Fair Backup

It has been long been said that storing your backup somewhere else is the way to keep your backups if your house burns, gets robbed or you have forgotten your backups in your car (which was stolen) or your laptop gets a new owner unvoluntarily. So do you store the backups offsite (as your DVDs, external USB drives) or backup to some remote FTP server?

As with any decision, we need to analyze the costs and the benefits of each solution. Let’s take offsite backup first.

The costs of offsite backup

- whatever the amount to pay the rent to store your physical backup
- your it took you to go to your storage place, store the backups and go back to your place

The offsite backup benefits

- fireproof, server-crash-proof, fool- and anything proof storage system (depending on how much you pay, of course)
- the data can not be erased accidentally

Disadvantages
- you have to go somewhere to store your backups
- you pay the money regardless of the amount of data you backup (unless you store trucks of tapes, of course)
- while erased backups may be recovered, lost backups may not be recovered at all (different probability of a successful file recovery, that is)

The costs of online remote backup

- depends on the amount of your backup data
- backing up to a remote FTP server is often slow (depending on you data, again, of course)

FTP backup benefits

- you only pay for the amount of data you backup
- you don’t need to go anywhere

Disadvantages
- you pay a lot if you backup huge amounts of data (hundreds of GB or TB)
- if the remote server crashes, you lose the data (unless you get it recovered, which is unlikely)
- sometimes backups take a while to proceed and it may eat your time (unless you schedule them)

Basically, in each case you may lose your data and either way, you may end up wasting too much time.

Conclusion
As seen from the examples, it depends on the amount of data you backup. If you backup a size fo a couple of CDs, you can easily back them up to a remote FTP server. If you backup gigabytes of data, you’d rather store them offsite.

The easiest solution would be to use an external USB hard disk to backup huge amounts of data and store them at your friend’s house. Encrypt your backups just in case and use backup compression.