The MongoDB Backup Service, now in limited release with general release slated for the summer, lets customers determine how often they want to back up their databases at colocation facilities 10gen uses. If a user wants to back up every six hours, for example, then that user has many options to choose from in the way of restoring a database to a previous state. They can choose the version from six, 12, 18 or 24 hours ago. Restores require two-factor authentication and work across multiple shards. Customers pay only for the amount of backup that they use.

10gen, based in New York and Palo Alto, Calif., expects the service to be a hit not necessarily with big companies but with small and medium-sized businesses. “It allows them to focus on building out applications instead of worry about this operational part of the infrastructure,” said Kelly Stirman, director of product marketing at 10gen. Regardless of company size, the feature could be valuable for anyone working in Mongo with larger data sets.

Beyond that, backing up means users can move data from a production environment into a testing environment to look for issues so their production environment won’t be affected.

While many MongoDB users already back up their databases, the systems are typically homemade, Stirman said. The MongoDB Backup Service, by comparison, is more reliable.

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The giant retailer uses Oracle databases and Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) to automate backup using robotic tape library systems. The cost of all that back-up paraphernalia was non-trivial so when Oracle brought out Oracle 10g with updates that let RMAN back up directly to Amazon’s S3 storage service, Amazon saw an opportunity to cut out the backup middleman, er robot.

According to a recently released AWS white paper describing the process:

We incurred significant capital expenditures over the years for tape hardware, data center space for this hardware, and licensing fees for tape software. In addition, it’s been difficult for us to hire engineers with the requisite experience for operating such hardware. We knew that Amazon S3 could reduce these costs to near zero.

The problem was while tape robots perform basic read/writes,  Amazon also needed sophisticated (read: pricey) tape backup software to provide additional capabilities. A move to S3 would obviate that need.

Amazon Web Services, acting as IT supplier to its parent company, tested out the new scenario, using an Oracle white paper as a starting point, comparing relative costs, data security, availability and durability considerations of old and new configurations. The decision was made to make the move

The transition to S3-based backup started last year and by summer, 30 percent of backups were on S3; three months later it was 50 percent. The company expects the transition to be done by year’s end — except for databases in regions where Amazon s3 is not available.

The diagrams below outline old vs. new set up.

One plus is that Amazon.com DBAs like the change. As Amazon.com grows, so does its databases. That causes tape backup and restore operations to take much longer. With S3 backups “DBAs don’t have to contend for available tape drives anymore, and in the case of disaster recovery, they don’t have to wait for hours while a backup is restored from tape,” said Dalibor Marceta, database engineering manager for Amazon Merchant Technologies, according to the AWS white paper.

Amazon cautions that cost comparisons are tricky. For tape backup you have to consider overall spending on the hardware, backup software and the tape itself, then factor in depreciation and cost of adding hardware over time plus the cost of retaining people to physically manage and maintain the hardware and resolve contention issues. Amazon S3 cost, by comparison, can be found by multiplying the size of database backups by S3′s per-GB price multiplied by the frequency of backups plus the AWS bandwidth charges for outbound data.

In this case, Amazon estimates it’s saving more than $1 million a year in hardware and software costs and — perhaps more importantly — it no longer has to hammer out separate contracts with tape hardware and software vendors. And, AWS said it takes less than half the time to back up a database to S3 compared to tape.

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1. Set up Time Machine

If you aren’t using Time Machine, it’s time to start. This is your first, best line of defense on a desktop or laptop. Backups made using the built-in OS X feature are non-intrusive, and recovery of files is nearly instant. Although external hard drive prices are high right now, most everyone will benefit with Time Machine. Hook up an external hard drive and OS X will ask you to use it for Time Machine. I generally recommend getting a hard drive 1.5 times the size of your internal drive.

2. Set up online backup the proper way

I suggest online backup services as your second line of defense. It’s important to keep backups offsite in case of a disaster or theft at your location. If you do your initial backup all at once it can take months and you’ll find you are missing a key file just when you need it — I wrote about how to optimize your strategy here – and be sure to leave your computer on and awake if you want your backup strategy to work. Also, please remember that sync software like Dropbox isn’t a true online backup system, since it has the ability to remove files.

