Personal &Tech & VC 14 Dec 2006 03:37 pm
Data Backup Solution?
I feel vulnerable to data loss via hard drive crash or laptop theft. I have no automatic backup solution in place. Once a month I drag my important, local work files over to the file server, but that’s it!
My hosting provider, Dreamhost, gives me 200 gigs of online storage accessible via SFTP. That’s enough to back up my hard drive four times over.
Does anyone recommend a turn-key software solution that will take my SFTP credentials and backup specific folders on my computer nightly? Ideally this software would offer a grandfathering backup implementation.
I did a quick Google search on the subject, and there’s a myriad of choices. Anyone recommend one in particular?
11 Responses to “Data Backup Solution?”
on 14 Dec 2006 at 5:48 pm 1.Graeme Thickins said …
check out the RocketVault™ appliance: http://www.intradyn.com/rocketvault/
starts at $1195 and will backup any which way you want, on site or off…
try Wayne Morris at wmorris@intradyn.com — he can tell you more, incl where your nearest dealer is
cheers,
Graeme
on 14 Dec 2006 at 8:51 pm 2.Andrew Parker said …
I was thinking more along the lines of freeware, preferably open source.
on 14 Dec 2006 at 9:23 pm 3.Lee Semel said …
My current solution is to set up a cron on my laptop to run a shell script every day at midnight that will tar and gzip all of my important files, and ftp them to my desktop computer, which runs an ftp server open only to my internal network at home. This works fairly well, but it’s not as reliable as I’d like, because sometimes the laptop randomly won’t execute the script if it’s sleeping. I’ve investigated automated online backup services like iBackup, which have a friendly interface, but their prices for disk space are outrageously high compared to Dreamhost. I’d be paying hundreds of dollars a month to back up everything.
So if you find a better solution I’d definitely be interested to know about it.
on 14 Dec 2006 at 9:31 pm 4.Andrew Parker said …
I used to play SysAdmin for a young non-profit associated with Stanford called Groupspace.org. While there, I implemented this exact same setup (cron plus gzip/tar on a nightly system), and I did so using a “Great-grandfather, grandfather, father” algorithm for backing everything up in an efficient way.
Unfortunately, I no longer run linux (I’m on winXP) so stuff like cron jobs and shell scripting are non-existent and their Windows-equivalent are flaky at best.
Anyone got a good WinXP solution? Preferably free?
on 14 Dec 2006 at 9:39 pm 5.Lee Semel said …
I’m on WinXP too so I always have a set of Unix tools installed, use Perl for shell scripting, and Automated Tasks for cron. I’ve accumulated the Unix commands from a bunch of sites over the years. Do you want a copy?
on 15 Dec 2006 at 12:15 am 6.Jennifer said …
There is an excellent website for online backup information, news and articles. Check it out here:
http://www.BackupReview.info
This site lists more than 400 online backup companies and ranks the top 25 on a monthly basis.
Cheers,
on 15 Dec 2006 at 10:00 am 7.John Tokash said …
You can get most of the linux command line tools built for XP from a few different places. I always install the set from cygwin.
FYI, I tried using Amazon S3 for backups recently and it’s just WAY TOO SLOW. I just did a full backup to an external disk for most of my machines yesterday. I think I’ll follow Lee’s suggestion and set up automated backups of individual folders to that drive tonight.
on 15 Dec 2006 at 1:27 pm 8.Andrew Parker said …
This is great. I’m stoked about running linux commands at the WinXP commandline. Grep here I come!
And thanks Jennifer, back up review is certainly thorough.
on 23 Dec 2006 at 9:58 am 9.Darren Johnson said …
I’d highly recommend Mozy.com. 2GB free and a small price to upgrade your storage. I’ve been using it for a year now and I love it.
on 08 Jan 2007 at 12:04 pm 10.Rob Shurtleff said …
Andrew,
Happy New Year. I was offline for a couple of weeks so just getting caught up. Don’t know if you figured this out yet. There is a piece of Microsoft freeware that works well Synchtoy. i use it to back up the My Documents tree on the various family PCs that I am responsible for… I have a Buffalo Network Storage device on my Lan as the backup target.
rob
on 10 Apr 2007 at 5:25 pm 11.Vineet Jain said …
Hi Andrew,
I was made aware of your blog by a colleague of Fred Wilson at Panorama Capital.
We recently opened our solution Egnyte, which, hopefully you will find can address the question you raised here, and much more.
Please check it out at http://www.egnyte.com
Regards
Here’s a brief Egnyte overview:
Egnyte is a web based application that uniquely combines archiving, automatic organization, sharing and a powerful search capability.
Egnyte does away with the manual uploading of files to the Web, instead allowing users to synchronize information directly from their computer to the Web. Egnyte mirrors the way people work, for example, by letting users automatically create versions and share them as they change files. This reduces the clutter caused by manual versioning and emailing that commonly occurs. Recognizing that emails constitute 70% of all team communications, Egnyte is the first application of its kind that lets teams archive and share emails. Search is an integral part of the solution, helping quickly find personal and shared information.
The Egnyte solution is intuitive and easy to use, blending familiar concepts like “files,” “folders,” and “email” with new ways of managing information such as “tags” and “search.” Designed to help teams consolidate information and more easily collaborate on projects, Egnyte is available immediately at http://www.egnyte.com.
Egnyte offers free baseline accounts (1GB) with additional options to upgrade.