Backup Solution Catch-all

I've got a few questions about offsite backup and so on, but I want to move it to it's own thread.

About JungleDisk:

How do you control what gets backed up, and what doesn't? (I've got a massive MP3 collection I've got backed up elsewhere, so I don't want to fuss with the 80 gigs of music/video I have.)
How easy is it to use?
How is security handled?

Also: Any other reccomendations?

Does it work with mapped drives? It sounds like it should, but i thought i'd ask.

Kannon wrote:

How do you control what gets backed up, and what doesn't?

You create backup "jobs", which define what folders get backed up, and when. You can create multiple backup jobs for more fine control over the backup process.

Plus, since you can mount it as a network drive, you can use any existing backup software you wish with it, and point the software at it like it's a normal drive. But the ease and simplicity of the included backup capabilities mean you probably won't really want to.

How easy is it to use?

Excessively. Even encryption is handled very easily, no manual key management, just defining a password for the "bucket".

How is security handled?

S3 uses SSL to encrypt all traffic, Amazon provides you with keys which you'll have to copy-paste into JungleDisk.

By default, traffic is stored unencrypted on Amazon's servers. JungleDisk allows you to encrypt files before transmitting, so that the files will be stored as encrypted on Amazon's servers. Amazon won't be able to look at your data, nor anyone that breaches S3 and gains access to your S3 account. The key is stored only on your PC - JungleDisk does not have a copy, and cannot help you retrieve data if you lose your key.

File encryption is not on by default because of this - to be secure, the key has to be yours and yours alone, but the average mouth-breather will forget their "password" and lose all access to their files, so it's provided as a feature strictly for people who know what the hell they're doing. Even so, it's painfully easy to use.

Also: Any other reccomendations?

No. I mean, there's a ton of small storage solutions, many of which actually use S3 storage as their own (Dropbox is like this - though it's more of a collaboration tool, you can use it as 2GB of backup storage yourself).

You can use TrueCrypt with something like Dropbox to have your remote data encrypted.

jonnypolite wrote:

Does it work with mapped drives? It sounds like it should, but i thought i'd ask.

You mean, can you make a backup job pull from folders on a mapped network drive as opposed to ones on a local drive?

If so, then yes. In Windows, a mapped drive is just a drive letter like any other. And in the UNIX based OSs, a mountpoint looks just like any other folder as far as anything accessing the filesystem is concerned. Network transparency is a great thing.

That's what i mean. I ask only because i naively thought my NAS would work with Mozy, but they don't support mapped drives, and i'm having trouble getting iDrive to see the mapped drive, even though i can access it fine in Vista.

I'll give S3 a try tonight, sounds like it might do the trick.

I'm paranoid about offsite backups in addition to having a NAS and redundant backups in our house. I tried a few different services (Mozy, etc) however I went back to JungleDisk and S3. With a large amount of files to backup Mozy would consistently crap out. A large portion of my backups are digital photos and it seemed (at the time anyways) like Mozy would get confused with thousands of files.

JungleDisk itself is cheap and reliable - as Legion mentioned it allows you to decide what to backup and works with mapped drives. Amazon's charges for S3 seem relatively reasonable. I have about 100GB backup up via S3 (initial backup took many many days) and have been able to access to the backups from other sites without any issues.

I would definitely recommend JungleDisk and S3. At this point I haven't found anything better and I periodically check out alternatives.

jonnypolite wrote:

That's what i mean. I ask only because i naively thought my NAS would work with Mozy, but they don't support mapped drives, and i'm having trouble getting iDrive to see the mapped drive, even though i can access it fine in Vista.

Really? Strange. I can't see how being a mapped drive should matter at all, but maybe that's just that pesky UNIX mentality again. I thought the whole point of drive mapping in Windows was transparency - making the network shares look identical to applications as local storage.

I believe you, though. I just don't get why it is.

I know this is an entirely different KIND of backup, but as someone who's work product is entirely based on nicely organizable files, the idea of backing up a SYSTEM is alien to me. I only care about backing up my WORK. As such, I have Dropbox running on my desktop and my laptop, and all of my work happens inside the confines of my dropbox folder. Not only have I never once thought abotu backing up, but all my work is always on both machines, and I can even pull a version 12 saves ago through my iPhone. I've also got my media server subscribed, so it has yet another local backup of everything.

