David Gewirtz has an interesting post over at ZDnet about the importance of multiple backup strategies. Specifically, the post is "How CrashPlan cloud backup saved my bacon." The author lost a number of files and folders on a network share but was able to recover them from his Crashplan account. He has multiple layers of backup but needed to use Crashplan because he did not discover the documents were missing until after his primary backup was overwritten:
Anyway, although the cause is important (and I hope we figure it out before it drives us crazy), this is a parable about the importance of backups. I generally have a two stage backup for live data. First, every morning, I have a script that automatically syncs the contents of all our critical folders using SyncBack Pro to the Drobo.
The thing is, to avoid exceeding the Drobo's limited capacity, I have SyncBack set up to remove deleted files from the Drobo if they're not on the original machine and haven't been modified within a week.
So, when I went to the Drobo to recover the missing document scans, they weren't there. The files vanished slightly over a week ago, and we just discovered they were gone yesterday.
He makes it clear that the Drobo worked perfectly - but the backup strategy to the Drobo required discovering the missing files sooner. The late discovery of the missing files was not a problem in the end because Crashplan features versioning of the files you backup to it:
Now, you might think that if the files were deleted from our network share a week ago, they'd also be missing off the CrashPlan servers. But you'd be wrong, and this is how CrashPlan saved our bacon.
CrashPlan keeps snapshots, for which you can set the granularity. I found that it had kept daily snapshots going back 90 days, weekly snapshots going back a year, and monthly snapshots going back about the 30 months or so since I started using the service.
Even with two tiers of backup - the Drobo and Crashplan, the writer is going to add another layer of backup protection - can't have too many copies of priceless photos and documents:
Even though this experience worked out well, one of my two backup tiers failed. I don't like that. I'm going to add another tier, which is an unused older server I have parked in a back closet. I'm going to power that thing up once a month, do a full backup, and power down. That way, I'll have another snapshot older than the one on the Drobo, just in case.
How CrashPlan cloud backup saved my bacon.
Related articles
- Keep Your Data Backed Up and Safe With CrashPlan+ (wired.com)
- Better safe than sorry (lostincolonisation.com)
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