Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Question about Hard Drive Backup

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Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 02-13-2008, 09:25 AM:

Is anyone familiar with those internet companies that offer backup of your hard drive on their servers? I am looking at Carbonite. For $50 a year -- a fairly economical way to back up, seems to me, you download their software which will send a complete copy of your hard drive data to their backup server(which can take a few days, depending on the amount of data), then the software polls your computer every day for any changes you've made and backs those up as well. Supposedly it has smart technology which asseses your CPU usage and slows its own demand down when needed, so it does not degrade the apparant performance while you are working.

In theory, the data is encrypted before it leaves your computer. My rather serious reservation about this is that once you do this, there is a company out there run by who knows who which now has all the information on my computer, including passwords, credit card numbers, my bank account data, etc. Sure, it's encrypted, but THEY have the encryption key.

If anyone has had any experience with this kind of data storage alternative or read any professional evaluations about it, I would sure like to know how they are rated before jumping in.....and sending my data out.

Thanks

Posted by Dennis Benjamin (Member # 1137) on 02-13-2008, 10:04 AM:

Trust no-one.

Encrypt and back up your own data.

It is relatively cheap and easy to do this yourself, even if you have limited technical knowledge.

I would never trust an outside company with my PERSONAL data.

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 02-13-2008, 10:28 AM:

How much do hard drives cost? Just back up the whole thing every night or every week or whatever you feel is needed to ensure you don't loose too much. I still back up my checking account every time I use it, period because I don't want that to even be a day off...but how many things are like that?

Alternately...don't worry about the programs (you should have originals on those) but back up your "documents" folder nightly sort of thing.

I do so much work from home that often the office and the home have a copy of the documents I'm working on so I'm never more than a day out of sync on current stuff and what are the odds that both places have a failure at once? I've had only one hard drive crash on me and I was backed up enough that it really wasn't too big a pain because essential stuff was very current and the rest could be loaded on the new drive as originals (or I took the opportunity to upgrade and, in some cases, throw away.

I agree with Dennis on this though...I'm not in favor of sending my personal stuff to some company any more than I have to and even then, not very often.

Steve

Posted by Greg Anderson (Member # 235) on 02-13-2008, 11:19 AM:

It can't be that hard to just back up data to your own hard drive. The only problem is the possibility that someone will physically steal your computer AND your back-up drive. (Remember a few months ago when Francis Ford Coppola was devastated when someone took his laptop from his home in Argentina? He didn't have back-ups. But what if he did and someone stole that too?) And what if there's a fire or a natural disaster that destroys your back-up drive along with all of your other stuff? (I'm starting to sound like a commercial for services like Carbonite.) What's the best way to make a back-up and then protect it from everything that can affect a back-up?

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 02-13-2008, 12:00 PM:

This has been discussed elsewhere but relating to businesses. The "proper" method is to back up (nightly) and store off-site. In our case, we use tape back up and the tapes are stored off-site....thus it is pretty darn hard to loose everything. For most home things, unless you run your business from your home, that is a bit overkill. Most people are backing up at home to prevent loss, not theft.

Steve

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 02-13-2008, 01:39 PM:

quote: Steve Guttag
I still back up my checking account every time I use it, period because I don't want that to even be a day off...but how many things are like that?

Why? Your bank or credit union should be doing this for you if you have on-line banking. One of my IT friends is the IT guy at Morgan Stanley here in SLC... they actually back up and store those backups in different parts of the world for safety! He says that banks do similar things. I can't think of any bank or credit union or financial insstitute ever having lost any data ever.

Hard drives are cheap and actually getting cheaper...I just picked up a used Dell Powervault with almost 1 TB of storage on E-Bay for $120.00 with all high end SCSI drives installed in it. Now I have two Raid 5 arrays so anything short of a fire and I'll not loose a thing. Raid 5 can be reliably implemented in almost any existing puter new for under 500 bucks total using stata drives... something you should really have if you have alot of important or irreplacable files. Then back up regularly as Steve reccomends on tape in case you experience any dual drive failures iin the raid.

Mark

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 02-13-2008, 03:47 PM:

I don't do banking on-line at this time. Call me old-school but I just don't like doing this sort of stuff on-line. I do use Quicken for my checking and hence, I back up those files regularly to avoid any loss of data.

Quicken is quite handy for me (has been since version 1). My wife will occasionally ask me how much we spent on such and such and I can normally pull up a report that has what she was looking for pretty fast. I have had some categories set up for as long as 20 years...heck "my bank" has changed names three or four times in that amount of time!

Steve

Steve

Posted by Wayne Keyser (Member # 2420) on 02-13-2008, 08:27 PM:

I just had a $150 visit from a knowledgeable independent "geek" - among his pearls of wisdom: back up to an external hard drive. Why spend days sending the data out online?

Posted by Frank Angel (Member # 248) on 02-15-2008, 05:43 AM:

Well, it really seemed easier than taking the hard drive off-site. We still back up on a daily basis to Maxtor hard drives, but it was the off-site thing that started getting clunky. Spitting the data off to a company who know where seemed like a reasonable alternative, especially to a group of people who had the entire office complex burn down, computers, backups...everything. Off-site has a special incentive for us.

I also found out that their default (Carbonite) is to use their own encryption key, but you can choose to create your own key that only you have access to. They do warn you, however, that if you loose that key, nothing they or anyone else can get your data back (other than the programmer who built in half a dozen backdoors in the software). As everyone knows, there isn't an encryption code that can't be cracked if someone REALLY wants to get your stuff.

Posted by Paul J. Neuhaus (Member # 3205) on 02-25-2008, 05:30 PM:

This is easy stuff. As an MCSE security of data is imperative! Both physical and electronic. But here is the thing: Your data is only important to you! No matter how much somebody claims it is important to them your security is your responsibility alone!

Just set up a computer running server in somebodies basement secure the connections through vpn, encrypt the data, and require certificate authentication and set-up whatever you need: I.E. shadow copies, file syncronization, or just back-ups. Learn the difference between the types of backups: Full, daily, differential, incremental..... etc. This will help you keep your backup from interfering with performance to a minimum.
Ok, in summary DO it yourself. You are smart enough to do it and your data is most important to you no somebody else!!
Paul