Tag: Backup

Thinking about RAID vs Backup

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Six hard disk drives with cases opened showing...

The cost of storage hit a low the last time it was time for a storage upgrade. Then prices shot through the roof after a flood in Thailand closed factories.

This shut down all of my hard drives purchases for over two years. When I emerged from my cocoon, Samsung was gone as a Hard Drive manufacturer…and I had bought many Samsung OEM hard drives.

The purpose of RAID in a redundant system is to protect against hardware failure. You have different levels of RAID for this, RAID 1 for just a straight mirror, and RAID 5 and 6, which involve a minimum of 3-4 drives to accomplish.

RAID is important if you care about uptime. If you can afford to be down for a bit, backups are a better choice.

What is being stored, in this case, consists of several categories: Video, Music, Documents, Configuration Files. There is no point in storing complete drive images. The OS can be reinstalled, and it probably will be better off and cleaner running after it is. The OS drive on all of the systems I’ve built or refurbed in the last two years is an SSD, which is a common practice nowadays.

I had been mulling this after reading an article on another hardware refresh by Adam Williamson. He hadn’t refreshed in seven and a half years and used a separate NAS and server. So, why refresh after only two and a half years? Partly it was due to mistakes.

I’d been using WD Green drives. These had several limitations. They park the head after only 8 seconds of inactivity, which increased the load cycle count. The WD Red Drive is designed for 24/7 operation in network attached storage, with a longer warranty, and I now have two 3TB drives. The only other alternative in WD’s stable was a Black drive, their performance drive. It might be time to consider a Seagate, the main competitor, as well.

The warranty situation in hard drives now continues to drop. Five years, down to thee, and down to two years. So there is less protection from the manufacturer and less inclination to create quality products. That was why we were buying OEM over Consumer Drives over the last few years.

Back to the subject at hand…why not a RAID? It is simply a matter of cost vs. benefit. This is terabytes of video data, mostly a DVD archive I intend to create by backing up my DVD collection to MKV. If it were lost, the original copies aren’t going anywhere. But, more importantly, cloud backup is impractical.

Using Amazon S3, for example, at a rate of 9.5 cents a GB, that is just under $100 a month per TB. Amazon Glacier, which is their long-term backup option, is 1 cent a GB, or roughly $10 a TB. But once you take video out of the equation, or sharply reduce it, budgeting $5 a month for important data is a reasonable amount, and still gets you a lot of storage options to work with.

So, to ensure redundancy, there is a second drive in the system, and backups will be done to it. From there, the backups of everything but the video store will be sent up to the cloud. As I’ve mostly given up buying DVDs(due to Blu-Ray), the collection should be fairly static.

Back to Adam Williamson, he had a great idea of having the other computers on the network back up their data to the server, independently isolated by each machine having a separate user account on the server. Not quite there yet, but sounds good. I have other plans to download data from my cloud service providers(Google, Dropbox, etc., and maintain a local backup, but that is a longer-term project. I’m reasonably certain in the interim, Google has a better backup system then I do.

What about off-site then? I still have the old 1TB Green Drives. They can be run through diagnostics, loaded up as a backup, and sent off to a relative’s house…I’ve added a hard drive dock through an E-SATA port to support this.

So in the end, RAID wasn’t necessary for me, but some redundancy was. It may be for you. Comments?

More to come…

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Equipping your UPS – Planning

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Geek out: Power protection

Hot on the heels of discussing emergency power for mobile, it is time to discuss thoughts about Uninterruptable Power Supplies(UPS). These battery backup devices use heavy-duty batteries to power your electronics in the event of failure. When power is lost, it automatically powers using the batteries.

The first rule of UPSes is to always get ones with a removable/replaceable battery. You can get replacement batteries without much issue, although manufacturers would obviously prefer you replace the unit.

Our current favorite simple UPS for home use is the APC BE550G. This is an 8 outlet 550VA UPS. The green feature is a master outlet, which turns controlled outlets off when the master device is off. This is also a great green feature for various surge protectors.

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However, the basic UPSes may have trouble with some power supplies, so mileage may vary. The issue is voltage regulation, and pure sine waves(necessary for Active PFC power supplies). There are more expensive UPSes, and more full featured ones. There are advantages to voltage regulation and purer power, but for some devices, it doesn’t matter.

