Greetings,

I'm a relatively new Linode user, and a recovering hardware owner.

The backup feature seems to be working great, and the simplicity of it makes the cost perfectly reasonable to me.

However, I do have one concern. I would like to achieve geographical heterogeneity with my backups, and Linode is clearly storing backups in the same DC as the VPSes I'm running. If there were an option to rotate a weekly backup to another Linode VPS for, I don't know, a 25% per month increase on the backup fee, I would completely pay for this. Then in the event of complete catastrophe, I'm still safe.

Along those lines, I'm trying to figure out the best way in the interim to back my files up (I have a full set from a few days ago before I completed the migration, and things don't change that fast) to a storage service, since Linode says it has no current plans to add an S3-like option.

Because Linode has no plans, I would like to suggest that integrating a feature to move backup files or have FUSE support for S3 mounting or what have you would be a great feature to add, too.

Best,

Glenn

First, I would like to thank the Linode staff for so quickly jumping on the problem, and persevering into a late Saturday night / Sunday morning until everyone finally was up and running.

Second, I also would like to see some redundancy at a distance.

Thanks.

Lester

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After last night's Fremont outage (where I have my Linodes), I see that there's a direct if occasional need for what I was suggesting.

However, it could be simpler. I was thinking more that backups would be at heterogeneous locations for emergency recovery, but given how your systems work, the backup option (at an extra cost, as I note) could store my Linodes images at one or more other DCs, perhaps copied from nightly backups (with one or two images stored).

Then, if the Fremont outage had happened last night, I could have switched to another DC, fired up the image, and revised DNS until Fremont was back. If it were Linode or its DC operator's provider, then the operation cost of the backup image could be waived. (There might not be capacity, of course, at other DCs for such emergency launches, but that's a separate issue.)

That would quickly become very expensive, in terms of bandwidth.

Using Linode's 100GB for $10 /mo Extra price, just say you use half of your storage on the 512.

8GB (per linode) * 30 days (every night's backup) = 240GB, a cost of no more than $24 per month for Linode. That's too much. I could possibly understand this as an extra, but again, I doubt it's going to be as small as 25% more. (That would only be $1.25 more for a 512, and the cost approximately above).

If you really want reliable backups cross-datacenter, buy a 512 in another datacenter and rsync important files every hour or so. Ideally, in a manner where you can simply change a DNS record in the event the source goes down and the latest "backup" becomes live.

Right, but that's RAID 10-backed live accessible storage. What I'm talking about should be cheaper to maintain, since it's archival and doesn't need performance, just reliability. Data transfer among Linode's DC almost certainly costs them far less than general Internet in/out costs with peering partners and upstream connectivity.

I pay $40/mo for backups with my 4 GB Linode. I would think $10/mo more would provide a profitable addition for storing 1 to 2 disk images at a time (not 3 or 7 or 30) in a different DC.

It's still Internet traffic, unless they deploy their own private networks between them. They pay the same base price per GB of bandwidth as they do for the rest of our Internet traffic.

The 4GB linode has 128GB of storage, and let's just say you use half of that (64GB).

64GB * 30 days = 1,920MB or no more than $192 in cost to Linode. Even if you account for the fact that Linode makes a profit in the bandwidth they sell to us, it probably still costs them (at least) near $100 to transfer 2TB (!) of bandwidth per month. That is no small number, and for them to offer this as a service, they have to make a profit. That means you'd have to pay for at least that amount. Do you want to pay $100+ for remote datacenter backups?

Storage isn't the issue, the bandwidth is. Hard drives are cheap, even the 15K RPM ones are fairly inexpensive (xN for raid) in comparison. And while you may not use all or most, or heck, even half, of your available storage, they have to account for the fact that some people who might opt in to the backup service do.

Again, your best bet is to have your own extra Linode in a remote datacenter using rsyncs (which are very bandwidth efficient unless there are a lot of big changes frequently) as frequently as you need for the data to be useful in the event of a failure.

I'm not suggesting 30 days of backups. Just one or two. For $40/mo the can affordably store four images of up to the maximum disk size in the same DC.

If Linode doesn't have private data transfer among its DCs then--I'd be very surprised.



This forum is for feature suggestions, although I appreciate the advice. Paying another $240 per month ($80 + $160) for backing up my Linodes is not cost effective.

It's quite expensive to deploy a true private network (your own fiber cables between the DCs). I'd be more surprised if they did, because they charge us for cross-DC bandwidth.



True, and I agree, it's a great suggestion. Truly redundant backups exceed the confines of 1 datacenter. I just don't see it being very affordable, especially with the amount of data that Linode is responsible for reliably backing up and the price that is being paid.



You could always use rsync on your home computer to download critical files. This of course is more complex, as you'd have to develop a strategy for also restoring these files to another Linode in the event of failure of your 4GB Linode. Backing up data without a restoration strategy is pointless

However, that way, you could utilize your own home bandwidth (which is typically "unlimited" in the sense you have a speed limit and not a hard monthly limit, typically). This would involve leaving your computer on all night, using cron and rsync (with Cygwin on Windows), and during backup periods considerable bandwidth usage (it may not be feasible to run it every hour, for example).

The primary benefit would be you can use your own cheap storage, and pay nothing extra. But again, proper planning and testing is definitely in order for this method to be truly effective.

Or you could backup to a service like amazon s3, then create a stack script to create a new linode and pull the config files etc from s3. It's what I do.

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Thanks for the advice in this space, although I still want Linode to (someday) respond and offer the service I want!

I wound up with Jungle Disk, which has a very inexpensive backup option. They charge $5/month per server, unlimited data, incremental backups with grooming. You can store at Rackspace (15¢/GB/mo) or Amazon S3 (14¢/GB/mo). The first 10 GB at each service is free. Compression is something wonderful. 18 GB compressed to 5 GB.

Data transfer is charged at Amazon's normal S3 rate (10¢/GB uploaded, I believe), but Rackspace (Jungle Disk's owner) doesn't charge for data transfer. Between my two Linodes, I have 2.4 TB of monthly transfer, so that seems like the best option.

Right now, I'm not mirroring the whole disk, just data, but I'm may mess around with trying to mirror the image, so little data changes every day.