LLive Blog

Cheapest Cold Storage Backup

  • byJordan
  • December 29, 2022
  • 2 minute read

Introduction

Someone posted on a Facebook group looking for the cheapest means for cold storage backups. I did some research and collected some data.

Response

Tapes

All depends, if you have a petabyte or half a petabyte it might work. It might be cheaper to just sync data to another data center. LTO8/9 are 12/18TB uncompressed.

But you have to buy new tape drives every 5 years as the technology changes and data gets bigger. If you have a tape library that has four drives, it can be costly.

You also have to rehydrate, sending tapes back and forth and having backup software manage them. You also need to replace tapes due to lifespan or duplicate tapes for redundancy (they’re not 100% reliable).

For a small setup, you could look at this, which offers to stage. I haven’t used it but looks cool https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/owc-mercury-pro-lto

You’ll have a massive upfront cost for tape, the drive being the most expensive, then an appropriate HBA which is usually pretty cheap, and then the tapes, which are also relatively inexpensive.

But what about the storage of the tapes? Do you ship them to a friend? What software are you going to use for backups? There are lots of caveats with tape, even with LTFS https://getprostorage.com/blog/lto-ltfs-archiving/

SSDs + Safety Deposit Box

You could get a safety deposit box, buy 4x8TB SSD’s M.2 and plop them into this bad boy and get 32GB RAW or less in a software RAID.

https://www.storagereview.com/…/qnap-tbs-464-mini-all…

You could buy two or even a spinning disk QNAP and rehydrate every month.

The only issue is M2 SSD’s are expensive, you’d want a SATA 8TB for around $900 pop. and grab this little guy https://www.storagereview.com/…/synology-diskstation…

Or you could just buy 2TB SSDs and use a docking station like this https://www.amazon.com/…/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_glt_fabc… 

Use SSDs like tapes. Just keep an eye on https://diskprices.com/ for the cheapest per GB SSDs. The cheapest SSD out there is the SAMSUNG 870 QVO 4TB.

You could put the SSDs into an electrostatic bag with a dry pack and seal it 🙂

Online Storage

Backblaze B2 (Per TB)

At USD $5/month/TB this is pretty affordable if you have over 20TB per month you can reach out for reserve capacity which requires time commitments.

https://www.backblaze.com/…/reserve-capacity-storage.html

Backblaze Personal Backup (Unlimited)

At USD $5/month if you can use Backblaze Personal Backup, you can back up an unlimited amount of data. The operating system would just need to be able to see the data. This doesn’t come with versioning.

Backblaze Largest Personal Backup (2018)

I saw this thread on Lowend Box about the largest personal backup at Backblaze on the Personal Plan that is $5/month. Granted this is data from 2018.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20998010

Here’s a screenshot of the post.

Here’s the screenshot from imgur.

View post on imgur.com

Here’s the original image, in case the one from Imgur get’s taken down.

S3 Glacier

Cost USD $3/month/TB, and actually cold storage.

Mega.nz

Cost EUR €1.56/month/TB, not cold storage.

Wasabi

Cost USD $5.99 TB/month, not cold storage.

OVH Cloud Storage

Cost USD %$9.5 TB/month, not cold storage.

Conclusion

There really isn’t much of a conclusion, the cheapest solution is Backblaze but you can’t backup NAS devices. Mega.nz seems to be the cheapest.

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MikroTik – Backing Up Your MikroTik & Routerboard Config

  • byJordan
  • July 13, 2012
  • 1 minute read

Another great script that will email you a copy of your MikroTik/Routerboard device config. You can find the source on the MikroTik Wiki below.

http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Send_Backup_email

Some notes about the script on the MikroTik wiki and below.

  • I had to modify the script on the MikroTik website, it had used /tool e-mail set address instead of /tool e-mail set server.
  • Ensure that you specify an IP Address for sending an email, a host name will fail.

I’ve moved the code to GitHub just because its awesome and it will track changes! The latest code is available at https://github.com/jordantrizz/mikrotik-scripts/blob/master/backup

/export file=([/system identity get name] . "-" . \
[:pick [/system clock get date] 7 11] . [:pick [/system clock get date] 0 3] . [:pick [/system clock get date] 4 6]); \
/tool e-mail send to="[email protected]" subject=([/system identity get name] . " Backup " . \
[/system clock get date]) file=([/system identity get name] . "-" . [:pick [/system clock get date] 7 11] . \
[:pick [/system clock get date] 0 3] . [:pick [/system clock get date] 4 6] . ".rsc"); :delay 10; \
/file rem [/file find name=([/system identity get name] . "-" . [:pick [/system clock get date] 7 11] . \
[:pick [/system clock get date] 0 3] . [:pick [/system clock get date] 4 6] . ".rsc")]; \
:log info ("System Backup emailed at " . [/sys cl get time] . " " . [/sys cl get date])

Please note: The code above was incorrectly formatted and may have had some characters changed or stripped when it was first posted. I have since updated the above code and it should be correct, if you have any issues then post a comment. -Jordan @ 09/12/12

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JungleDisk – Server Daemon Not Responding, No Backups, Not cool?

  • byJordan
  • August 15, 2011
  • 2 minute read

So I noticed that one of my servers wasn’t being backed up via email alerts recently. Usually I’m on top of it, but I noticed recently one less email from JungleDisk (I get completion notices on all JungleDisk Backups).

So I opened up the Jungle Disk Server Edition Management and found that I couldn’t connect to the machine I was trying to open. I thought, hrmm this happened before I just need to restart the “junglediskserver” process on the server in question. At which point I could then see the server listed in the Management console.

Once selected the server to see when the last backup was, I noticed it was 24 days from the last complete backup. I was super surprised and kinda ticked off because I didn’t notice this quick enough to fix it and neither did JungleDisk. I mean if there are 24 missed backup windows, don’t you think I should be notified.

I described the above to JungleDisk in an email to their Feedback address, lets see how they respond.

Update #1: I got a response from JungleDisk via email, they directed me to their Support System at which point I was able to post a feature request. But to my surprise their were already a handful of similar requests, so I dropped my two bits in. The one thread was over 2 years old. Great software, bad community relationship.

Update #2: I haven’t been following the thread on Jungledisk’s support site as I’ve pretty much decided to live with this problem. However, another awesome thing happened (I’m being sarcastic). Jungledisk was doing a backup and it either started super slow or during the backup it slowed down, either way the backup was going at 0.1k/s and wasn’t going to finish. It kept running, it missed the next backup window and I only knew this because I got no email about the job completing. You would think if a job takes too long and the next backup window is forthcoming, why not notify via email that it’s happening.