Also, there are some issues with APC. We had used Belkin for a while, but had longevity and design issues. The Belkins we had tended to put the outlets on the top, which made placement difficult. There is also Cyberpower, which some people enjoy, but we’ve never tried one. We may next time.

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This Cyberpower Unit looks promises, offering an LCD control screen with basic stats. This looks rather promising for non-computer uses.

These devices were originally marketed for computers. They were designed for safe shutdown of a computer and monitor, and things have changed. More people are using these to power other devices. In preparing for this post, we started reading reviews, and people are powering big screen TVs and other devices.

So, that is the sort of planning we want to discuss. For your cable modem, your router, etc. We have a simple 300VA UPS hooked up to our cordless telephone system, so it will work for a while in a power outage. As these devices are much lower power than a computer, many can run for hours with just a few necessary networking components hooked in.

The first step, even if you do not want to get into the wattage details, is to make an inventory of the devices you want to power. Make separate lists for extended outages, power hiccups, and voltage drops. Basically, most computers you may want to merely make a graceful shutdown, but you may want your networking gear to last for hours.

We predict, in our area, lots of people will be hiring electricians to install transfer switches for portable or permanent generators, after extended periods of power loss. But for the installation of a manual transfer switch will be close to a thousand dollars, if not more, as it requires disconnecting your house power in order to install the cutoff, and probably an adjustment of your house breaker box.

If your area isn’t prone to long power outages, you want to cover a few hours of power outage or irregular power, which is much less expensive than generators.

In the end, always buy UPSes with replaceable batteries, pick the devices that works for you, and do the advance planning.

What are your tips for planning for power loss with UPSes?

 

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Amazon Glacier for the Home User

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Backup Backup Backup - And Test Restores

Earlier this week, Amazon announced Glacier, which is long-term storage that costs one cent a gigabyte per month. This compares to the 12 cents a gigabyte per month for S3. The basic difference is that Glacier can take between 3 and 5 hours to retrieve data, and S3 is instantaneous.

“Amazon S3 is a durable, secure, simple, and fast storage service designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. Use Amazon S3 if you need low latency or frequent access to your data. Use Amazon Glacier if low storage cost is paramount, your data is rarely retrieved, and data retrieval times of several hours are acceptable.”

But, let’s go to the pricing. As a home user, we’re assuming you have less than 50TB.

  • Storage
    • Glacier – 0.01 per GB/month
    • S3 – 0.12 per GB/month
  • Data Transfers In – Free on All
  • Data Transfer Out - Glacier and S3 both use the same pricing.
    • 1st GB free
    • Next 10GB, 0.12 a GB
    • Next 40GB, 0.09 a GB
  • Requests
    • Glacier
      • Data Retrievals are Free, however, Glacier is designed with the expectation that retrievals are infrequent and unusual, and data will be stored for extended periods of time. You can retrieve up to 5% of your average monthly storage (pro-rated daily) for free each month.
      • If you choose to retrieve more than this amount of data in a month, you are charged a retrieval fee starting at $0.01 per gigabyte. Learn more. In addition, there is a pro-rated charge of $0.03 per gigabyte for items deleted prior to 90 days

Amazon has promised that there will be an upcoming feature to export from S3 to Glacier based on data lifecycle policies. The details on how this will work aren’t 100% available, but we could imagine offloading from S3 to Glacier based on age. So, you keep the last 1-2 months of data on S3, and the older backups on Glacier. It would allow you to save a good deal of money for backups.

Not everyone, for that matter, needs high availability…especially if you are keeping something that is infrequently modified. For example, the family photo album. You can keep your local backups, and for 1 cent a month, you get a copy that you can access in an emergency.

What we’re missing is that many reports indicated that retrieval is potentially costly. But we found it equivalent to S3, only slower.

But, what would you use this for? We’d like to hear your thoughts.

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Mandatory PSA: Secure Your Digital Life

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The KeePass Password Safe icon.

Every tech pundit out there has been talking about the heartbreaking story of Mat Honan of Wired and how hackers used social engineering to gain access to one of his accounts, and the chain reaction results.

One of Honan’s problems stemmed from how his accounts were daisy-chained together. `The recovery email for one account led to another, account names on different networks were consistent, etc. Figuring out how to mitigate this requires some thought. We have multiple email accounts, and it will probably require some diagramming and planning to figure everything out there.

