Below Belief

Backups are one of those things that are dull and boring – until you lose some work and wish you’d treated the topic with more respect…

Since moving from a “one laptop” situation with an external HDD as my “backup solution” to a world where I now have a work laptop (PC), a play laptop (Mac), a girlfriends’ laptop (Mac) and a Media Center box (Linux), all of which contain a subset of the overall superset of valuable files, I figured it was high time to do something more significant about securing that value.

I was all for building my own RAID-array of backup disks, but I was reading up about it and suddenly it dawned on me that a cheaper, more effective and generally less hassle-alternative was to use an online backup service.

There are actually lots of these which have sprung up out of the “cloud computing” movement. The general gist is you sign up with an online service and create an account and then you run a piece of client software on your machine which sends backup data over the internet where it is recorded safely (offsite, securely with guarantees about it’s safety). If you need to restore a file, you can do so via the same client software (running on a different machine if you have a disaster).

Not all the services are created equal and there are a few features I realised would be great – that made my choice a bit more complicated.

I settled on a service called SpiderOak (spideroak.com) because it has the following features:

• You can backup from multiple (as many as you want) into the same account
  (this is important so I cover the superset of files)~
• This has the nice benefit that, for once, all the files end up in the same place (the backup server) where there is enough space for them all to live. And what this lets you do is “sync” some of the folders on ALL or some of your machines. eg I have a photo library which goes back seven or eight years. I don’t have room to store the entire archive on any one of my machines, but for convenience I’d love to have all “this year’s” pictures synchronised. So when S takes some photos and puts them on her Mac, I’d love to be able to see them on mine… make sense? So with SpiderOak once you’ve backed up all the related files, you can “Sync” them together in a fairly flexible way and it will do it’s best to keep those unrelated folders on different machines containing the same files – regardless of which machine added them.
• “Zero-knowledge” – this means that the files are encrypted on each machine and sent to the backup server encrypted. It means the files are “safe” and even the staff at spideroak can’t see the files or names of files in the backup. It’s a nice privacy feature which makes online backup as attractive as having your own.
• compression: they compress all your files such that the space they actually take up (which is what you get charged for) is a lot less than the space they occupied on their native machines. This makes it cost effective.
• version maintenance – unlike some of the other solutions, SpiderOak retains every version of every file you backup in the future. Even if you delete a file on one or more machines, it moves it into a deleted files folder where it can be retrieved at any time in the future. This means screw ups or corrupted files are still retrievable from the backup.

So, anyway, I selected this product and bought 200Gb of space. SpiderOak sell space in blocks of 100Gb for $10 per month – but I managed to get my 200Gb for $150 for the full year by paying in advance and using the discount code: “spring” to get a 25% discount. Whether I need 200Gb or not (I suspect I do) remains to be seen.

So let’s say it costs me £100 to backup everything for a full year – that compares favourably to the cost and hassle of setting up a truly redundant, large backup system at home which might require an investment of £500-£600 and a lot of hassle, not to mention the fact that it still wouldn’t be “offsite”.

The first challenge in making this all work with SpiderOak is the “first backup”. My superset of files – including photos, music, movies and documents is > 400Gb and over a poor ADSL connection with an upload speed of maybe 50kb/s at the best of times, this represents a long process – many weeks.

Luckily the SpiderOak client seems pretty resilient and I now have the thing running on all of the machines in the network, slowly dumping their contents into the backup service. It’s going to take a while.

All very usable and clean so far though.

I can’t do much more yet (with the sync feature) until the backups have completed – because you need the folders and files to exist on the server before you can set up a sync. But I’ll keep you posted!