Backing up your files to a remote server?

[Mike Jackson]

Hi all,
Danny and I were talking about backing up files to a remote server over the past few weeks. I was checking on some web hosting sites last week because the one I had been using locally sold out and my account is now in Canada. This Forum along with two of my other sites have been hosted by Canaca.com (also in Canada). After looking over their site, I see they have an interesting plan, offering 3,000 gigs of storage and 11,000 gigs of transfer for $16.95 per month. That is $203.40 per year. A 500 gig external hard drive costs more than that. Additionally, they do their own back ups of the files on their servers.

I am sitting here with six 300 gig drives daisy chained with firewire connections. That is about one half of the storage I could get at their site for $203.40. The down side, of course, would be the slow upload time to get the bulk of the files uploaded, but once that was done, uploading recent files would be pretty darned easy.

Most of our job files are really not that big, so doing it just for those files seems like it would be a snap.

I see a couple of advantages. First, all my data could be saved one time on my hard drives, giving me back about half my space locally. The second would be knowing the data is being stored in an off-site location in case something really bad happened here (fire, theft, lightning, etc). Also, the whole set up is really supposed to be a web hosting service. They also allow people to up to 500 web sites within that same package. I could save quite a bit of money going that route.

Any thoughts? Has anyone done anything like that?

M. Jackson

[mgking]

Unfortunately, there is one benefit and lots of costs, most of them "indefinite". You may end up ahead of the game but you need to be careful of some administrative headaches that I have run into in my career as a Database Administrator.

First off, as you noted, your existing provider transferred to someone else: you may not find the new service as easy or convenient as the old but you have no choice: they have your data.

Second, if you want something done that's out of the ordinary (like recovering just one file), it can be quite a hassle. They are in business to reduce their costs and your calling them is a cost.

On the benefit side, you don't have to worry about backups. Put another way, you trust them to do their job. You should test them periodically by asking for something to be restored and make sure they can do it right and fast.

The real time to get into hosting is at the beginning, when you're just starting up a business. If you commit to everything of value being on their servers and test as I described then you can get to anything from anywhere at any time and all you have at your own place is a cheap PC (or Mac) that accesses the Internet. Once you start down the road of getting your own fancy computers with lots of storage, you bump into this issue.

This may be further than you want to go but if you trust them to host your site and handle your backups anyway you might as well commit the lot and sleep easy at night. Of course you still have to be able to get to the Internet...

Mike