[ale] Backup strategies

[Greg Freemyer]

Answers interspersed

On 9/12/08, Chris Kleeschulte
<chris.kleeschulte at it.libertydistribution.com> wrote:
> I am interested in hearing your thoughts on backup strategies.
>
>
> We have about 500GB of data that I must back up.
>
> Currently, I perform incrementals nightly, with full backups monthly, and a
> differential backups every 2 weeks.
>
> I can't push 500GB offsite via the Internet, so what I am doing is gpg
> encrypting the backups and sending it to a usb disk and then shipping the
> backup drives offsite.
>

We do via rdiff-backup.  Designed for the purpose.  We rent a virtual
server from Dreamhost to hold the offsite.  I think it is about $20 +
$0.20 / GB / month

We have a T-1 and a few GB per night tends to go out each night.
(Took us a couple months to create the initial offsite repository.  We
sent about 10 GB per night iirc)

I do worry about how long it would take to do a full recovery of all
that.  Fortunately we can pull the data piecemeal if we have to.

>
> but even encrypting the backups and sending them to it to a usb drive takes
> quite a long time. I thought about not performing the full backups so often,
> which would be easier to send data offsite, but this might be dangerous.

Buy an encrypting USB carrier.  They run at full USB speed.  Then pull
the physical encryption key out and send to your offsite location
separately.  (ie. if the drive gets lost in the mail, the lucky
recipient does not also get the key.)

>
> I am not crazy about using tapes or having a service come and gather the
> tapes.

We do that as well.  We have them come by once a month.  We back up
multiple TB of relatively stable data this way each month.  We use an
LTO-3 drive.  About $2500 I think.  So $5K if you want to have a pair.
 Backups including verify go about 2GB/min. with our setup.


> So my challenge is preparing the offsite medium and transferring that data.
>
> What would you do in this situation to perform the offsite backups?
>
>
>
> Chris
>
>
>
>
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Greg Freemyer
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