Home: Message List - Remote backup capability

Re: Remote backup capability

socalbits — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 23:18:49 GMT

Hi Barry,

ibackup.com is a pretty good remote solution and it's automated. I have a couple clients that use this service to backup their financials, HR, legal and other important data to an offsite facility. It's fairly inexpensive and is viable for most smaller companies that backing up less than 50GB

Re: Remote backup capability

NorthStar — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 19:12:34 GMT

We like to keep it simple. We split our data from our applications. For the Apps and OS, we have a ghosted image of the drive that we can restore. For the data, we have built an file system on the drive that is used by everyone. We then burn DVD copies of the data every weekend nd also a spare on a monthly bases.

This is cheap and very effective. Easy to setup and maintain.

We keep one copy local and send another one out of state.

If you want to know more let me know.

Re: Remote backup capability

KAKURAVI — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 09:07:14 GMT

Hi Barry,

Not sure if you've heard of HP Upline. Go to www.upline.com.

This one let's you share your files too.

Kakuravi

Re: Remote backup capability

DomainDiva — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 15:26:17 GMT

Once our product is launched, my ISP will back up every day at midnight pacific time. This was one of the first things we covered in our contract.

We have a full back up of the website as well now every 3 days since we are just mostly information only.

Re: Remote backup capability

Bridge — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 13:43:44 GMT

Dear ampcs,

I too am in hurricane territory. My computer backs up everynight automatically. I use a USB Maxtor drive; it is small and comes with software to manage the back-ups. I set it to backup everynight at 2am. It is very fast (incremental back-ups of files) and does not interfere with my work.

My "plan" is to take the drive with me on evacuations. This may or may not work for you depending on the size of your data.

How much data do you need to back up? Can your business "operate" if you lose power or have to relocate? How will you handle phone calls?

Several years ago I was working in Miami when the hurricanes hit, running a national healthcare distribution center. We received new orders from doctors daily and reorders from customers.

We "relocated" our offices to several new sites since we lost power at our main distribution center.

1) I worked out of my home office in Tampa and had all fax lines forwarded to a send2fax number so that I could manage respond to all incoming faxes from my office.

2) We had phones rerouted a similar way except to numerous cell phones. We had people working out of their homes (those with power) and returning calls from their cells.

3) Inventory was moved to several locations where shipping could still be received from.

It was difficult but we managed through it.

Re: Remote backup capability

puzzleman — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 11:38:27 GMT

As databases go I think mine is rather small as it is only 250 MB. So, I don't have a storage problem on the thumb drives and it only takes about 5 minutes to save.

A bit of off topic. What do you know about remote hosting of a database, where my computers would work off the internet and I could access the database from outside of the shop?

Jim

Re: Remote backup capability

NatOnline — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 05:02:31 GMT

Hello Xenopod,

I think it depends of what version of SSH server you are talking, all versions are not secure. As far as the FTP account I meant a similar service like this one: http://www.datavaultcorp.com/FTP_Backup/i
ndex.shtml , perhaps I did not explain very well at the first time. Of course a single FTP account will not provide a huge security for sensitive data.

What the big corporations are using these days are VPN connections to secure their data, which provide a decent security.

Anyway, I thing a removable devide should do the job right, it doesn't cost a lot of money and provide plenty of capacity to store sensitive data that you can bring whatever you go.

Re: Remote backup capability

xenopod — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 23:19:57 GMT

So is the issue now that you're running out of free space on your thumb drive or is backing up the data to your thumbdrive taking too long? Having copies at work, on your persons, and a back in a safe deposit box seems like a fairly redundant method already.

There was another member on this site who had a remote storage service. You might try searching the site for their information and looking into using that for another layer of backups and just using a secure connection to shoot over the contents of your thumbdrive backup to the offsite backup as well. Since you do the backups weekly though you probably could use any regular hosting service and run your backups weekly from the thumbdrive to your hosting space just don't have the uploading directory with webservice access (i.e. don't have the folder inside a public_html folder leave it in your private space when you connect to the server) and again please use some form of secure connection (whether SFTP/SSH or SFTP/SSL) and you should be all set with yet another safe source in case you need to recover! Just be sure to pick a data center in a relatively safe geographical location (like in the middle of Texas).

I hope that helps.

Re: Remote backup capability

xenopod — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 23:11:33 GMT

Well it is certainly more secure than just sending out your password as plaintext, and defeating SSH is no easy or practical task.

The easiest way is if you just blindly connect to an SSH server for the first time, because if you just accept the key and don't know that it is the server you should be trusting then you've defeated the point of the encryption.

That problem is easily overcome if you contact your hosting company and ask them what the public ssh key is for your server. Once you know it you can add it to your list of trusted hosts. That way if another server tries to blindly intercept your packets it won't be able to, because SSH clients won't accept connections to servers with the wrong key when you already have a trusted key programmed into the software.

So that leaves what if the malicious server can fake your actual servers credentials. Well this is where it is truly difficult. I would suggest a brief read of the wikipedia articles on public key cryptography or the RSA scheme for a small sense of how it works, but suffice it to say that just because the public key is publically knowable that isn't enough information for a malicious server to compromise your data. While it COULD be enough to fool your ssh client into accepting the connection (though not necessarily since most SSH implementations have several private and public layers all of which would have to have been spoofed for the connection to be accepted) the malicious server still won't be able to read the data you're sending to it. It would need yet another private key from the server it is faking, and getting that is a very difficult task. Basically the only sure method is a brute force approach that is very time and resource intensive (the issue of prime factorization (the math that is involved in this area of security) is what is referred to in computer science as an NP-Hard problem which means no "fast" computational solution exists). Again it is a highly impracticle method.

So why would someone waste so much time and effort on compromising a relatively low priority target? I mean easily that can of effort could be expended on a potentially very rewarding target, but if you're just some blind attacker you always go for the low hanging fruit, because there is enough of it and it is easy to take. Thus again why it is a terrible idea to ever send passwords or any sensitive data over insecure connections.

Re: Remote backup capability

NatOnline — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 20:27:49 GMT

This is excellent, I am backing up with an external Tera HD in eSata connection, that's very fast when I backup. There is also a connection in USB 2.0 in case I need to use my laptop.

Anyway, back ups are important because we never know when something goes wrong.