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Ask HN: Help me fix your backups

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Re: Ask HN: Help me fix your backups

#31

Post by larsberg »

altano wrote: post #29
larsberg wrote: post #27

"The biggest problem with backups is" Missing option is impact on the computer while I'm using it. All of the transparent services (especially Time Machine) that I have experience with are abysmally bad at turning themselves off when the machine is being actively used.

That's my favorite aspect of Windows Home Server's backup. It does it once a day whenever you're asleep. It'll even wake up your machine, back it up, and them put it back to sleep. And it's smart enough to only do this if you're laptop is plugged into AC and not running on battery. And if any machine isn't backed up in a while, you get a Health warning in your system tray. And this is all pretty configurable. How's t…

That's awesome! I'm very jealous.

Re: Ask HN: Help me fix your backups

#32

Post by pedrocr »

sreitshamer wrote: post #25
pedrocr wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the OP but I'll add my datapoint here. I have that just because of digital photography. My current 12MP camera fills up a 16GB card easily if I am covering a 2-3 hour event for some friend. That adds up fast. Right now I do a versioned rsync to a server I host myself that has a (just upgraded from 1TB) 4.5TB RAID5 array. That was ~400$ in disks when I upgraded. Even at the current ~1TB usage that would be 360…

Comparing S3 to an offsite RAID volume seems like apples to oranges. The biggest difference I think is the data are stored in multiple data centers and Amazon takes care of all the issues with that. There were a lot of interesting comments about S3 cost here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=422225 It would be awesome if Amazon offered something analogous to a single offsite automagically-expanding RAID volume for…

> Comparing S3 to an offsite RAID volume seems like apples to oranges.

And that was exactly my point. Amazon is selling apples and I want an orange. Tarsnap is an apple pie and is the perfect kind of pie I want. But I want an orange pie.

I would be ok with a service that didn't give me online access to my data. Run a very large stack of removable SATA drive slots. Copy incoming files into two of them in two locations. Store them securely when they are full. Fetch them back when I need to restore. That should cut way down on the CapEx of all the NAS/SAN hardware S3 has to run.

Re: Ask HN: Help me fix your backups

#33

Post by apowell »

I got about halfway through the survey before realizing it was about workstation backup, not server backup.

Time Machine + Dropbox makes workstation backup a solved problem.

Slicehost Backup + Tarsnap makes server backup almost a solved problem. And I say almost because I don't like having no choice but to store my full bootable backups with the same provider that hosts my primary server. If I could store bootable weekly images off-site, I'd be golden.

Re: Ask HN: Help me fix your backups

#36

Post by lincolnq »

jhg wrote: post #34

> * Required > Looks like you have a question or two that still needs to be filled out. If I want to skip a question, I should be able to do so.

Agreed. If you give me a survey and mark all the questions "required", if I find anything I don't want to answer, you're out of luck on the whole survey because I will just click back.

Re: Ask HN: Help me fix your backups

#37

Post by dcreemer »

Since I've not seen it mentioned yet: I use CrashPlan to back up all of my personal systems, both to a home server and to an remote peer. It's a bit RAM heavy, but other than that nicely stays out of the way & does it's job. The killer feature is trivial peer-to-peer connectivity, making off site backups easy. I'm not affiliated with the company -- just a happy customer.

Re: Ask HN: Help me fix your backups

#38

Post by carterschonwald »

pedrocr wrote: post #32
sreitshamer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing S3 to an offsite RAID volume seems like apples to oranges. The biggest difference I think is the data are stored in multiple data centers and Amazon takes care of all the issues with that. There were a lot of interesting comments about S3 cost here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=422225 It would be awesome if Amazon offered something analogous to a single offsite automagically-expanding RAID volume for…

> Comparing S3 to an offsite RAID volume seems like apples to oranges. And that was exactly my point. Amazon is selling apples and I want an orange. Tarsnap is an apple pie and is the perfect kind of pie I want. But I want an orange pie. I would be ok with a service that didn't give me online access to my data. Run a very large stack of removable SATA drive slots. Copy incoming files into two of them in two locations…

yes, something like this would be very nice. An analogous version would be to have a "netflix-lite" of data where you mail in a portable hd, they slurp out your data into (by default ) your private store, and then write the data (whether private or public) at the top of your request queue back into the hd and mail it back to you.

Subject to pricing, reliability and privacy infrastructure being sane / good, I'd be very interested in that

Re: Ask HN: Help me fix your backups

#39

Post by pedrocr »

carterschonwald wrote: post #38
pedrocr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Comparing S3 to an offsite RAID volume seems like apples to oranges. And that was exactly my point. Amazon is selling apples and I want an orange. Tarsnap is an apple pie and is the perfect kind of pie I want. But I want an orange pie. I would be ok with a service that didn't give me online access to my data. Run a very large stack of removable SATA drive slots. Copy incoming files into two of them in two locations…

yes, something like this would be very nice. An analogous version would be to have a "netflix-lite" of data where you mail in a portable hd, they slurp out your data into (by default ) your private store, and then write the data (whether private or public) at the top of your request queue back into the hd and mail it back to you. Subject to pricing, reliability and privacy infrastructure being sane / good, I'd be ver…

I see what you are saying. I would rather do a daily sync of any changed files as the deltas would be small and then maybe have the option to do a full restore by getting a disk couriered to me if I'm in a hurry or fetching it online if I don't mind downloading files for a week or two.

What I want to avoid is to have to bother about backups in the normal case. I just want to set it up properly as a daily cron job and mostly forget about it. Putting physical disks in the mail or safety deposit boxes is too much trouble. The server I want to backup isn't even usually physically next to me.

This problem is only growing as people get better cameras and start shooting a bunch of video and stills that take up a bunch of space. An interesting solution would be a mix of this online service plus a NAS appliance to put on the home network that does fast filesharing and automatic backups locally and to the online service. When a disk in the appliance fails you call the guys and they send you a replacement drive with the data already in it.

Re: Ask HN: Help me fix your backups

#40

Post by huhtenberg »

sreitshamer wrote: post #18
lovskogen wrote: post #10

Dropbox solved everything backup related for me, and I love it.

On the Mac, Dropbox doesn't do so well with restoring metadata: http://www.haystacksoftware.com/blog/2010/06/the-importance-... http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/dropbox-backup-bouncer-t... (Disclaimer -- I write backup software: http://haystacksoftware.com/arq/ )

Arq looks nice. I wasn't able to digest the (S3) pricing table, but all in all it leaves a favourable impression of a well-designed and well thought out program.
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