3. Back up your online email system

If you use online email systems such as Gmail, you need to back that up as well. Don’t rely 100% on your provider. Your account could get hacked, or you could accidentally delete your email. Follow this guide on backing up your Gmail using POP access. A similar strategy would be applicable to Hotmail, AOL and Yahoo (though Yahoo may require a paid upgrade to do it).

4. Test your backups

I’ve written about this before, but if you aren’t testing your backups, how do you know if they’re working? Do you know how to restore in case of disaster? Trust but verify as they say. Simply try restoring files from your backups to make sure they work as expected.

5. Back up your iOS devices

With iCloud, backing up to your computer isn’t technically necessary because you can restore from the cloud. On a practical level though, that takes time, and there’s also no guarantee your backup will always be there when you need it. At least every month, it’s important to hook up your iOS device to your computer for a quick and immediate backup of your data. To do a manual backup via iTunes, follow these instructions.

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Get settled in for the long haul

One of the key downsides of online backup is the time it takes to actually get your initial backup into the cloud. Some companies such as CrashPlan and DollyDrive allow you to ship a physical hard drive to “seed” your backup, greatly reducing the amount of data that needs to be transferred online initially.

If you aren’t with these companies or want an alternative, you can create a tiered backup strategy. If you do it all at once, it can take months and you’ll find you’re missing key files when you need them. Here’s what I typically recommend in terms of a staged approach for the average user:

1. Work first. Realize that while most people say pictures are the most important items to back up, those typically take the longest to upload. I prefer to start with the Documents folder. These typically are probably the hardest to recreate, as well as being time sensitive. This is the folder you’re also working in most often, so you may be more likely to accidentally overwrite things. If you use Outlook or Entourage, exclude the Microsoft User Data as the database for those email programs tends to be huge.

Keep an eye on the backup program, and make sure it not only successfully backed up that initial folder, but is also correctly backing up changes daily. Typically this takes just a few days. Once you have that folder backing up, the next folder I suggest is the Desktop folder. For convenience (and a bit of poor training), many users keep documents on the desktop rather than the Documents folder.

2. App and system settings. Next is the Application Support and Preferences folder in your user library folder. These contain the settings for your various programs as well as some supporting data files.

After you’ve got those critical files happily updating it’s time for the bigger folders such as email and the rest of your library folder. Email, of course is very important and annoying if lost, but often it’s already stored elsewhere, like on your email provider’s servers.

3. Photos and home video. Once you’ve got the documents and various support files and folders, it’s time to tackle the photos. More and more users keep copies (albeit at a lower quality) on services such as Facebook and Flickr, as well as sync photos to their iPhone, so it probably isn’t so urgent for most. What I do recommend is to spend some time and back up your photos manually by periodically burning them to disc from iPhoto. Be sure to keep these disks offsite in case of disaster, maybe with friends or family.

4. Music last — or not at all. Finally, after these elements are successfully updating each day, it’s time to back up the rest of your hard drive and can go with the software’s suggested recommendations. You might think about excluding your iTunes folder, however. With iCloud and iTunes Match, you might consider waiting on these folders or not backing it up at all. A large media library can choke a backup system for months without a large return on investment. While Carbonite or Mozy is trying to back up a movie you ripped off of DVD to entertain the kids on your last road trip, it’s missing the actual pictures from the trip. Which are more important?

General tips

A general recommendation I have for the initial load is to upgrade your broadband speed, at least for a month or so. Most companies will give you a free trial period of around 30 days at a higher speed in hopes you keep the service. Take advantage of that and upload like crazy, although be careful if you use a metered service not to exceed your monthly bandwidth limit.

Make sure your Mac doesn’t go to sleep during the initial backup period. I’ve seen clients subscribe to an online service and never get an initial backup because the computer is shut down when not in use. Unfortunately, they often learn this when they try to restore after a disaster. Ouch.

Each hard drive is unique, so your data may not conform to these guidelines, but consider a game plan for your initial backup and make sure that you stagger that backup so at least something new is being backed up every month. Nothing hurts more than to have a data disaster and find you’ve been paying for a service and it hasn’t been backing up the stuff you want.

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Cloud storage is so popular because it’s relatively inexpensive and nearly infinitely scalable. It also provides a level of disaster protection, because unlike just adding more hard disks on-site, the data is actually stored in a different location. To this point, however, most cloud-storage offerings (e.g., Dropbox or Backblaze) target consumers or small businesses that have fewer security, availability and compliance restrictions than do large enterprises.

