[X4U] Off site data storage - Options?

[Stroller]

On 10 Aug 2006, at 05:13, Robert Ameeti wrote:

> I have multiple clients that if in a normal IT situation, would  
> find themselves doing tape backups and then taking the tapes off  
> site for disaster preparedness. These clients though would like to  
> be lazy and just back up to some off site destination via a  
> scheduled back up routine using their unused broadband during the  
> night. I'm talking about backing up maybe 100 to 200 GB of data  
> which could be handled via incremental after a full backup over a  
> weekend. Sensible?

I think that 100 to 200 GB of data would take more than a weekend on  
the internet connections of most small businesses.

That is a LOT of data, and I'd imagine that it would be quite a large  
organisation that would need that much. Or maybe they're graphics  
designers working with bitmap & RAW files? In that case 100 to 200 GB  
would be very little.

But on this amount of data even the incremental uploads would be  
quite large. In the UK the fastest cable / ADSL connections are  
about .5meg up. I'm no good at converting kbps to megs-per-hour, but  
I think you would be limited to a handful of gigs overnight.

> What companies might offer this service?

A customer of mine has just started using a company called Clunk  
Click <http://www.clunkclick.net/> - they are a reseller of a common  
solution, and although I don't know who the top-level provider is I  
would think that you could find another reseller in your area.  
Basically this provides a GUI interface for you to select which files  
& folders you want backed up and then it runs overnight, transferring  
the data over an encrypted connection; my customer is using Windows  
SBS Server 2003 as a client, they advertise Mac OS X support on their  
site, and I believe they support Linux, too.

I do have some concern about standards-compliance, transparency &  
auditing with this setup. They tell me they encrypt the data using  
Blowfish (the site has a username & password that the company can  
recover if forgotten, but they tell me that you're knackered if you  
lose the encryption key) but I know that they make connections to  
more than one server during the backup process (once authenticated  
the backup seems to be directed to another server), and I'm unclear  
on the necessity for this. I'm also unable to obtain a full archive  
of the data from them - they apparently have a webinterface I can use  
to extract individual files (using the user:pass & encryption key)  
but that's not quite the level of auditing I'd like.

So there's a bit of me that's saying, "well, we all know that the  
most common downfall of secure encryption schemes is an insecure  
implementation" and being all proprietary I'm unable to do any  
auditing of these guys but mostly I'm happy with it. If I were  
driving the adoption of this then I'd want more answers, but I'm just  
along for the ride as this is what my customer wants, so I'm not in a  
position of any liability if Clunk Click foul up.

> What equipment and software would be appropriate for me to offer  
> the service as a destination for my clients?

If you want to offer an online backup service - as opposed to  
facilitate the offering of someone else's service - then you need one  
very large clue before you start. If you have to ask here then you're  
probably not qualified to handle the security & reliability issues.  
If you want to offering of someone else's service to your clients I'd  
start by looking for other resellers of this same solution - it seems  
to be resold very widely under different brand names.

[cut due to 5kb limit]

Finally, as a datapoint I think my customers are going to be paying  
about £40 or £50 a month for 5gigs of storage. I think that went up  
to about £70 or £80 a month for 10gigs, so we cut down on what we  
considered important; basically either of these figures are quite  
affordable to the customer, paling into insignificance besides the  
cost of their 5 staff. If we needed to store hundreds of gig then we  
might have to do some more research.

Stroller.