JDPFu.com 2025

Recently, I’ve been running IT for a small business. Backups and Disaster Recovery are critical for us AND our customers. With our background in enterprise solutions, we were limited in knowledge for low-end solutions that didn’t cost an arm AND a leg to implement. High end solutions from EMC, Sun/StorageTek, IBM, and HP were our expertise. OTOH, we know that we need to do lower cost solutions better than anyone else does since technical architecture is our business. Having an outage due to a system failure is unacceptable. If a disaster occurs, we need to be up and running with acceptable data loss the next day. Period. Unplanned downtime for a trivial reason simply isn’t allowed. It can’t happen.

Requirements

1. Trivial Backup of data – Backups need to be easy to automate. If they aren’t completely automatic, then they won’t happen.
2. Even easier restoration of data – Backup is 10% of the problem. Recovery is 90%. Recovery at 3am after a bad day and little sleep is the goal.
3. Encrypted transfer – No peaking at our data, please. Strong, industry standard encryption. Claiming FIPS compliance, but not saying the real encryption used is just scary.
4. Encrypted disk storage – No peaking at our data, Mr. Service provider. Strong, industry standard encryption.
5. Differential backups / Incremental – We only want to transmit data that has changed since yesterday of the internet. This keeps bandwidth costs low after the initial backup seed.
6. Selection of recovery from last night or 3 weeks ago – 30 days worth of backups where we can recover data from last night or 3 weeks ago just as easily.
7. Compression – 60% compression of data is fairly standard.
8. Pay by use – Pay by the GB or TB, not by the amount of packets transferred (Sorry Amazon). 1TB needs to be in the $150/month range at most.
9. Windows / Linux support – Desktop, laptop, and Server OS supported.
10. Open file backup – Windows is known for keeping files open and preventing a good backup from completing. Linux will keep a few files open all the time too, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want them backed up.
11. Recovery by the file, not the entire backup set.
12. Full Virtual Machine backup from outside a VM. VMware and Xen and VirtualBox supported.
13. Near and Far Backup support – Off-site backups are great, until your network connection is down. If a user just noticed a lost a file due to corruption that happened last week, it needs to be easy to recover the single file from 8 days ago.

Possible Solutions

There are too many to list, but in our search, we found:

• Home made script; cron job, rdiff-backup, gzip, mcrypt, and rsync to remote location.
• Numerous backup solutions, but no low cost solutions appear to run on both Linux and Windows-whatever. If a backup server platform can be dictated, the an optimal solution may be possible. AMANDA, Bacula, BackupPC, rdiff-backup and many others may be suitable.
• Mozy.com – part of EMC now and appears to have everything we need, except Linux support.
• Rotate USB drives connected nightly/weekly then a mirror or incremental backup. Then take them home or off-site daily/weekly with the rotation.

My Answer and Why

I’ve selected the home made script with rdiff-backup at the core. Most of our production infrastructure runs on Linux inside Xen-based virtual machines. We automatically shutdown each VM nightly for a few minutes, run the rdiff-backup and bring the machine back up. All of our efforts require less than 3 minutes of downtime each. Very acceptable for a known clean file system, IMHO. Then the output is packaged into a single file per server, compressed, encrypted and transmitted to another local machine with protected disks. The amount of daily change data is relatively small – 10MB per server for a complete VM (OS, applications and all data). Over a 30 day period, retaining 30 days of incremental backups, about 1GB of extra data is incurred above the compressed initial full backup size. Most of our Xen VM backups are under 2GB is size. 5 servers, 10GB, not bad? There are exceptions to these sizes. One of our server VM backups is 14GB compressed.

Mozy would be a viable solution for Windows provided you don’t have too much data to backup. The cost really explodes since 100GB is over $100/month. Also, it doesn’t support local backups. The cost and security are well within reason for your most critical data and Mozy is part of EMC – who else would you trust with important data. If critical data on your CxO laptops aren’t being backed up nightly, What are you thinking? Be certain the data is encrypted on the laptop too by using Truecrypt too.