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Not So Random Thoughts
Just getting started here, and I'll probably soon move this to a more structured Blog site in order to make maintaining this easier, and to formalize the separation between my thoughts and opinions and those of Continuous Technology Solutions. Standard disclaimers apply...
2007-09-03
Lately there has been a great deal of attention given to online backups. There are a number of compelling reasons, mainly:
-
Convenience - no tapes or media to change or maintain
-
Portability - endpoint based agents work on mobile systems
-
Cost Effective - especially with current price-wars
-
Secure - data can be encrypted in transfer and when stored
-
Offsite - data transferred to a remote location, can be further replicated to additional sites as well for additional protection from natural disasters, etc.
The standard pricing model is to pay for the amount of storage space used per month, and often the number of computers that are directly accessing the backup service. Below I list some of the many, many companies competing in this space. This is the tip of the iceberg...
These are some of
the companies that are leading the low cost charge, mainly targeting
residential users and multimedia sharing:
Mozy – unlimited storage
for $5/mo
Carbonite – unlimited
for $50/yr or $90/2 yrs
Xdrive – 5GB free, 50 GB
for $10/mo
MediaMax – 25GB
free, 1000 GB for $30/mo
These are mid range services that
offer some additional capability, reporting, private-labeling, real
live tech support, etc:
Dr. Backup - 5GB for
$30/mo
RemoteDataBackups
- 10GB for $30/mo
iBackup – 5GB for
$10/mo
DataPreserve – 5GB
for $20/mo (unique combination of online, onsite B2D and multi-site
mirroring backup options)
These are the high
end players (they don’t even list pricing
J
but deal in more litigious or regulated industries and provide other
services like archiving, secure data destruction, compliance,
auditing, document management, etc):
IronMountain
EVault
Other companies in
this market-space are software vendors, many who also provide
backend infrastructure (data centers):
Remote-Backup
Ahsay
Vembu
And then for
something completely different: LogMeIn Backup
(as an aside, I've been pretty impressed by LogMeIn's
technology. Their product
ideas are not always earth shattering, but their
execution is first rate.)
LogMeIn's
Backup is conceptually
similar
to some of the
old round robin backup schemes with utilities like HandyBackup,
etc. For example, take three machines A B and C:
Backup A to B
Backup B to C
Backup C to A
With this scheme, two failures must occur simultaneously to lose
data. A more paranoid option:
Backup A to B & A to C
Backup B to A & B to C
Backup C to A & C to B
With this option, three failures must occur simultaneously to
lose data. Advantages are that the data stays on systems
you control. The software controls login & access from one
system to another, as well as encryption in transit and when
stored. Disadvantage is that unless the systems are in
separate locations, you lose one of the main advantages of
onsite backup in the first place. You also need a great
deal of disk space for this to be practical, but disk is cheap
these days, and is probably less expensive than other online
options. This scheme can be extended indefinitely across
however many machines are in use in the environment, or
leveraged to a provider's systems as well. Neat
alternative.
To end on a humorous note, here is a joke from Mozy’s website listing an alternative as: “Run a cron job of rsync, gzip and mcrypt piped over ssh to your friend's server over his DSL line.” Doesn't sound terrible if you know how. Guess that's the point. J