Then there are passwords. We admit to people all the time that we don’t even know half our passwords. We use a two-pronged attack on this. One is the open-source, multi-platform app KeePass. KeePass offers a password vault stored as a file, encrypted using a single Master Password. All of the passwords in it are generated by the program and impossible for most people to remember.

We also use Lastpass as a service. Lastpass has a plugin for every browser, offers one click login, form filling, and more. The basic service is free, but the premium version adds mobile support and additional features. We’re not using half of the options that it offers, even with the $12 a year we give them for premium.

But, as part of a redundant philosophy, you should have your most important passwords in multiple locations. Also, having passwords even you don’t know in vault means you can easily change your credentials regularly for individual sites, should you choose to. do so.

Two factor authentication, although it could be a bit more user friendly, is enabled for all Google accounts and Lastpass. This is not a challenge for hackers to hack. There’s nothing very interesting there anyway.

In security, the mantra is trust no one. Try to walk the line between paranoia and rationality very carefully.

The second issue is backup. This is an area where we could be better. We have a backup plan that needs to be upgraded. We have various cloud backup solutions, and a few local ones. They need to be unified. We’ll get back to this in a future post, once we create a checklist.

But, for those of you out there, let’s cover a few basics. Periodically, extract your online data and store a copy somewhere, both locally and remotely, in addition to your cloud storage. Try a relative’s house. The likelihood of you and your relative both suffering calamities is probably slim. Remember that sending your data to a remote drive and deleting your original copy is an archive, not a backup.

Make a plan, automate as much as possible, because manual action is so easy to get behind on.

So, backup, secure your accounts, do some planning…we’ll be back with more. Consider yourself warned.

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Switching From Dropbox to Wuala

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Image representing Wuala as depicted in CrunchBase
Image via CrunchBase

We were once a big booster of Dropbox. But recent events have caused us to doubt them. On July 1st, Dropbox revised their policies. This was in response to a well publicized authentication breach where, for several hours, access to accounts was permitted without valid passwords. This followed the realization that despite assurances, Dropbox employees can access your data, but only to the extent that they need to(or so they say).

Does this mean we doubt the sincerity of the company? No more than any other company. But we’ve decided to move on…to Wuala. Wuala is a secure online storage service that provides many more features than Dropbox, if less supported.

There are three core principles of Wuala:

  1. Security and privacy
  2. Bridging web and desktop
  3. Economic technology

In terms of security, Wuala offers client-side encryption, which means that the encryption is performed on one’s one computer. During the upload, data is split and stored in multiple locations. They promise that because your password is never transmitted, no one, including their employees, can see private files.

Wuala offers a desktop app for Windows, Mac and Linux, and mobile apps for iOS and Android. There is even a web version. You get 1GB for free, and you can gain additional storage by paying for it, trading your local storage for extra storage(more on that in a moment), or inviting friends to join Wuala.

Wuala offers both backup and synchronization options. Backup saves local files regularly into the Wuala Drive, at an interval of your choosing. The backup are read-only. Sync allows you to sync files and folders across multiple computers. Dropbox provides sync only.

If you want to pay for storage above the free 1GB, it is $29 a year for 10GB, $49 for 25GB, and so on. You can also trade for storage. You can trade up to 100GB on your computer in exchange for 100GB in the cloud. You get whatever you provide multiplied by your online time. You must be on for at least 4 hours a day. As they put it, this doesn’t give you extra storage, but you give up storage locally to gain it elsewhere, which has its advantages.

We’ve set up the Wuala client on our headless server to trade storage. It also resides on our desktop systems to sync our files. We have plans to expand the headless part, to generate backups of the entire Wuala sync and send it to a secondary backup site as well, but that is for the future. The Wuala client allows it to be mounted as an NFS partition for that purpose.

There is an Android client we have tested. It lacks many features of the Dropbox app, including directory download/sync/upload and support for the Android sharing functionality. Of course, the Wuala developers have acknowledge this as a desired feature, but there is no timetable for its implementation. If they are slow in doing so, there would be hope of a third-party app, however, the Wuala API is in Alpha and only supports GET requests. It has been in this state for over a year.

When it comes down to it, Wuala is not perfect. But it offers a more complete feature set than Dropbox, if a less mature API and Android client. But, like many things, it is a matter of what is more important to you.

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