[AusNOG] Offsite Backup Recommendations

[Karl Auer]

On Sat, 2017-05-13 at 10:41 +0000, Aus Net Servers Australia Pty Ltd
wrote:
> First time posting here... My boss has asked me to look into what
> cloud providers they are in Australia to backup all our backups (Over
> 10tbs) to after having a major disagreement with Crashplan after
> finding out when we went to recover files that there was no files
> there to recover and they will not explain why.

This does not answer you actual question, but:

You can get really cheap NAS storage in that range; your protection is
in having two (or three, or four) in different locations. If the
locations are not well-connected, you can prime a second NAS from the
first, then cart the second one around to the other locations to prime
the others. Even large amounts of data are fine, as long as the amount
of new/changed data does not exceed your capacity to transfer it.

Re Crashplan: I don't know whether your attempt to recover files was
due to having lost data or was a test. If it was a test; well done for
discovering the problem before it WAS a problem (and I do hope you can
get all your money back from Crashplan). If it wasn't a test, let me
sing the praises here of an at-least-yearly test of recovery
procedures. Backups by Schroedinger are only marginally better than no
backups at all.

Finally, versioning: Is that 10TB of backup data, or 10TB of data to be
kept backed up? You will need *significantly* more space for backups
(over time) than size of your data, because you need to maintain some
level of versioning. Otherwise bad data can all-too-easily overwrite
the good. How much more space you will need depends firstly on how much
new/changed data you generate and secondly on the intelligence of the
backup tools you use. I use a home-grown rsync-based system for my
personal and small-business backups, and I have 100 backups, each
allegedly about 637GB in size, on one 3TB array :-)

Some tools - like CommVault - understand cloud storage directly; you
can drop backup data directly into e.g. S3 buckets. Worth considering.
And you can prime S3, Glacier etc via Snowball if necessary.

Regards, K.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer
http://twitter.com/kauer389

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