Honestly, I can't imagine a more ideal or forgetable solution.

rabbit wrote:

I know this is an entirely different KIND of backup, but as someone who's work product is entirely based on nicely organizable files, the idea of backing up a SYSTEM is alien to me. I only care about backing up my WORK. As such, I have Dropbox running on my desktop and my laptop, and all of my work happens inside the confines of my dropbox folder. Not only have I never once thought abotu backing up, but all my work is always on both machines, and I can even pull a version 12 saves ago through my iPhone. I've also got my media server subscribed, so it has yet another local backup of everything.

Honestly, I can't imagine a more ideal or forgetable solution.

That's actually more-or-less what I'd be doing. Data and system separation is a beautiful thing. Too bad windows doesn't support it nearly as well as *nix. I've always had problems with user folders on other partitions under windows. /home under linux is always on another partition, however.

rabbit wrote:

I know this is an entirely different KIND of backup, but as someone who's work product is entirely based on nicely organizable files, the idea of backing up a SYSTEM is alien to me. I only care about backing up my WORK. As such, I have Dropbox running on my desktop and my laptop, and all of my work happens inside the confines of my dropbox folder. Not only have I never once thought abotu backing up, but all my work is always on both machines, and I can even pull a version 12 saves ago through my iPhone. I've also got my media server subscribed, so it has yet another local backup of everything.

Honestly, I can't imagine a more ideal or forgetable solution.

It even has version control? I am sold. Thanks.

I just use a Netgear Readynas in a Raid 5 at home. Every two days or so, I upload differentials to an off-site backup solution on a share in case of house fire.

Can't be too careful with the porn collection.

Anodyne wrote:

It even has version control? I am sold. Thanks.

DropBox does that very well.

JungleDisk also has a "previous versions" feature. For any given "bucket", you can set how many previous versions of changed/deleted files it should keep.

You can have it flush out these previous versions after X days, etc. And/or to keep X number of backups of a given file regardless of age.

For just a basic CYA against accidental deletion, I have it keep all deleted files for 14 days.

It's not the same as revision control, like DropBox does, but it is a feature worth mentioning.

rabbit wrote:

I know this is an entirely different KIND of backup, but as someone who's work product is entirely based on nicely organizable files, the idea of backing up a SYSTEM is alien to me. I only care about backing up my WORK.

There are more than just those options.

Like the family picture/video collection, etc.

DropBox is great for storing text documents and such, but 2GB is nothing for a media backup.

Thanks for the suggestions, and thanks Rabbit:) Dropbox works well, i'm using a third party program whose name escapes me to backup photos. Great solution!

I don't know if this is the place to ask, but I've been thinking a lot about backup lately as well. My biggest concern is size+bandwidth. My backups are not at all 'average'. I need to backup somewhere on the order of 1TB of data (audio recordings, sample libraries, music libraries, photo libraries, and system backups) - with probably a couple hundred extra MB of backups per week. A clone backup is a requirement because configuring my audio setup is a multi-day process (generally 4 to 5 days to install all my apps, sound libraries, and configure all my templates.

Doing it over the net will probably cause my ISP to shut me down, and 1TB over the net will take weeks...

I realize that a sneaker-net backup is probably the most effective solution here, but it isn't 100% synchronized unless I do a daily backup and swap.

Is anyone else (graphic designers, audio geeks, video geeks, etc.) working with some kind of system that is similar? Recommendations?

I just upgraded to the Pro version of unRaid a couple weeks ago and it's been working out very well for me. Since I use Vista making clones/backups are a cinch, and it can have a ton of space (I think I'm currently working with ~3TB on a motley assortment of drives). Now that I have a cache drive in there, I can get 80MB sustained both up and down over my gigabit LAN, so it can even stream uncompressed Blu-Ray rips.

Symbiotic wrote:

Is anyone else (graphic designers, audio geeks, video geeks, etc.) working with some kind of system that is similar? Recommendations?

Debian Linux + low-power server box + SATA RAID cage + software RAID 5 is what I did. I've got 1.5TB of backup storage with one drive bay left to fill.

Something like FreeNAS could be used in place of manually configuring a Debian system, I imagine. I mainly went with Debian because the server box is doing more than just acting as a network backup.

Thanks, Legion. I have a Mac G5 that we use as a media server + secondary office machine (mostly email and web). I think I could pretty easily get that up and running with some kind of RAID cage + software RAID. I'm not terribly savvy on the RAID front, but I assume that you just take one drive with you offsite and swap it daily or something?

