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Posted on: July 23rd, 2010 by Famous Phil
I am delighted today to bring you a guest posting from Alexis Bonari!
Anyone who does any sort of work on their computer can tell you a hard drive crash is the stuff nightmares are made of. While it’s easy to pass judgment on such individuals for failing to use an external hard drive, doing so is admittedly time-consuming and, in some cases, expensive.
The solution: online backup sites. For a small fee, these off-site servers back up all data stored on the computer in case of a hard drive failure. Here are the top three such services and what they have to offer:
1. Carbonite
(http://www.carbonite.com/en/default.aspx)
For only $54.95/ year, Carbonite offers unlimited backup on their server. No matter what your computer’s storage limit, the Carbonite system can handle it. For security purposes, files are encrypted before being sent to the Carbonite server for storage. For ease of use, the files are automatically backed up each time the computer is connected to the Internet. Restoring the files is as simple as logging into the Carbonite website and clicking the “restore” button listed on your account.
2. MozyHome Free
(http://mozy.com/home/free)
Unlike Carbonite, Mozy doesn’t charge a fee for the first 2 GB backed up. The system for retrieving files and backing them up is essentially the same the one used by Carbonite. If you want to store more than 2 GB, Mozy charges $4.95/month. This gives you unlimited data storage for only slightly more per year than Carbonite.
3. SugarSync
(https://www.sugarsync.com/)
Many experts believe that online syncing represents the future of online backup technology. SugarSync.com is the current leader in online syncing technology. Instead of simply backing up a set of files on one computer, SugerSync notifies other computers and devices you’ve listed of any changes made. You can work from nearly anywhere in the world and have your files backed up in real-time by the Sugarsync server. Devices supported include Mac’s, PC’s, Ipads, smart phones, and many others.
Those who sign up get a 30 day free trial. After that, the price goes up to $10/month for 60 GB of storage. While the limited storage and the higher price might be prohibitive for some customers, many are happy to pay extra for the ability to sync documents over multiple devices.
Bio: Alexis Bonari is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She spends much of her days blogging about Education and CollegeScholarships. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.
Tags: alexis bonari, backup, disaster, guest post
Posted in Technology
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Posted on: March 11th, 2010 by Famous Phil
Today, I will pursue a topic that all of us wish wasn’t necessary to discuss, but it is a fact of life. Backups are required in life and this isn’t a new concept, but poor backups can be devastating when you find out that it doesn’t work (and that is usually when you need it the most). I’ve spent a lot of time making changes to my backup systems over the years, but they are never perfect and I constantly find new flaws that I constantly work to fix.
A few weeks ago, I found a major flaw in my backup system that I never really thought about in the past. My backups would run every night by essentially pushing the latest backup to another server that I run. This server had an account on it where the backup would neatly upload then not be touched again until the next backup cycle ran. To access the backup, all I had to do is login as root on my production system (the system that runs famousphil), then request the backup. Passwords are entirely controlled through keys, so I didn’t have to do anything special or know anything to gain access to my backup server. Unfortunately, if all I needed was my root password / key to do that, if a hacker got into my system, they essentially could completely destroy my backup system as well.
With the ever growing threat of hackers attempting to compromise my network of servers, I’ve began giving more thought to hack attempts and prevention along with hard disk and other physical server failures (which also happen). Because of these thoughts, I’ve implemented a new backup routine that fixes most of my issues with a hacker gaining access to my network. If I discover a hacker has penetrated one of my servers within 12 hours, I will always be able to restore a backup that is no more than 3 days old now. The same goes for a hard disk failure / natural disaster. I do not feel it is in the best interest of Matthouse to disclose the new backup system and exact scheduled times, but I thought that it would be appropriate to share a little insight into that thought that I’m sure many other system administrators might fall into at one point or another.
Another threat that I found with my backup system was that part of my backups were incomplete. For any admin that thinks backing up /var/lib/mysql is appropriate to backup MySQL, think again. About 2 months ago, I thought this was appropriate, so I began backing up MySQL this way (I never really thought to check it initially since the server was brand new). I normally check the redundancy of my backups about once every 2-3 months. During my redundancy check, I always check everything and I discovered that I could not restore the MySQL database server from that directory easily. Since I have the original server still running, I came up with a new backup procedure that works much better and can actually be restored.
For all of you who need to backup an entire MySQL server, here are the 2 commands that will help:
Those are the 2 major points I wanted to make in this post. In conclusion, I recommend that you make a backup schedule for your servers and verify that loop holes don’t exist in it. I’m constantly looking for loop holes and I patch them as I find them. Also, verify your backups! I would have never realized that MySQL wasn’t being backed up unless it was for verifying that my backups are in tact and can be restored. I verify my backups every other month and I recommend that every system admin does so.
For anyone at home, HARD DRIVES DO FAIL. I strongly recommend keeping any data that you could not afford losing on a flash drive or external hard drive where if your computer did fail, you would still have your data. Unfortunately, data is unrecoverable at cheap rates, making a backup is a cheap insurance policy to avoid complete disaster!
Tags: backup, hacker, hard drive failure, mysql
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration
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Posted on: July 10th, 2009 by Famous Phil
As you probably know by now, I have a Microsoft Exchange 2007 server. With any kind of server, a backup and disaster recovery plan is a vital part of any kind of professional hosting. Hosting email can be quite tricky as it is, but taking network backups was a new road that I’ve never covered in Windows.
First, I have a fairly simple environment set up for my backup. I have a Linux backup server running samba sitting in Seattle (mthsweb2). This server has the Windows IP white listed so that only my Windows server can connect to it to map a network share. For those of you who don’t know what samba is, samba is a daemon in Linux that will allow Windows to naively connect to a Linux server for file sharing. Samba is a very simple solution for mapping a network drive to Linux in Windows without needing any specialized software such as sftpdrive (not called something else).
Tags: backup, batch, Linux, mapped network drive, network, ntbackup, samba, script, server 2003, windows
Posted in Hosting / Server Administration
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