A friend of mine is a lawyer, and she's got her life on her laptop. If the thing goes toes up, she loses years worth of work that would be difficult to replace. Everything she does ultimately ends up as a hard copy, so it could be reproduced. But it would be an enormous undertaking.
So I've been doing some research on backup solutions for her. Something that she doesn't have to think about, but results in at least weekly backups of her critical information. I was very intrigued when Steve posted about a cool NAS appliance that NetGear is currently making. But that still leaves my friend with a problem: If her house burns down, heaven forbid, her backup gets melted along with her laptop. And she's got too many things to worry about without having to manage a tape system with complex tape rotations, so that rules out offsite tapes and even CDs.
So I started looking into some of the online backup services to see if they would fit the bill.
My requirements:
- 4-5 gigs of storage space
- Encryption of the data, both in transit and at rest
- They have to operate in a bonafide data center, not in a rack of systems in their owner's garage
- Scheduled backups, at least weekly in frequency (daily would be better)
- Some version control would be cool, so she can go back to a previous backup if the current one saved a corrupted file or something
- Easy to use, completely transparent and low maintenance
- Ability to edit the files online would be a plus, but not required.
- Compelling price
The big players in the space are iBackup and XDrive, both of whom have gotten very good write-ups from various trade rags. They've also both been doing this for a while. The price for both services is compelling, with X-Drive charging 10 bucks a month for 5 gigs and iBackup charging $15 a month for 4 gigs of space, both with unlimited transfers (iBackup offers a reduced service 5-gig plan for 10 bucks, but to fairly compare features with XDrive's $10 plan you have to go with iBackup's $15 plan).
Unfortunately, I had to disqualify X-Drive almost immediately. While they encrypt the transfers in 128-bit SSL, like everyone else does, the files are not encrypted at rest. Which means that you have to have a very high level of trust about the operation's data center, security posture and staff. I wouldn't trust my mother with my friend's legal files, so that's a big problem. So, sorry X-Drive, you're out of the running before we've even left the gate.
So iBackup. They've got a neat offering. Not only do they allow you to encrypt the files at rest, with a strong well-known scheme, they also have some neat tools to allow you to work on the files online, without having to have local copies on the system you are using. Like X-Drive, you can map a drive letter to the online repository and use it just like any other locally attached storage device. Cool stuff.
Unfortunately, being able to encrypt files at rest, and being able to edit them online are mutually exclusive concepts. You can't have both. The tool that enables drive letter mapping is not capable of performing the decryption of the files, only the backup/restore tool can do that. So, while it would have been nice for my friend to just work on the files as they reside at iBackup's site, it's not going to be possible unless she forgoes the encryption-at-rest. The encryption of the backups and restores during the file transfers is still in place, since that relies on simple SSL.
However, this is not a showstopper. It would be nice for her to be able to work on files online, but that's not a hard requirement. Enabling scheduled no-hassle backups is the core requirement here, and iBackup seems to do a fine job with that. The scheduled backup wizard is easy to use, and had me up and running with backups in a few seconds after installing the software. You can backup at the frequency you wish, which is another differentiator from some other online storage solutions that only allow you to back up once a week.
Another really neat feature of iBackup is the fact that they do automatic snapshots of your data (you have to enable the feature, but it is free), leaving you with a history of revisions that is 10 backups deep. So if you realized that the last 3 backups have been backing up a trashed version of a doc, you can actually go back to the 4th previous backup and restore that version. Very cool! With some of the more expensive plans they allow you to go back 30 revisions, or more. But you get 10 snapshots included in the base price, and they don't count against your storage allocation!
My wishlist for iBackup:
- The iDrive application (drive mapping) with integrated file encryption, as I indicated earlier. I wouldn't keep files on my laptop at all if they offered this.
- The ability to have an encrypted storage area and a non-encrypted area. I don't care if my web site backups are encrypted, but I'd like my docs encrypted, for example. Right now it seems to be all or nothing, based on the user.
- I'd like the ability to put the backed-up files in a directory structure that I designate. If I make a backup of my web site files, I'd like to to be in a directory called “bmonday.com backup“ or something, not c/inetpub/dottext. Currently if I back up 2 machines that have the same “My Documents“ directory, all the files end up on the iBackup server in the same directory: c/My Documents/username/. I don't normally have the same doc on 2 systems (and I'm not sure what happens in that case), but still it isn't very intuitive. I want Machine A's backup to be in a directory clearly indicating it was from Machine A. I haven't played around with the directory settings of the system though, there may be a workaround for this that I haven't yet seen.
Overall I am very impressed with iBackup's offering, and will recommend it to my other friends who don't have an established backup strategy. I may even explore using it as a repository of our disaster recovery documentation and procedures at work, in addition to other critical files that would be handy to have immediate access to in a pinch.