Backup External Drives

Right, given the conversations here I had a chat with a data center guy and he mentioned how it may suit you to do the following.

A group of you guys get together and rent out space in a datacenter for backup. He recomended a 'cloud package' which means that you only pay for the space that you use. This company will then throw in free webhosting and email servers as well.

What this allows you to do is back up your files onto the net, but it also allows gives you access to your files from any pc. These are crowd who used to host for youtube before they were bought out by google.

Costs are as follows:
Fixed $100 per month for use of service, then $0.15 per gig used (this decreases as gigs go up).

So if five of you got together, you can host your own sites for free on the package and then it would cost around €30 per month for complete off site backup for around 200gigs.
Naturally, you only have access to your own files so its not like the five of you can see or edit each others photos.

It would be very easy to set up a 'boards package', the main driver in the cost is the $100 per month so the more people you get in, the cheaper it gets. Also, the only tech knowledge required is FTP

rymus

online space isnt the issue. Many of us know where we can get a 500gb web hosting setup in the US for around $150 per annum. It's how to get the files to the webhost.

I'm sure we'd all love to sit around for days/weeks on end while our local drives with many many GB's of raw files rsync with an ftp/ssh at shoddy upload speeds that you get in Ireland. Online backup is fine for your average office that might do a nightly or weekly incremental backup of several hundred MB of word documents and excel spreadsheets, but it gets quite unusable quite fast if your incremental backup includes 40/50 X 20MB RAW files.

Contact the data center (who isn't a reseller, won't work with them) and send in the disk with the files on it.

Can't beat sneaker net!

Then just upload subsequent files through the web.

rymus

ok.. so even if you send them the bulk of the files, say 250GB and they copy that onto your virtual/co-lo server.. Then you go out and shoot 230 raw files at the weekend and decide that you really want to keep 100 of them. With an average raw of 15MB, that's going to mean an upload of 1.5GB you have to do over a 384kb/sec broadband line.

Unless you keep sending DVD's of images to your host.. .and I'm sure that'd wear pretty thin pretty quickly.

feileacan

feileacan wrote: »

iomega are now doing a 2Tb (2x1Tb) external hard drive for €207 (including vat), not sure how much delivery is.

http://www.iomega-europe.com/section?SID=fd0f40b5207eb8889b1ca8d95fe0b132073:4725&secid=76612

back software wise, i use Allway Sync on the pc (cant recommend this software enough) and chronosync on the mac

i have 2tb (4x500mb) raid-5 system. i also have 2x500mb WD external drives as a back up to the 2tb system. this would also be a back up disk, perhaps for off site storage. and yep im paranoid

Thats the price of remote backup.. well in Ireland anyway. I get decent speeds here in the UK.

1.5gig should't take a huge amount of time - couple of hours at most. Its doable, and the advantage of the non reseller approach would that if you did end up with a major amount of work, you could pop them on a DVD and mail them in.

Its just an idea - you are going to get choked on the bandwidth but you do then get a 'proper' backup that won't loose files following hardware failure, theft or in the worst case, fire.

rymus

1.5gig was a fairly optimistic baseline guess. More realistic guess would be 3/4gb or if shooting a wedding or other event, anything up to 8/12gb and beyond.

I'd love to be able to backup online. I'd also love to have a 5 or 10mbit upload and no upload cap to be able to do a weekly incremental.

rymus

rymus wrote: »

1.5gig was a fairly optimistic baseline guess. More realistic guess would be 3/4gb or if shooting a wedding or other event, anything up to 8/12gb and beyond.

I'd love to be able to backup online. I'd also love to have a 5 or 10mbit upload and no upload cap to be able to do a weekly incremental.

Not going to be in Ireland for a while yet I'm afraid.

On the other hand, download truecrypt, encrpyt a DVD and then leave it a mates house. Not that efficient, but it does work.

rymus

You can get it... but you'll pay dearly for it. Maybe the few lucky punters that live in housing developments with FTTH or FTTC installation will be able to avail of the huge uploads required. Ahh well.

funkybusiness

Just jumping in on the conversation.

Can I ask...Would you pay for a service where you can get your RAW files backed up onto tape and then stored in a secure location?

rymus

depends on the cost and how easily accessible it is for both backing up and restoring.

funkybusiness

What if the cost was transparent? For example the end user pays for the tape costs and secure storage costs and the backup company puts on a fixed fee per backup or per month.

So for example if we were dealing with large quantities of information like 500GB or greater you would need tapes that cost around 50 euro. 2 or three might be needed so a once off setup cost.

Say secure storage is 20 euro.

And then markup is 25 euro a month or something like that. Markup would be for the use of the backup servers/tape drives and for transport costs and time taken to do each backup and for the expertise.

All pie in the sky stuff and don't know exactly how much each piece of the jigsaw would cost but the idea that the end user has full visibility of the costs and how it works.

That way they could in essence set it up themselfs and do it themsselfs or alternatively they could have somebody else do it for a markup.

Would you use it?

rymus

I'd use something along those lines if it wasnt 45 euro a month with a 150 euro setup fee!

funkybusiness

funkybusiness wrote: »

What if the cost was transparent? For example the end user pays for the tape costs and secure storage costs and the backup company puts on a fixed fee per backup or per month.

So for example if we were dealing with large quantities of information like 500GB or greater you would need tapes that cost around 50 euro. 2 or three might be needed so a once off setup cost.

Say secure storage is 20 euro.

And then markup is 25 euro a month or something like that. Markup would be for the use of the backup servers/tape drives and for transport costs and time taken to do each backup and for the expertise.

All pie in the sky stuff and don't know exactly how much each piece of the jigsaw would cost but the idea that the end user has full visibility of the costs and how it works.

