so that remote saving is the only option. Our existing SharePoint infrastructure can't support this, so do we upgrade all our server infrastructure at significant cost? Provide share drive capacity equal to 8000 x hard drive size at significant cost? Provide a private p2p 'sync' (Good point on that one :)) at ??? cost?

The point I'm making is that I know this isn't the solution on its own, which is why I want to know what it can and can't do, so I can feed it back into the 'bigger picture™'
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom