Things I Wish I’d Thought of Regarding Online Backups
Posted on July 23, 2007
10 Comments
Thinking about going to online backups for your home or office? I’ve been a Mozy user since last August and recently gained a lot more (unplanned) experience with the MozyPro service as well.
What follows are some things to consider. While all my experience is via the two Mozy services — and I’ve generally been very pleased — I think a lot of this applies to other services as well. If not, you can bet their corporate representatives will drop some comments to educate us!
Weigh the Pros and Cons
Going to an online service is a big change from the traditional tape or removable hard drive type storage that most of us are used to. It also tends to be a lot cheaper (especially when you factor in secure and controlled offsite storage facilities for tapes). But, there are some things to ponder.
For instance, if you suddenly need to recover 20GB of data, you’ll pay a bit for that cost savings.
Then again, need to just grab a handful of files? Online storage will be way faster than running through a tape.
You get the idea? Look over your business continuation plans, your disaster plans, and make sure you can still meet your goals.
Mix Options?
After noodling around the pros and cons, maybe it makes sense to mix in some hardware with the online storage? For instance, maybe pick up a large NAS unit? Have all that storage on the LAN, back up (or mirror) machines to that, then back it up to your online backup service.
Recent data is right there on the LAN, but older data is safely offsite yet still retrievable.
I thought I’d mention this as I’m currently mulling it over… Thoughts?
That First Backup is Going to Take a Long Time
Plan on it. Allow for it. You’re about to ship many gigabytes of data over the Internet. If you’re doing this from home, you might even have the added “feature” of upload caps slowing you down. From the office? You might want to have the backup client configured to throttle back on the bandwidth during business hours (no fun clobbering the office network!).
One of my recent new setups took over 5 days going full time, but throttled to 256Kbps during business hours.
Don’t setup up 10 servers all at once. Bring them on to the service in phases or waves.
Plan the Restore Carefully
Just had a disaster and need to get all the data back down? Think before you start (aka learn from my mistakes). Plan to make a few restore passes. For your first pass, just select the stuff you need the most.
Side Note: I only have experience with MozyPro. To do a restore, you select the backup set or drives/folders via their website. Once completed, they’ll bundle that up into a series of self-extracting archives and drop you an email when they’re ready.
In my case, 21GB took about 10 hours for the bundling. The final download was completed roughly 30 hours later. The final download had the files we needed first.
If I had marked that first, then went back and marked the rest for a later pass, I wouldn’t have waited nearly as long for the stuff I wanted first! Life would’ve been a bit calmer.
Don’t Set it and Forget It
The little backup client tells you it completed? Check the history or the logs. Make darned sure it completed. Look for errors. Just like any other automated process, get in the habit of checking up on it.
In my case, it said it was done. But really, it was “done” because it hit a file that caused an error so it had to stop. If I had paid closer attention (and perhaps the error was more obvious) I wouldn’t have missed several GB in my initial backup set.
As an aside, the MozyPro folks have been friendly and easy to work with — and I guess I can claim responsibility for a few new bug reports related to the whole “done isn’t really done” thing.
Closing
For home use, I couple the Mozy solution with my own patented Scattered Home Backups method. Works well for me.
For work, I think I like the MozyPro option, but am still getting the hang of it.
Anything you’d like to add to the above? Drop a comment — I’m all ears!
[image from NelgNL]
Tags: backup, mozy, operations, server
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10 Responses to “Things I Wish I’d Thought of Regarding Online Backups”
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I found your article very interesting to read and thought I would drop a few lines of comment. I think there should be a clear differentiation between an ‘online backup service’ and those companies out there (Databarracks included) who offer a ‘managed backup service’, I think the difference between the two is worth talking about a little.
An ‘online backup service’ such as MozyPro or similar gives a company the opportunity to use a backup infrastructure which is reliable, secure and of course most importantly offsite. The services offered today vary in terms of storage infrastructure and backup software, some are great and others not so great. Cost is also a variant with backup being offered from just a few dollars or pounds per GB. These services as described are automated and leave the checking and management of backups to the user. Most importantly with these are the speed of restores of course.
I think these services represent great value for money for smaller businesses.
On the other side are ‘managed backup services’ again these are usually ‘online’ but differ mostly in how they fit into a company’s requirements. Typically with Databarracks services an engineer would visit the customer, identify data and configure a backup client and install a local storage device. This device would ensure that any restores of data would happen at network speed and protect against all but a catastrophic loss of the customers data centre. In this event data restores would happen in a twofold way, with the most critical data being restored online while the main data set was being shipped back to the customer with an engineer who would remain onsite until the customer was ‘back in business’.