That way they could in essence set it up themselfs and do it themsselfs or alternatively they could have somebody else do it for a markup.

Would you use it?

I would want to believe that the backup company know what they are doing and have multiple redundancies. I would also want quick turnaround on getting access to the tape. People pay for a level of service, not choose a service because of 'transparent' pricing.

You aren't inspiring me with confidence.

funkybusiness

I suppose I was just focusing on the price with the last post.

Just for the record I only just came upon this post this afternoon so I haven't completed my business plan just yet

Also just for the record my background is in IT with appox 15 years commercial experience. Over the past number of years my background is in data security and protection and ensuring that companies are compliant in how they manage and store sensitive information.


I agree with you on level of service.

These days when I buy something like a server for business, I'm not just buying a hunk of metal, I'm also buying a good service level agreement (SLA) for 'when' things go wrong.


Regarding SLA,

I believe that there would need to certain compliance systems put in place i.e. Data Protection Act, SOX, ISO 27001. Some of these acts might not be legally relevant but the idea is that if the service was compliant with strict data use policies, it would be good proof of data security and integrity.

Coming under the SLA and compliance would be the multiple levels of redundancy in the system i.e. storage of data in multiple locations in case of disaster.

Regarding turnaround, I would guess that same business day would be enough for this industry but maybe I'm wrong.

Ideally an online backup solution would be best but upload times are very bad in Ireland. I know because I have researched quite a few solutions.

stcstc

you could always use the amazon s3 service, or even theputplace

I have an LTO3 drive in my server

the costs of setting up are huge, the tapes are about 45 and will hold 400g uncrompressed, but takes hours & hours, so i have it happening at night etc

and the management is a nightmare

amazon do it to disc, the disc to disc, then disc to tape backups i belive, but we are talking huge industry there

funkybusiness

I have used Amazon S3 and have a partner agreement with them for software development. I have developed an online backup system that uses S3 so it would be in my interest to try to push that.

BUT

For large quantities of data it would take weeks/months to do initial upload of information at current broadband speeds.

On top of that for S3 not including the monthly server use costs, it would cost approx 0.20 US Cent per GB. If you manager to get 1TB up there it would be costing you approx US$250/month.


Putplace will run into similar problems/good application but broadband speeds dont help its cause.

Tape backup is expensive and complicated to setup which is probably why generally photographers are not doing it themselfs.

If a photographer was to use a tape backup the first backup would take house but after that ongoing backups of approx 10 -20GB would not take long.

What is needed is a system/process whereby a photographer can avail of the large backup capability of a tape backup but with the ease of online backups.


Would you agree with the above statements or do u thing I'm living on another planet? :eek:

stcstc

no i do agree

but i thnk the s3 figures are for the imediate access, am i right?

i think if you have them dropped to tape with s3 the cost per month drops rapidly


there is a problem with terminology too, are we talking backups or archival

in terms of the service your talking about, i agree would be good, but

1. i dont think photogs would actually pay for it
2. i dont see how it could be implemented. unless you go to a photogs and collect the data etc

funkybusiness

Yep you're right the S3 figures are for immediate access. My backup server is sitting on EC2 in connection with S3. this allow clever things like pausing a backup in the middle of large files and some other treats.

But you could just use something like jungle disk and upload to S3 for cost per GB.

'i think if you have them dropped to tape with s3 the cost per month drops rapidly'

Not sure what you mean by this.....do you mean that you just use S3 to transport the files from the photographer to the offsite tape drive?
If so, you're right again regarding the cost per month because your generally only paying for the transport through the S3 servers.
However you will still have the speed issue.

I was talking about backups but I see what you mean regarding the confusion between that and archival.

The last two points are the two things I was considering myself...

1. will photographers pay for it......I think only professional full time photographers would.
2. visiting photographers sites may be the only way to implement it

I feel that this has been a good brain storm.

If you build it....will they come?????

If there are any professional photographers reading this....would u pay for it?

Just to clarify: its a backup system where we call to you studio, take a backup of your RAW photos and then store offsite in multiple secure locations. If you need to backup or restore there would be same business day service. Is the risk of losing photos enough to pay for service like this?

stcstc

I dont think they will pay for it

I went through this idea about 8-10 months ago, and it never went anywere, about 5 photogs expressed and interest out of about 100

DotOrg

funkybusiness wrote: »

[*]will photographers pay for it......I think only professional full time photographers would.
[*]visiting photographers sites may be the only way to implement it

when you can buy a 1Tb disk for under €100, it would have to be damn cheap and insured against loss to make it worth while

In a years time I'm sure 2TB drives will be at the €100 mark

funkybusiness

DotOrg wrote: »

when you can buy a 1Tb disk for under €100, it would have to be damn cheap and insured against loss to make it worth while

In a years time I'm sure 2TB drives will be at the €100 mark

I wouldn't trust my professional photos on a 1Tb disk that is under €100.
I have seen two such data disasters in the last 6 months with this type of setup.
I do see your point though regarding the cost of external hard drives coming down and think it could be the deal breaker on all this. With common sense, a small investment and regular maintenance there is no reason why you cant have a reasonable backup system in place.

Regarding the 'insured' aspect, this would be one of givens that an professional system would have over a manual DIY based system. Any data protection/backup company worth its weight should have multiple layers of protection and redundancy in place.

If this is how you backup your data can i just recommend that you use multiple backup disk drives and also test the backup regularly. Finally ensure at least one drive is kept offsite.....fire isn't your only worry a burst pipe can be as destructive.

Would you mind me asking how much data you have and roughly how much it grows monthly or annually?

rymus

funkybusiness wrote: »

I wouldn't trust my professional photos on a 1Tb disk that is under €100.

This is why God invented the redundant array of inexpensive disks. Where would we be without it?