How to backup my data (and why!)

It is the digital age, the amount of personal data we produce keeps going up: digital pictures, HD movies and documents take an ever increasing amount of space.
That's a lot a memories and information we don't want to loose (or can't afford to).

Companies have devised backup plans for a long time but the concept is now entering homes though cloud storage (and other means). When your data is lost, it is too late: you need to devise a plan now!

I will focus on the needs of individuals and deal with 3 different data types:
- photos
- videos
- documents (excel, doc, text, pdf...)

Also, there are diffrent risks to take into account when defining a backup plan:
- hardware failure (crashed hard drive)
- physical destruction of data at a physical location (think fire, theft ...)
- human error (oops! I deleted the file)


1. Put your data in the Cloud

The cloud will shield you from hardware failure, physical destruction but might not protect you against human error.... Added bonus is that you can share your data with other people :)
You also take on additional risks: like the risk of you online account being hacked or the risk of your data becoming visible to everybody because of a misconfiguration on your side.

The good news is that there usually are free allocations for each service but you might have to pay for a feature you really need.

For pictures, you have:
- Picasa: 1GB free + free unlimited storage of pictures up to 800x800 pixels (additional storage available: cost of 20GB is 5USD/year, see all prices here)
- Google plus: free unlimited storage of pictures up to 2048x2048 pixels
- Flickr: free upload of 300MB worth of pictures every month, paid option unlimited storage (original quality) & bandwith for (25 USD/year or 45 SD/2y. see all prices here)


For movies, you have:
- Youtube: Videos can be uploaded for free (up to 20GB per video)
The problem is that the videos are automatically edited (and reduced in quality) and it is not easy to download them once they are in the cloud!


For documents, you have:
- Google Docs: storage of documents, presentation and spreadsheets in google format is unlimited, you get 1GB for other type of files. Additional space can be bought (and shared with picasa). See the above link in Picasa for pricing details. The problem is there is no easy way to synchronize a local folder with Google Documents...
- Dropbox: 2B free storage. Local folders can be synchronized with dropbox.

2. Use a backup Service

This will shield you from hardware failure (but it might be slow to recover the data), physical destruction and human error.

The idea is to send your compressed and encrypted data to a remote server where it is stored. You can usually access our backups from a website and from a specific software.
The problem is that all your data goes through the internet and it can be very slow to do the initial upload if you have a lot of data. For example, if you have 1TB of data to backup, it can take months to do the initial backup!
Same problem when you try to do a full backup: it will be usually an order of magnitude faster than doing the initial backup but it can still take a few days.


If you also need to recover fast from an hard drive failure (the most common hardware failure) you can use a local redundant RAID configuration (like RAID 1 or 5). Please note that RAID alone will not prevent data loss: you are still vulnerable to other hardware failures (like RAID controller failure, destruction of the device and human error).

Let's compare the different plans out there. I will focus on 3 providers: Mozy, Carbonite and Crashplan.

Plan Name	+10GB	Unlimited	Family unlimited	Home	HomePlus	HomePremier	50GB	125GB
Yearly Price	25 USD	50 USD	120 USD	59 USD	99 USD	149 USD	72 USD	120 USD
Space	10 GB	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited			50 GB	125 GB
Number of computers	1	1	2-10	1	1	1	1 (add computer +2USD/month)
Suported Os	Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris			Windows, Mac		Windows	Windows, Mac
Automated backup	All files			All Except video		All files	All files

Whatever your usage, Crashplan seems always cheeper and has more features. I use it myself and I am very satisfied with it....


The free crasplan software also allows you to backup on a friend computer (running crashplan as well). This means that you can backup your data without paying anything, provided a friend is ready to allocate you some data for backup.


3. Case studies

We just need to find the most cost effective combination of the above:

Profile A:10GB of pictures and a few documents: 5USD/year
Pay 5USD/year for Picasa storage (20GB)
Use DropBox free allocation to store the documents.
Problem: the backup process is manual: if you forget to upload your pictures to Picasa, they are not uploaded, unless you use the software I wrote to automatically upload to Picasa: see my post here). You are still vulnerable to Human error.

Profile B:100GB of pictures, 200GB of movies and a 10GB of documents: 50USD/year
Cheapest alternative is Crashplan Unlimited (50USD / year)
The backup process is now automatic: no need to worry about forgetting to backup something. On top of that, you are protected against human error as you can retrieve former versions of a file.

If your data is spread across different computer, you can buy a NAS and run crasplan on the NAS (see my post on how to install crasplan on an Iomega NAS here. Alternatively, you have the simpler option to buy Crashplan unlimited Family.