Other cloud-storage offerings, such as Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloud Files, are object storage systems ideal for developers writing cloud-based applications. However, while they’re certainly not designed for consumers, neither were they designed with demanding enterprise users in mind.

Zetta's storage architecture

Zetta is one of a small number of companies targeting enterprise storage in the cloud, with the other big name being Nirvanix. Zetta offers a standard storage service in which its cloud appears just like another drive on a company’s network, as well as a replication-and-protection service called Zetta Data Protect. All of its services tout robust feature sets to ensure that data is always secure, available and recoverable.

Nirvanix, for its part, has raised $45 million. It has taken a somewhat different tactic, doing cloud backup via a REST API a la Amazon S3, but layering on enterprise features. Additionally, Nirvanix also sells hybrid and managed on-premise offerings.

However, while a lot of investment cash is pouring into cloud storage, and there’s a provider for nearly every audience, it’s still all about backup. Storing primary data in the cloud still sends shivers down the spines of risk-averse CIOs, for reasons of security, availability and performance. A few companies, such as Nasuni and StorSimple, tout primary storage in the cloud, but they rely on physical on-premise controllers to handle low-latency data access and certain security capabilities.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user zzzack.

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1. The “best fit” solution

Most won’t have a cloned backup of their drive on hand, I’m guessing. The good news is that performing a clean wipe and install is a good idea for general maintenance of your Mac. The bad news is that in this case, you really have no choice. Here’s how to save what you can and get back to Snow Leopard, provided you have a Snow Leopard install disc (including the one that came with your computer, if it’s a recent purchase). This method also erases the emergency recovery partition Lion automatically installs.

1. Backup your User folders to an external drive. This should preserve your documents, photos, music, etc. If you store those things in locations not in the User folder, make sure to copy those over too.
2. Insert the Snow Leopard disc. Restart your Mac and hold down C to boot to your DVD drive.
3. Go to Utilities in the menu bar once the installer pops up and select “Disk Utility.”
4. Find the drive in the sidebar where Lion is installed, select it and navigate to the Partition tab.
5. Click on the drop down menu under Partition Layout and select “1 Partition.” Hit Apply.
6. Now navigate to the Erase tab and make sure “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” is selected, then hit Erase to delete all data on the drive.
7. Quit Disk Utility to get back to the Snow Leopard installer and proceed with the install.
8. Restore your User folder and documents from your backup.
9. Run Software Update to get everything current, install your apps from your original install media and update those as well.

2. The “best case” solution

If you managed to clone your drive (Dave describes how in this recent piece) before you installed Lion, which you should do if you haven’t yet taken the plunge, then you can get everything back the way it was.

A popular option for cloning your drive is Carbon Copy Cloner, which is a handy utility to have for any Mac owner. Assuming you’ve done that, follow the directions above to get your drive primed and ready, but stop at step 6 and follow these instructions instead.

Now you’re ready to install Snow Leopard from your Carbon Copy Cloner backup. Here’s how to do it:

1. Attach the drive containing your CCC clone to your Mac.
2. Open System Preferences, then go to the Startup Disk preference pane.
3. Chose your CCC external drive as the startup disk.
4. Restart and launch CCC, then choose your backup from the “source” menu.
5. Select your Mac’s internal drive as the destination.
6. Chose “Restore items from a backup” from the settings pop-up menu and hit the “Clone” button.

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Updated: The cautionary tales around broadband caps are trickling in, with the latest coming from André Vrignaud, who detailed in a blog post his experience of being cut off from Comcast’s Internet service after going over the company’s 250 GB per month broadband cap two months in a row. He’s justifiably outraged because he now has no Internet and he didn’t really seem to have a lot of options offered before he was cut off. My colleague Mathew experienced a similar issue with his cap, and I suspect the two stories have something in common — the cloud.

Or rather, backups of huge files. After Mathew was forced to become a network cop and figure out why he was going so far over his monthly bandwidth allotment of 95 GB per month, it took him about a month to determine the culprit — an inappropriately configured cloud-backup service with Amazon. Judging from Vrignaud’s story, he may have hit his cap doing backups as well, since he describes backing up RAW image files and FLAC audio files to a recently purchased Carbonite subscription. He also describes streaming Netflix movies and Pandora in a home with multiple roommates, as well as working from home on digital files. We’ve driven this point home before in a multitude of posts about how caps harm innovation and how they will catch more and more users over time.