Symbiotic wrote:

Thanks, Legion. I have a Mac G5 that we use as a media server + secondary office machine (mostly email and web). I think I could pretty easily get that up and running with some kind of RAID cage + software RAID. I'm not terribly savvy on the RAID front, but I assume that you just take one drive with you offsite and swap it daily or something?

I have JungleDisk set up to backup the stuff I *need* to have backed up offsite.

Not everything on there is critical must-keep-at-all-costs stuff. It's also a bulk network storage.

You'd probably do things a little differently if you wanted to be able to pull drives to take offsite, but I'm sure there's some proper setup for doing that sort of thing.

I am > < this close to signing up for Jungle Disk. I am loathe to ever spend money, ever, unless something shiny shows up at my door as a result otherwise I would have already clicked.

Symbiotic wrote:

I don't know if this is the place to ask, but I've been thinking a lot about backup lately as well. My biggest concern is size+bandwidth. My backups are not at all 'average'. I need to backup somewhere on the order of 1TB of data (audio recordings, sample libraries, music libraries, photo libraries, and system backups) - with probably a couple hundred extra MB of backups per week. A clone backup is a requirement because configuring my audio setup is a multi-day process (generally 4 to 5 days to install all my apps, sound libraries, and configure all my templates.

Doing it over the net will probably cause my ISP to shut me down, and 1TB over the net will take weeks...

I realize that a sneaker-net backup is probably the most effective solution here, but it isn't 100% synchronized unless I do a daily backup and swap.

Is anyone else (graphic designers, audio geeks, video geeks, etc.) working with some kind of system that is similar? Recommendations?

Maybe make an image of your system so all you have to do is just reload the image. For file storage, Legion's solution is relatively cheap but maybe a Drobo would be another option.

I'm so down for JungleDisk it's not even funny. Thing is, we've got no budget ATM, but as soon as we've got a little spare that sounds perfect.

Symbiotic, could you get an image of a clean, properly set up system, store that on hand, then use the offsite backup for stuff as it comes up? That way, you've got the best of both worlds. (Sneakernet to a bank vault is a pretty good plan for massive once-in-awhile storage.)

I signed up for Jungle Disk. Now I am watching as my computer slaves night and day for an estimated 8 goddamned days to sling 26.5G of sh*t up there over TWC's anemic pipe. Le sigh.

ColdForged wrote:

I signed up for Jungle Disk. Now I am watching as my computer slaves night and day for an estimated 8 goddamned days to sling 26.5G of sh*t up there over TWC's anemic pipe. Le sigh.

Oh good lord. It'll take me a damned month to throw stuff onto JungleDisk.

I'm using Backblaze and find that it is excellent. I get unlimited storage for one computer for $5/month or $50/year. By default, it backs up everything except Windows and your programs, but you may exclude other folders if you wish. It does incremental backup if you add or change files that exist on the backup. If you lose your data, you can re-download everything or (for a fee) they will burn DVDs of your files or even send you a USB hard drive overnight with the data.

Here's an interesting option: http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/21/a...

Apparently, Windows Home Server has Drive Extender, which is apparently more reliable than, say, RAID5. http://www.fearthecowboy.com/post/Wi...

The drives are hot-swappable, and with 4 bays, I could easily use this thing to sling media AND act as a multi-system backup (OS X Time Machine can use a WHS server disk as a target).

$600 and I'd have 1TBx3 storage - one disk to take with me when I leave in the morning, and two to leave at home to act as server+at home backup.

SLICK!

I use windows home server but only for the complete system backups it does daily on the workstations. I've already got a 'real' Windows server with a shared drive and volume shadow copy (I also use VSS on all the Vista boxes but not much is stored locally).

I pretty much follow the Google plan, I make sure I have three copies of everything. I have two external hard drives attached to the windows 2008 server that run robocopy on the shared drive directories nightly, with one drive using the purge switch (it deletes from the destination what's been deleted from the source) and one not, this way I have files on one of the drives in case VSS fails for whatever reason.

I also have a WHS set up (an HP), I have had a few problems here and there with drives but by and large it works well for local backups. In the past I used a Linux box and rsync but the complete system backups of WHS is what sold me on it. I even have my Macs backed up on the WHS.

I use JungleDisk for all of my "off site" backups for important things like photos, documents, family videos in case of fire or theft.