4. Conclusion

If you care about your data: take the time to devise your backup/data recovery plan now! You can always find a way that fits your budget.

You can get a reduced quality backup for your pictures and videos for free. Truct me, it is better to have a reduced quality backup than nothing!

How to backup your google docs documents

I am a fan of google docs: I often needs to access and edit my documents while I am away, and google docs offers a great way to do that.
The problem is: I have a lot of large pdfs there, and they can take a while to load: I would love to have a local copy when I am in the office...
On top of that, I always like to have a local copy of stuff... just in case! Call me paranoid but what happens if your account is hacked? or if google unilaterally closes your account because they consider you don't respect the terms of use? Better be safe than sorry...


I couldn't find anywhere an application that would do what I want (get a local backup of my google documents and update it regularly).
There is the google "takeout" application but you can not schedule regular downoads...
A project like google-docs-fs seems promissing but it does only support google documents (and not any other file you may have uploaded if you have -like me- a premium account). Plus, my analysis is that there are too many possible points of failures if you rsync this file system... I need something more robust.


I decided to code what I need myself: a java command line application that can be used to schedule regular downloads of all your google docs documents.


1. Presentation gdocsauploader.jar

The features implemented:
- re use data from a previous data to avoid re-downloading files that haven't changed
- rotating backups (for example, a maximum of 7 backups backup.zip being the most recent one and backup.7.zip being the oldest one)
- zip archive or just a folder archive (takes more space but easier to access)
- configurable document export mode (export google spreasheets as xls or as csv)
- download only once documents that are in multiple folders (gdocsbackup.removeduplicateddocuments)
- archive without folder structure (all documents in a zip, like google takeout) or with folder structure (much easier to navigate)
- support for any type of files.

TODO:
- use hard links on operating systems that support it (that would substantially reduce that amount of disk needed for multiple backups with a lot of unchanged documents)
- fix the bug that forces you to use a temp directory on the same partition as the destination directory

In my setup, I want to install pgdocsauploader.jar as a daily cron on my NAS, but you can install it anywhere.

The program is configured using the config file gdocsuploader.properties which reads as follows:

#use system defined proxy
gdocsbackup.usesystemproxy=true
#google account username and password
gdocsbackup.username=xxxx
gdocsbackup.password=xxx
#the path where we want to backup
gdocsbackup.backuppath=C:\\Users\\xxx\\Documents\\Data\\
#the name of the backup archive. 
#the zip archives will be named: backuprootname.zip backuprootname.1.zip
#the folder archives will be named: backuprootname/ backuprootname.1/
gdocsbackup.backuprootname=gdocs_backup
#the number of backup files to keep
gdocsbackup.nbbackupfiles=7
#TRUE is you want to stroe backup as zip file. 
gdocsbackup.usezip=FALSE
#zip compression level (0-9) with 9 being the most compressed (and most CPU intensive)
gdocsbackup.zipcompresslevel=6
#use hard links to link new data identical to older data. This does save a lot of space (you can't use this option with usezip)
#not supported yet!
gdocsbackup.usehardlinks=FALSE
#document export format: one of doc html odt pdf png rtf txt zip
gdocsbackup.documentexportformat=doc
#presentation export format: one of pdf png ppt txt
gdocsbackup.presentationexportformat=ppt
#spreadsheet export format: one of xls csv pdf ods tsv html (NB: first sheet export only for csv and tsv)
gdocsbackup.spreadsheetexportformat=xls
#try to replicate the directory structure in the zip
docsbackup.keepdirectorystructure=TRUE
#show documents that appear at different places in the folder tree only once (in the first folder where it is found)
gdocsbackup.removeduplicateddocuments=TRUE
#log file (for linux, good practice is to put it in /var/log/ or /opt/var/log (and make sur logrotate works correctly))
gdocsbackup.logfile=C:\\gdocsbackup.log

All options are self explanatory. You can customize it as required by your setup.

As the program is java, it can be run on any OS / Architecture supporting Java.

The jar is available for download at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/50398581/gdocsbackup/gdocsdownload.jar
sample properties files is available at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/50398581/gdocsbackup/gdocsdownload.properties
and source code is available at: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/50398581/gdocsbackup/gdocsdownload-src.zip


Please note that in order to "rotate" backups, the program will delete the oldest backup! Don't modify the backups or store anything there!
The program only gets information from the google server: it does not update or delet anything: you are safe there!


To determine if the file was already downloaded, the last_update tag given by google is checked. I suggest you do a full backup from time to time to avoid an error propagating from backup to backup (to do that, just add the option full download after the "properties" file launching the jar)


2. Steps to install the gdocsbackup on a linux based NAS
The setup is easy to adapt to any machine running linux. I didn't do a tutorial for Windows or Mac as I lack some knowledge to do it, but it can of course be done... feel free to adapt it and post your results and hints in the comments!
This tutorial assumes some vi ans linux knowledge...

