Cloud backup

[dibekem]

Hi Guys.

 

Does any of you using cloud based backup for the school's data? If so which one would you recommend?

 

 

Thanks

[matt40k]

RedStor - School Backup, Online Backup for Schools, Remote Data Backup and Recovery for School Data

 

Pretty much anyone who wants a reliable backup: Redstor - Remote Backup for Schools Service - Our Clients

[fairm010]

+1 for RedStor. Use it here and its great.

[Patric]

We use RedStor as well - no complaints so far, works pretty good!

[theo_logical]

We use Gigasoftdatabackup.co.uk no problems with them at all.

Excellent prompt support

[bwestlake]

crashplan, i use them for home and we use them at school

[Jasbo]

Those using red stor, do you mean via your LEA or through a direct service from red stor? We use rbuss through the lea for sims data but find the cost of the service prohibitive for user data, so I wonder if it would be cheaper as a direct customer of red stor?

[robjduk]

I remember I got a quote once and they wanted crazy money (into the tens of thousands for about 1.5TB)

[matt40k]

Being honest, RedStor\RBUSS (if brought via the LA) isn't cheap, especially when you think most of the backups are restored from what basically is, a kinda robocopy of the data onto another area of the server, but that's not what your paying for, your basically buying insurance. Take St Felix Middle in Suffolk - it burnt out, (BBC NEWS | UK | Education | 'Our school was destroyed by fire') - only reason they had data was that the technician wisely took the backup tape home, a legal nightmare - even encrypted. Don't even say fireproof safe, they had one and there is a picture of the office where it used to leave, I'll buy a beer to the first people able to identify the safe left alone be able to recover data from one of the backups within it!!

 

Personally, you wouldn't want to backup 1.5TB of data. For me, just backup your MIS data and a few other bits. Sit down, look at your data and mark it 1 - 5 with 1 being, "OMG I don't want to even thing about losing that!!" to 5 being, "well, I could always redo that, but it would be nice". Then look at the costs, the 1's would instantly be RedStor. 2-5 would depend on the cost, if it's an extra few quid, it makes sense to add the files. Generally the 4 and 5 would end up on a cheap NAS, heck for the price, get two slap one at each end of the school. Basically, if you heard your school was on fire, do you want to be worrying is your data safe? Did the backup run last night, did you swap the tape over, when was the last time you actually did a restore to check it actually work? Redstor pretty much takes the worry away which would disappear once your LA has confirmed the data is ok and is restored onto a temp server. Your 4 and 5's people are prob going to be a bit accepting they might have lost data in scenarios like half the school has disappeared because of some disaster.

 

Oh, and for those of you thinking, "I back up to an outbuilding" or even another school, remember, people in the Twin Towers used to backup to the other tower as they believed that was safe. Let's hope your right.

[speckytecky]

Yep - big problem that I'm sure keeps many of us awake. I'm certainly trying to find a way forward for this for my school. Currently our curriculum server gathers 'too much' cra* data that no one other than IT staff make any attempt to weed. That backs up to a LTO the tape being hopefully safe remote. The MIS backs up to a removable HD again the current removable device stored remote. Trying to work something better out. Especially trying to identify data that actually needs saving and backing up! Hopefully this thread will run and run. I've been in contact with one of the Edugeek backup sponsors to try and work out a plan but wasn't particularly happy with clarity nor sales technique. Still a high priority to do for me.

[dhicks]

Yep - big problem that I'm sure keeps many of us awake.

 

Why aren't LEA IT support departments offering backup solutions themselves? Surley the whole point of having a central organisation is that they can hire some datacentre space somewhere, write a decent backup utility and have all their schools backup data to their system.

[speckytecky]

Good thought Dave - I'll explore what our LEA recommend. However, with massive cuts at our restructured LEA I Have a feeling I know the answer already!

 

Why aren't LEA IT support departments offering backup solutions themselves? Surley the whole point of having a central organisation is that they can hire some datacentre space somewhere, write a decent backup utility and have all their schools backup data to their system.

[dhicks]

Good thought Dave - I'll explore what our LEA recommend. However, with massive cuts at our restructured LEA I Have a feeling I know the answer already!

 

But they could run such a service for a profit! Google's price-per-GB for cloud storage is currently around 0.5p per GB per month, which is about the same as you'd wind up paying if you bought a server and a bunch of disks and placed that in a colocation facility. All these services charging 25p per GB per month are making a huge margin. Even if an LEA charged maybe 5p per GB per month, for data you could be certain was kept in the UK and backed up in two remote locations, they should easily beat off any competition.

[SYNACK]

But they could run such a service for a profit! Google's price-per-GB for cloud storage is currently around 0.5p per GB per month, which is about the same as you'd wind up paying if you bought a server and a bunch of disks and placed that in a colocation facility. All these services charging 25p per GB per month are making a huge margin. Even if an LEA charged maybe 5p per GB per month, for data you could be certain was kept in the UK and backed up in two remote locations, they should easily beat off any competition.

 

 

 

 

Yea but google has huge volume and your privacy to sell so they work out about even in the long run