With these types of services, the software and backup infrastructure would change significantly also. Typically enterprise level remote backup software would have elements such as data de-duplication, data retention (direct grandfather, father, son tape cycle replacement), archiving and hierarchical storage management (H.S.M) elements to it. The backup element of the software would send data to schedules or in real time and also as you would expect have the ability to backup the usual database and business applications as well as taking ‘bare-metal’ backups of servers.
Storage infrastructure is also different. Where there are strict SLAs for the restoration of data in place or a strict regulatory environment the storage infrastructure is key. If you are using an ‘online backup service’ the speed of drives doesn’t need to be very fast (you are limited by your bandwidth after all). Where you need to dump large amounts of data to a portable NAS device to take to a customers DR site quickly you need fast i/o speeds or you are limited to how quickly you can move GBs or TBs of data off the storage system to a portable device (some managed backup companies including Databarracks will provide you with a populated loan server back to your site until you have bought in replacement kit.
Then there is the day to day management of the service. With Databarracks service our engineers monitor all customer backup logs every day and if there are errors, we report and rectify this either remotely where possible or onsite if this is required. We also have regular reviews of our customer’s backup requirements to ensure that the environment hasn’t changed, applications added that are not backed up etc.
With the second type of service the costs do increase, but the services, while on the surface may look similar actually are very different and address different needs.
I think these services suit different companies and both have a very valid place in the market. As you mentioned in your article I think it is important for people looking into an online backup service to think first about the restoration of data and business recovery and then work back from there to find the solution that suits their specific needs. There are now solutions in the market that suit each and every level of backup from home user through to multi-site corporations. The online backup market place is highly competitive with more and more companies entering into the market place. As with any business, we are all working on margins, there are always exceptions to every rule, but in broad terms if one service is much cheaper or more expensive than another there is usually a valid reason behind it.
For online backup, I think you cant go wrong with Carbonite. It’s a really good deal, only 50 bucks, and I can back up everything on my computer. I was really happy to find that Carbonite allows me to back up an unlimited amount of stuff because many other services don’t. I have a lot of stuff on my computer and carbonite saves all of it. I highly recommend Carbonite to anyone that needs to back up anything on their computer, photos, music, papers, whatever. Carbonite is just an all around great product. Although the initial backup is a little long, I was more than willing to sacrifice a day or two in order to keep my entire computer secure.
@Peter - wow. Although some of that is close to an advertisement, you definitely offered some food for thought.
@Janice - Can we safely assume you work for Carbonite?
I think a reason why people don’t use that much online data storing (for personal use instead of company) is because they have the fear of their right to privacy being violated. Everyone has the fear of governments secretly looking into your files, whether its your home finances or your secret porn stash O.O
HI
I used to use Mozy, Mozy and the other freebies scare me as look @ the .com buisnesses of the 90’s and 2k….i dont want my data sitting with a comapny that is working on those kind of margins (how much can a company make that is free or 5 bux???) RIght now i got a accepted to a beta run on http://www.onlinebackupvault.com their system seems to be seamless and easy to setup, they also have techs available to work with you and dial into your PC and setup the software which i found very helpful. Online backup vault seemed to be good- i have also played with sos and data box which seemed good - ill keep ya guys up to date!
@The King - I can’t speak for the other companies out there, but Carbonite’s backups are encrypted before they ever leave your computer, and again when they arrive on our servers - even our own employees can’t view your files.
@rivky - I suppose it depends on the business model for the company in question, but Carbonite is doing very well with their current pricing, including a lot of company growth.
@Chris - Janice does not work for Carbonite, unless she’s a brand new hire I don’t know about. I don’t see her name on my company directory, at any rate.
@Janice - Thanks for the nice comments.
Len Pallazola
Supervisor, Customer Service Systems
Carbonite, Inc.
http://www.carbonite.com
@Len - thanks for stopping by and joining in. If you’re still around, I have a quick question: Is carbonite really unlimited storage?
Ok, make that two questions: Do you guys have a corporate version?
We don’t have a corporate version yet, although we do have corporate pricing. (Write me at lenpal at carbonite.com if you need more info.)
Carbonite really IS unlimited though. Honestly, because you’re backing up over the Internet, practicality will become the limiting factor - the more you want to back up, the longer it will take to back up (and the restore, although restores tend to go much faster than backups).
Please let me know if you have additional questions, either here or by e-mail. I’m set up for e-mail notifications here.
Boy, you nailed that one on the head!
I’ll drop you a note via email shortly on the corp pricing.