This is how I installed the gdocsbackup.jar on my NAS (an Iomega Storcenter ix4-200d). Please note that the procedure is unsupported by Iomega! use at your own risk!

a. Download and setup of gdocsdownload
First, you need to ssh into your NAS (see my other post if you have am Iomega Storcenter)
Then:

mkdir /opt/usr/local
mkdir /opt/usr/local/gdocsdownload/
cd /opt/usr/local/gdocsdownload/
wget http://dl.dropbox.com/u/50398581/gdocsbackup/gdocsdownload.jar
wget http://dl.dropbox.com/u/50398581/gdocsbackup/gdocsdownload.properties

Don't forget to change the properties file to make it work for your setup (you at least need to change account information and paths):

vi gdocsdownload.properties

If you are concerned about security, you should put the properties files into you home folder...

If you haven't already done so, you need to install java on your NAS. See the java section of my previous post How to install Crashplan on an Iomega Storcenter to find out how to do it for an Iomega storcenter.

If you followed the java installation procedure of my other post, link java to a more usual location:

ln -s /mnt/pools/A/A0/NAS_Extension/ejre1.7.0/bin/java /opt/bin/java

The setup can already be tested by starting the command:

/opt/bin/java -jar /opt/usr/local/gdocsdownload/gdocsdownload.jar /opt/usr/local/gdocsdownload/gdocsdownload.properties

press Ctrl-C to stop the run


the program will need to be started from a script so that we can set correct folder permissions and TMP folder.
You need to make sure there is enough space in your temp folder (my /tmp/ folder is way to small, that's why I use /opt/tmp/

vi gdocsdownloader

and then type:

#!/bin/sh

#this is to have a backup that's readable by everybody
#but only writeable by the owner.
#change it to suit your needs
umask 022
#use a tmp file with enough space to fit all your docs
#NB: it seems like there is a bug somewhere and the tmp directory has to
#be on the same partition than the destination directory....
#please choose a tmp file respecting these conditions
#/opt/bin/java -Djava.io.tmpdir=/opt/tmp/ -jar /opt/usr/local/gdocsdownload/gdocsdownload.jar $@
/opt/bin/java -Djava.io.tmpdir=/mnt/pools/A/A0/data/perso/gdocs/ -jar /opt/usr/local/gdocsdownload/gdocsdownload.jar $@

make it an executable:

chmod a+x gdocsdownloader

And test with:

./gdocsdownloader /opt/usr/local/gdocsdownload/gdocsdownload.properties

b. Set up a cron job to backup google docs data
Create the gdocsdownloader cron (I don't use /etc/cron.daily/ because I want a full download once a week):

vi /etc/cron.d/gdocsdownload

and add:

# download google docs files at 3:45 AM

#full download on sunday
45 3    * * 0   root    /opt/usr/local/gdocsdownload/gdocsdownloader /opt/usr/local/gdocsdownload/gdocsdownload.properties fulldownload > /dev/null 2>&1
#regular download the other days
45 3    * * 1,2,3,4,5,6   root    /opt/usr/local/gdocsdownload/gdocsdownloader /opt/usr/local/gdocsdownload/gdocsdownload.properties > /dev/null 2>&1

The cron will run everyday!
you may want to run the first batch by starting:

/opt/usr/local/gdocsdownload/gdocsdownloader /opt/usr/local/gdocsdownload/gdocsdownload.properties

c. start the cron daemon

The cron daemon is not started at boot by default....

You can start it manually:

/etc/init.d/cron start

But to have it start up every time at boot, we need to add the line:

/etc/init.d/cron start >> /opt/init-opt.log

to our /opt/init-opt.sh script.

See my other post How to run a program at boot on the Iomega Storcenter NAS to see how it works!

d. set up logrotate
Logrotate is the process that compresses and delete old logs so that your logs don't eat all you disk space!

vi /etc/logrotate.d/gdocsdownload

and add:

/opt/var/log/gdocsdownload.log {
    rotate 4
    weekly
    compress
    delaycompress
    missingok
    notifempty
    prerotate
      while [ "`ps aux | grep gdocsdownloader.jar | grep -v grep | wc -l`" = "1" ]
        do
          sleep 10
        done
    endscript
}

This will rotate your gdocsdownload logs once a week and keep at least 4 weeks worth of logs. It is easy to modify these parameters in the config file above.

I try to make sure the gdocsdownload is done before rotating the logs to avoid conflict...

Don't forget to change the path if your log is somewhere else!