Professional Dropbox type services for DR/Backup

Question

Should I consider these kind of cloud services for off site DR?

We are a small company currently run backup across our servers and then allow dropbox (paid version) to ensure that we have backup's in other locations (US, NZ etc.).

We backup about 10-50 gig a month. Would you professionals consider this a good solution - would you recommend other solutions?

Our local PC backups are per PC but I'd like to add that any solution in the coming weeks.

Please feel free to rip this to shreds, this outside my experience and I want get some ideas for the what we should be considering.

Answer 1

You should not trust dropbox to keep your data secret. If you are concerned about privacy, you should encrypt all data with strong algorithms and good keys before uploading. In general, I would rather not rely on a collaborational file sync service as a backup solution - it just has not been designed this way and backup-specific stuff (like differential compression, deduplication, history management) will be missing.

There are several solutions backing up to cloud services - just googling for "online backup" will flood you with hits. Zmanda is one of them which is quite storage- and bandwidth-efficient, is using Amazon S3 as the backend and provides for a well-maintainable backup history. Data is encrypted by the locally run backup agent app before uploading. It should be a good fit for small businesses.

Answer 2

Check out Mozy Professional

http://mozy.com/pro/

Block Level Incremental Backups (BLIB) are very efficient for the network and storage. They usually only require one full to ever be taken. If you are paranoided about their block tracking and rebuilding algorithms, I'd recommend more frequent fulls. They also offer strong encryption.

They are running a special http://www.mozypromotion.com/?sub=gsp5&gclid=CPmlqreA06wCFYHe4AodYHDUqA