Off-site backups

Every once in a while, someone asks me to recover some poem they lost from my logs. Unfortunately, my logs only go back a year or so, and I am not always in the channel. The better solution to the fragility of using a computer for storage of important things is to have a good backup system. Keep extra copies on your hard drive, burn stuff to CD, or print it out. One thing with backups that I can help with is providing a place for off-site backups. I have a large file server, with a well-defined backup policy, and ample free space.

The benefits of off-site backups are many:

• Won't be lost if your house floods.
• Won't be lost if your house burns down.
• Won't be lost if your house is eaten by a black hole.
• Historical backups could be made available at up to weekly increments.
• Backups can be pulled and sent to you wherever you are.

So, what do you have to do to take advantage of this? Well, the first step would be to determine how much stuff you want backuped up. The quantity of the backups determines the best delivery method. I am open to accepting backups these ways (but feel free to ask me about other transfer methods):

• Emailed archives (up to 5MB in size)
• SFTP tranders of archives (up to 200MB in size)
• Snail-mailed CD-R/DVD-R (limited to how much you want to mail
• Snail-mailed physical printings (limited to one bankers box worth of stuff kept in my house)

If you are uncomfortable with me having access to your stuff, encrypt it. There are many freeware encryption utilities available online. I personally have used GPG, in password mode. You can of course use anything you like, since I don't need to decrypt it. Of course, backups are useless without the software/password/key to decrypt/extract it at a later time, so I would recommend that a software package be used that is going to stick around for a while, or also back up the decryption software. I personally used password based encryption over key based, so that I only need to remember a password, not a 4096 bit key value.

Once you know what you are sending to me, and how, the only thing left is to decide how I am going to store it. I can keep electronic backups either on my server (in a protected directory), which would allow me to pull the backups at any time, without needing to be home. Or, I can keep the backups on burned CDs/DVDs. This would result in me needing to load the physical media to be able to recover, which could take a few days in the off chance I am not home. Server-based backups would also be burned to CD/DVD, in case of a hard drive failure. I keep old CDs/DVDs I have burned, so if you need an older backup, I should have it.

What all can you backup? Anything that is not illegal for me to have stored at my house. I prefer for electronic backups to be a single file, rather then a big collection of files. Use zip, rar, tar, or some other archiving utility to build a single archive. If you are sending stuff on CD/DVD, you can lay it out however you want, since I hopefully won't ever have to read it.

How much does this all cost? Nothing, except if I need to mail you something, at which point I do wish to be refunded the true cost of shipping. Why am I making this offer? Because too many people have lost way too much stuff, because they have kept their lifes work on a single hard drive, or worse, a floppy disc. Hard drives fail. Often. In the past few years, I have had about 2-3 hard drive failures a year (I have about 14 hard drives in use at this point). These things are not reliable. CDs/DVDs are some what reliable, but they can also "rot" with time.

If you don't want to use me for off-site backups, then use some other place. I keep backups of my home stuff in my desk at work, which given the distance between my office and my house, if something takes both of them out, my backups are the least of my problems. If you work on stuff constantly, then it is a good idea to have an automated backup system, so you don't have to worry about it. In UNIX-type OSes, this can be acheived with a cron job (I use cron to run vob for my daily backups differential backups, and my weekly full backs). In Windows, I think you can use the Task Scheduler to run a batch file that can do your backups.

If all this comes across as nothing but a bunch of geek-speak, the short description is this: You can use me for storing backups. If you do want to use me for off-site storage, then email me at japi@undernet-poetry.com, or talk to me on IRC.