Click here to Skip to main content
15,891,684 members
Please Sign up or sign in to vote.
0.00/5 (No votes)
See more:
I look after an office with 20 PCs and a server, and we run weekly full backups and daily incrementals. Backups are to a USB-attached hard disk, which is taken off-site overnight. What I'd ideally like to do is carry out the backup process over the internet, to a remote PC with the backup drive permanently attached to it, to avoid physically transporting the drive. Full backup is around 120GB of data, incremental is 5 - 10GB. What would you recommend as the best method to achieve this? (using an internet hosted, paid-for backup service is not an option - too expensive!!)
On-line or internet hosted backup services (the ones you're avoiding for the cost in your situation) are becoming very popular. They definitely have their place, but they also make me uncomfortable.
And they make me uncomfortable for the same reasons and issues that you're going to run into with what you're attempting to do.
Posted
Comments
Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 23-May-13 13:47pm    
So, what's the discomfort? Too expensive? Backup is always a problem...
—SA

1 solution

120GB is a lot of data to transfer to the internet on a regular basis: look to your connection speed (specifically the upload speed) and work out how long it will take, on average, to transfer it.
If you assume ten bits per byte instead of eight, it both makes the math easier and allows for the packet overhead reasonably well.

So if you have a 20m bit per second upload, that's about 16.6 hours:
120E9 * 10 = 1.2E12
1.2E12/2E6 = 60,000 seconds
           = 1000 minutes
           = 16.666r hours.
And that's pretty much a best-case scenario @ 20mbit/sec upload.
How often are you going to do a full backup? :laugh:

I backup the backups of essential data to the internet, but even then I keep the total below 10Gb to make sure it takes a reasonable time.

Even Google write data to an array of HDD's and physically ship them round the world - they do it so often they even have a name for it: FedExNet
 
Share this answer
 

This content, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)



CodeProject, 20 Bay Street, 11th Floor Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5J 2N8 +1 (416) 849-8900