Online, Inexpensive and Secure Data Storage?

ThePolkapunk asks: "After years of suffering through floppy demagnetizations, hard drive crashes, CDR bit rot and the click of death, I've become fed up with having to take care of my own backups. Does anyone know of a reasonably inexpensive, secure data storage facility accessible online that can store all of my important files with enough redundancy for me to feel safe?"

As usual..

[rylin]

As usual, someone thinks they can have all three.
Here's a hint: Pick two.

Re:RAID

[HawkingMattress]

Not sure if that's what you mean or not, But RAID is *not* a replacement for backup. If you don't pay attention and delete a file, a backup should be able to give you that file back. A RAID setup will ensure that the file gets deleted on all the mirrors...
On the other hand if you use an external RAID server to store backups on yep it's not bad. But i'd say that it would be even better to just have a regular ide disk to make backups on, and a remote location you can upload your backups to... RAID is good, but what happens if you PSU goes crazy and kills all the disk in the array (happened to me :( ) ? Or if the physical location the server is in catches on fire ?
So if you can have a place to upload to and it's doable for the amount of data you need to transfer, it'll probably be much cheaper, and much more secure than a RAID array.

See all the current losses in backups

[MerlynEmrys67]

Here are companies paying big BIG bucks for these three (well, probably not online - they'll ship tapes) and you still have tapes lost/stolen off of the UPS truck.

My advice - make sure you SECURE your data before it leaves the house... ie. run AES over the whole thing. Depending on your parania level - either keep the key locally, or with a DIFFERENT backup provider so that there would have to be a collusion between the two vendors to get your data.

Another solution would be to encrypt the AES key for each backup with your public key - then all you have to do is keep the private key private. Is it small enough to keep on a pair (or more) USB dongles - or again, back it up with a second vendor.

End result - most backup vendors provide physical security, so it is up to you to provide true security for when their physical systems are broken into.

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably the part where you can access it online...

Re:USB/Firewire drives

[OctaneZ]

The whole reason people prefer tape for backup over hard drives, is that you seperate the stoarge medium from the recording device. You therefore have an easier time recovering if something fouls one or the other.

Important issue, many seem to forget.

[Anonymous Coward]

Many people seem to forget the single biggest issue with online backups. That is, performance. People seem to forget that it will take nearly ten days to upload 80GB even on a 1Mbps broadband connection.

What happens when your hard drive fails and you need to restore? Can you really wait for ten days or more while the restore is downloaded? In my opinion, if you can't do a full restore in four hours or less, then you need a faster backup/restore solution.

Online backups aren't really very useful unless you have a 100Mbps or 1Gbps connection between you and the backup server. Unfortunately for them, most people don't realize or accept this little detail until they have a catastrophic failure and then it is too late.

Re:USB/Firewire drives

[altstadt]

You need rsnapshot [rsnapshot.org] and a *nix box.

I have up to 12 months worth of backups, including hourly snapshots of the previous 24 hours, always available to all the users online. Tapes do not have to be hunted down and mounted. The users can easily go browse their own snapshots and get the files they need when they have an oops. The snapshots are maintained on a different machine than the source data, so an individual machine can melt into a lump of slag with the loss of no more than one hour of data.

Since it uses rsync and hard links, only the changed files get added to the backup, so you can size your backup hard drive at roughly 50% larger than the source drive and never have to worry about running out of backup space.

If you have a reasonably fast network connection, you could even have the backups located off site with no extra effort beyond the initial setup.