Online/Offsite backup

[marksargison]

Still being relatively new to working freelance with sound, as opposed to simply making music for fun, I'm in the process of learning the best ways to do things. It seems I'm very anal about data management and backup and as such really want to find the best way to back up my back ups. Are there any particularly good online ways to do it? I wouldn't need a massive amount of storage initially, probably around 500TB.

Also, are there any options for doing offsite backups myself? I think this is probably a stupid question and the answer is no as my studio is also my home.

Cheers for any help.

[Max Holland]

500TB seems very large for an online backup service to provide, you sure you didn't mean 500GB?

[marksargison]

Wow. Don't I feel stupid now. Yes. 500GB. Any thoughts?

Cheers.

[crussom]

500gb is a lot of data to backup online. It will take forever to transfer, and probably cost more then you really want to spend. Look into an Amazon S3 solution like Jungle Drive, if you really need to do online.

Another option, clone your data to 3 different drives. keep one knsite, and find offsite locations for the other 2. Safe deposit boxes and a family members home or office are possibilities.

I use a hybrid of these approaches; backup current work online and archived/library stuff cloned at multiple locations.

[pan]

Get a 1TB Harddrive, make a backup and store it offsite (a friend's studio, your mom's house, in a bank safe?)

500 GB online storage will take some time to upload...

[Moofie]

Working in long-form TV/Film, I backup each project daily to a dedicated external 500gb or 1tb giving me 2 complete copies of a project while I'm working on it. (1 on my internal "work" drives and the other on a "bare" HD in an external USB caddy.)
This external "running" backup is serviced using an App such as arRsync which for me, has been extremely robust with no corrupt/missing files experienced in over 18 months of using this particular piece of code (arRsync is basically a fancy GUI for the Terminal utility in your Mac... thanks Matt.S for the heads up ).

At projects end, the source project on the "work" HD gets archived to an in-house LTO4 and the HD copy gets stored off site.

A colleague, who sounds like he's in a similar position to you, keeps 2 off-site Time Machine archives of all his work giving him 3 redundant copies at any one time... 1 in his Mac, 1 at his place of work in the CBD and 1 at his... Mum's house... awwww... isn't that lovely? He rotates each backup once a month keeping them all up to date.


Cheers

Tom

[georgia]

ditto. if the data is not on at LEAST 2 drives... it doesn't exist. If you're on one drive you are going to get hit.. it's just a matter of time.

All our work projects are on 2 drives, and even 3 at times.

cheers
geo

[NReichman]

I backup all my work with Retrospect to harddrives which are stored onsite.

And I continuously run Backblaze, which stores all of my work in the cloud.

Backblaze is inexpensive, and it did take 3 months to get 3TB up there, but now I have a good offsite backup.

And, as far as I can tell, Backblaze has never caused problems for Pro Tools.

[cjguitar]

I recommend checking out Crashplan+. There is a free version for personal use, but the paid + version allows multiple backup sets, as well as backing up to an offsite computer, you just have to have Crashplan installed on both computers. Check out the link for more info:

CrashPlan: FREE automatic, secure backup for your life.

[Moofie]

Originally Posted by georgia

ditto. if the data is not on at LEAST 2 drives... it doesn't exist. If you're on one drive you are going to get hit.. it's just a matter of time.

All our work projects are on 2 drives, and even 3 at times.

cheers
geo

Case in point was this past Monday... 6 month old internal 500gb Seagate had a bearing fail in 6 month old Mac Pro... entire drive rendered irretrievable. Took it out of Mac Pro... installed new 500gb HD... arRsynced current project from running backup to new HD and viola.

Total down time 2hours... total lost work? Zero.


I've been caught, once years ago, with an invoice from a Data Recovery firm... never again.


TM

[sycomidgit]

Originally Posted by diamondschwin

500TB seems very large for an online backup service to provide, you sure you didn't mean 500GB?

500gb would be obscenely expensive to store online, I doubt you could even find a service supplying that much. 2-3 externals would probably suffice and today that would probably only run between $150-200 depending on if you went individual cases or towers.

[NReichman]

Originally Posted by sycomidgit

500gb would be obscenely expensive to store online, I doubt you could even find a service supplying that much. 2-3 externals would probably suffice and today that would probably only run between $150-200 depending on if you went individual cases or towers.

Crashplan and Backblaze are $5-10/month for UNLIMITED data. Not expensive.

[sycomidgit]

Originally Posted by NReichman

Crashplan and Backblaze are $5-10/month for UNLIMITED data. Not expensive.

I thought the promo vid on backblaze was pretty funny. My mistake, I didn't realize online storage had gotten so cheap. I'm assuming, however, that upload and download speeds are going to be capped very low due to bandwidth restrictions. Uploading and downloading large files could be quite a hassle unless I'm missing something.

[NReichman]

Wow, I feel like I should be on the Backblaze sales team today.

I have FIOS 20Mbps down and 5Mbps up, and I leave Backblaze set to as fast as possible. In practical terms, my Mac delivers gigs to Backblaze every day. I haven't kept track of the upload speed exactly, but Backblaze as a receiver is not the bottleneck here.

Coincidentally, I tested Backblaze today, and got 2.2MB/sec down, which is almost exactly in line with my theoretical max. Their servers are good.

When you're really in trouble, they will get their money, because you'll pay for them to send a bunch of drives to you via FedEx. Something like $150/500GB. But that's nothing compared to the value of your data.

[Mundox]

I made Automator scripts to copy & compare the studio drives to another backup server HD via network, and once a week this backup HD gets carbon copy cloned to another drive that goes home with someone.
We used to use Retrospect but restoring a session browsing a regular Finder based file system is much more efficient IMO.

In saying that, I can still restore files from Retrospect based tapes from as far as '95.

[cjguitar]

Duh! I totally forgot about Gobbler:

http://www.getgobbler.com/i/yzCH8

It's built specifically for audio, and it also gives you the ability to send sessions to people, kind of like Digidelivery. It's in beta right now, so I'm not sure what it's going to cost, but they're offering it for free right now for 50G of online storage. It's very secure, they use Amazon S3 for the storage. I think it's got a lot of potential.

[marksargison]

All of this is very helpful. Thanks very much for the advice. The Amazon S3 stuff looks pretty good but I'm based in the UK so think looking at a UK based service could be better. Or just backup to a HDD and leave it offsite. Thanks again though.

[subbasshead]

I did some number crunching for an Amazon S3 archive of my 8TB library... Worked out prohibitively expensive:

Music of Sound » A Cloud Based FX Library – Possible?