How do you handle off-site backups of terabytes of data?

Question

I have terabytes of files and database dumps that I need to backup off-site.

What's the best way to accomplish this?

I'm currently weighing rsyinc to Amazon EBS or getting an appliance (eg barracuda).

I called a buddy of mine, and he said he uses backula to get all the files on a single disk, then backs that disk up to tape, then sends the tapes off to iron mountain.

Still waiting to hear back from other sysadmins I've contacted. Will post results here.

Answer 1

I'm scared of tape. I think it gives a false sense of data security. In my own experience from backing up dozens of terrabytes across hundreds of tapes, we discovered that the data recovery rate after a few years fell to about 70%.

To be fair, that was with a now discontinued technology (AIT), but it pretty much put me off tape for life unless it sits on a 1" spool and is reassuringly expensive.

These days, multiple hard drives, multiple locations, and yes, a fall back into Amazon S3 or other cloud provider does no harm (apart from being a tad expensive).

Answer 2

Over the weekend, I've heard back from a couple of my sysadmin buddies.

It seems the best practice is to backup all machines to a central large disk, then back that disk up to tape, then send the tapes off site (all have used Iron Mountain).

Tapes hold 400-800G and cost $30-$80 per tape. A tape changer seems to go for $10k on up.

Not sure how much the off-site shipping costs.

Answer 3

I would recommend using a local san from a company like EMC that provides compressed snapshot based replication to remote facilities. It's an expensive solution, but it works.

http://www.emc.com/products/family/emc-centera-family.htm

Answer 4

We use a couple of solutions. We have an offsite backup with another company that we do. We also use several portable hard drives and swap them out each day. Neither solution really handles multiple terabytes of data. More like gigabytes.

In the future, however, we will probably be looking at going the tape router, or something else that is similarly permanent and storable. Terabytes of data is too much to transfer over the wire. When bluray discs become reasonably priced and commercially viable, it may be a good idea to look into the 400GB discs that were touted not long ago. Those would be extremely storage friendly (both in the physical sense and the file size sense), and depending on the longevity stats, may keep for a while, similar to tapes.

Answer 5

Why not encrpyt it and actually upload to a third party vendor?

I am thinking of doing this with my data at home but have not found a vendor that will just let me do a dump...They all want to install client side apps...

Admittedly, I have not looked that hard...

Answer 6

Instead of tapes, I use hard drives that I physically swap out every week. It is less expensive than tape equipment, and easier to plug into another system when necessary.

Answer 7

Back in the late 80s I worked at a place where every week we received a box of tapes of various sorts every monday - we would do one set of weekly backups on the tapes on that box and send them off-site. Evidently they had two of these boxes, one that was in our office and the other they kept locked up somewhere. Then we got an Exabyte drive which had a single tape capacity greater than that whole box of TK-50s, QIC-40s and mag tapes, and it was just simpler to send a single tape home with one of the manager every week.

I'm sure there are still off-site backup systems like that, but I find it easier to keep cycling a couple of 500Gb drives from my home system to my desk at work.

Answer 8

One common solution to offsite backups that is worth considering is performing the backup onsite and then physically transporting the backup elsewhere, either via secure snail mail or with a service designed for that purpose. If bandwidth is an issue, this may be more practical.