Thoughts on home back up
Sunday, March 29, 2009 at 1:36PM I had a colleague recently suffer the trauma of house fire. Besides the insanity associated with the fire a serious realization hit home. Local backups are not worth much when the building is destroyed or seriously compromised.
The short story is that my colleague was fanatical regarding backups and yet the backup hard drive was simply a NAS device sitting on a shelf in his home office. When his house caught fire not only did his machine get cooked but so did the NAS. This got me thinking....
I've got a few TBs of storage in my house, depending on the machine I've got some backing up to a NAS and some to USB attached storage devices. From a data perspective there are numerous documents and pictures that are irreplaceable, and to numerous to print out and put off-site. Electronic off-site is another matter entirely. Enter the "Cloud"....
Given I have a mix of Windows and Mac machines I wanted to find a rational approach to Cloud backup. I finally settled on the combination of Amazon S3 and Jungledisk. The initial backup took 14 days! But other than that it has been flawless. Incrementals takes on the order of minutes. Finally, I have successfully restored from Amazon S3 selected files and thus I am happy.
Frankly if something happens to both my house and the Amazon data center, there are bigger issues to be dealt with.
Reader Comments (1)
I have to ask what size of pipe do you have coming in? I have a similar storage requirement and was thinking of going with Savvis.
Thoughts?
Cheers,
M@