[Year 12 IT Apps] [OT] Backups - a personal story

[Mark]

Hi all.

I recently had to organise an intervention - against myself.
I had full-blown backup OCD, with no signs of remission.

My valuable data was stored on my desktop's SSD.
- To be sure, I regularly copied the data to my laptop SDD.
-- Knowing the risk of storing to SSD, I backup up to my main NAS
(Network-Attached Storage) - a 6TB Synology DS-410 running under RAID 0.
--- In case the NAS failed, I backed the ESPECIALLY important stuff to my
second NAS, a D-Link DNS-323 with 3TB of disks inside.
---- And, just to be sure, I occasionally copied key stuff to hard disks
using a USB caddy...
----- And I burnt stuff to DVD.
------ And I uploaded stuff to my several domains, until my host complained
that I was using web space for data archiving.

At that stage I realised I had a severe case of backup fever and needed to
cure it.

Having become thoroughly sick of burning copies of HUGE files to HDD, SSD,
NAS, DVD and FTP, I needed to slap myself around the face and re-evaluate.

It was then I remembered we had installed 'Crashplan' at McKinnon -
continuous online backups - and they apparently had a domestic plan as
well.  The nice bit was that a file is automatically backed up as soon as
it is created or changed, with no user intervention.

So I signed up (about $70 a year for unlimited cloud storage) - they have
free plans for backing up to local drives or friends' computers.

There was a bit of a kerfuffle getting it to recognise my mapped networked
drives on my LAN, but once I got off my 'I know better' high horse and
actually followed the instructions, I now have terabtyes of my NAS storage
flowing (very slowly, because of the nature of ADSL) into the cloud.  So
now I can maybe lay off the 4-layer backups and just do one or two paranoid
copies... just to be sure.  These things are not cured overnight.

BTW - the Crashplan software is installed on my old Acer EEE box which is
always running, so torrents, backups and data recovery can run
continuously. The old EEE is a very nifty, silent and cheap little beast.
 Just be sure to add an extra gigabyte of RAM, a terabyte HDD and Windows 7
to make it sweet.

This is NOT a paid or unpaid ad for Crashplan: there are other places that
do a similar job, but Crashplan is good value for unlimited storage.

Actually the trigger for my decision was that my second NAS was getting a
bit close to 80% full and I started pricing unit #3... it was than that I
figured it would be around $1000 for 8TB, plus the electricity to run the
thing 24x7. I started thinking that $70 a year for unlimited space was a
worthwhile alternative... albeit at sloth-like data-recovery speeds.

Now I just have to keep in mind the drawbacks of cloud storage... and hope
that Crashplan is secure and not likely to go bankrupt soon.

--
Mark Kelly
mark AT vceit DOT com
http://vceit.com
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