Yesterday, I thought what would happen if my internal or external hard drive crashed.
The hard disk of this computer contains 53 GB of data (on Linux: df -H). As my home folder only contains 35.3 GB of data, 17.7 GB seem to be programs. 21.1 GB the remaining data is for movies and 6.1 GB are for programming (and backed up via GitHub). Hence the by far biggest part of the lost data would be movies, the rest would be scattered across my home folder.
The situation is similar for my external hard drive: A lot of video files, some audio files, A LOT of pictures and many, many miscellaneous files. I don't want to lose data, but I don't use my external HDD often. Most of the time I only have to do a RegEx search for file names (sometimes also a full text search for some files I found via RegEx) just to find out that the file I'm looking for is not there.
Online Services
I want to back up one computer with at least 200 GB which I don't need to access often and 10 GB that need to access often.
A backup service should include software, that …
- … allows me to configurate upload / dowload bandwidth limts
- … should integrate into my os in such a way that it feels like using a hard disk
- … lets me upload files of sizes up to 5 GB
- … uploads in background automatically as soon as my notebook gets an internet connection
- … uploads only parts of files, if only parts changed
- … starts uploading as soon as a file changed
- … creates checksums and compares them to check if files were correctly uploaded
A version control would be great, but that's a feature I don't expect. Also a possibility to share content (single files with a code) would be great, but I don't know if any of those services offers that.
| Name | Euro / Year | Free trial | Clients | Information | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Backblaze | 37.06 | ✗ | ✗   |
Wiki | |
| Carbonite | 46.78 | ✔ | ✗ |
Wiki | |
| CrashPlan | 46.78 | ✔ | 🐧 |
Wiki | |
| IDrive | 116.58 | ✔ | 🐧 |
- | |
| Jungle Disk | 238.62 | ✗ | 🐧 ? |
Wiki | |
| MiMedia | 77.20 | ✔ | ? |
Wiki | |
| Mozy | 131.00 | ✔ | ✗ |
Wiki | |
| Nomadesk | 93.57 | ✔ | ✗ ✗ |
- | |
| SugarSync | 194.94 | ✔ | ✗ |
Wiki | |
| Ubuntu One | 187.09 | ✔ | 🐧 ✗ ✗ | Wiki |
I was a little bit surprised that there seems no way to use Google Drive as backup option (at least on Linux as there is this petition which was signed by 16,774 people).
What could go wrong?
- A DOS attack against one of those companies might lead to temporarily unavailable services.
- Financial problems, bad backup techniques or personal mistakes might lead to permanent loss of data.
- Information might get leaked to the public.
- Information might get leaked to government (PRISM, Tempora)
- You might get analyzed by the company that stores your data. They could create a personal profile and sell that (maybe not even on the content you use, but perhaps only with filenames and edit times)
- The software you've installed for your backup might be a malware.
- The software you've installed might have security issues that allow attackers to execute malware.
Offline
RAID
All RAID levels (except for RAID 0) offer redundancy. This means, they store data on more than one hard disk. This way, you can restore data after on (or if maybe more) hard disk crashes. But this is by no mean a guarantee that your data is secure.
It's recommended to use RAID with a RAID controller (a dedicated piece of hardware). Otherwise, you need some software that does it and your CPU time gets wasted with these operations.
What could go wrong:
- One disk fails. You buy a new one to get security back, the RAID controller copies information to the new disk that replaced the crashed one. While it copies, the other disk gets heavy load. This heavy load might lead to another crash. Boom. Your data is lost.
- Your computer might get damaged (e.g. by a fire, by an earthquake, by overvoltage, by a cup of tea you accidentally threw over it, by an act of agression)
- A burglar would probably steal all hardware you have at home.
But RAID is no option for me as I use a notebook as my main computer.
External HDD
A very easy way to secure your files is an external hard disk drive. You can choose by yourself what and when to save your files for redundancy. But as I know myself, I will make those backups less often after a while. So I guess this will not work for me.
You could probably also make an external HDD raid.
More possibilities
- Amazon S3 Glacier for 15.44 Euro/year or Amazon S3 Standard for 133.34 Euro/year e.g. with DragonDisk and others - transactions are not included!
- Give external hard disks to friends / to bank.
- Software:
- rsync for Linux
- Time machine for Mac