But in reading this case and talking to Charlie Douglas, a Comcast spokesman, several other issues around caps came up. Issues that are more important as more users have caps. I’ve long appreciated that Comcast’s cap was pretty fair: It discloses the limits, it has a reasonable network management plan, it offers a meter and — most importantly — the cable provider says that as the median usage increases on its network, it will raise that cap. However, since the cap was implemented in 2008, when Comcast had a median usage of between 2 and 4 GB per month across its entire network, the median usage has risen only to between 4 GB and 6 GB per month. The cap hasn’t increased by a commensurate amount and Douglas was adamant in pointing out that using 250 GB a month was way above normal usage.

But what I took away from my conversation with Douglas is that the web ecosystem is failing consumers (and maybe teleworkers) when it comes to broadband and cloud services. Here’s why:

When there’s a problem, it’s hard for a consumer to know what to do: Mathew and Vrignaud both tried to take action to reduce their bandwidth consumption after being called on their excessive usage. Both failed at first to solve it after taking actions such as turning off public access points (and in Mathew’s case checking for an infected computer). Both of these guys are pretty technically savvy so imagine what happens if a normal person gets such a call. ISPs don’t provide the appropriate resources beyond notification and what Vrignaud called a “canned response.”

As people adopt cloud services, those providers don’t think about broadband: Short of Netflix taking up the crusade against caps, we don’t see Amazon, Mozy or Carbonite helping to educate users about how their services and settings for backups might influence their broadband caps. I don’t think they should have to get into this education campaign in an ideal world, but for now, we live in a world with caps. Helping customers avoid getting kicked offline or charged extra for overages is good customer service.

Residential service isn’t clear-cut anymore: When looking at this guy’s usage, it’s possible that he was using his connection for work, which prompted Douglas to point out that he had signed up for a residential connection. This is a common ISP response when people bemoan their limited caps in the context of uploading files or sharing videos as part of their jobs. But when I asked if Vrignaud would even be eligible for a business connection, Douglas didn’t know. He said that the business people would want to make sure the connection was for a legitimate business which means they would ask for a Tax ID number or some other verification. While a freelancer might have that, a remote worker wouldn’t and would then have to get their employer involved in getting a connection. In some cases, although not necessarily in this one, folks in residential areas cannot even get a business connection. Update: Vrignaud said in a conversation and in his latest blog post that he is trying to get a business connection, but it doesn’t look good.

In my many stories about broadband caps these issues haven’t really come up very often, but I think that’s about to change. And it leaves me with more questions than answers. As residential broadband becomes essential for how we do our jobs, as well as for consumer entertainment and other web-based products, it’s time for big companies to start taking a hard look at how ISPs policies will affect their employees and their ability to offer services and perhaps give a call to their favorite lobbyist. If left unchecked, this won’t stay a consumer issue for very long.

As for Comcast, when I asked if customers were getting caught in its cap more often, Douglas replied,”We don’t disclose, but logically people are doing more online and have more devices. Far less than 1 percent of our customers should ever get a call from us.” That’s not a real answer, but with 17.4 million broadband subscribers it sounds like we should expect to hear more stories on this issue in the coming months — but fewer than 174,000 of them.

Thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr users Ryan Franklin and Arthur Caranta

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Step 1: Get up-to-date

Make sure everything on your Mac is up-to-date before upgrading to Lion. First of all, make sure you’re running the latest version of OS X, which is Snow Leopard 10.6.8, using Software Update. Software Update will not only check for updates to OS X, but also firmware updates or new versions of Apple applications such as iTunes or iLife. You can find Software Update under the Apple logo in the menu bar. You should also check that your applications are all up to date, but for that you’ll need to check in the apps themselves, since Software Update only works for Apple products.

Also note that you can only install Lion if you have Snow Leopard installed; you can’t go straight from Leopard to Lion.

Step 2: Backup

You’re about to replace the entire operating system on your computer with a new one, so it’s a good idea to make a backup, just in case something goes wrong. The best thing to do is to create an exact copy of your Mac’s hard drive using a tool such as SuperDuper!. SuperDuper! can either perform a regular backup, or create a bootable clone of your hard drive, meaning that if something does go screwy, you can boot from the external drive you made the backup on. From there, you’d be able to try to sort out the problems with the Lion install.

If you don’t want to, or can’t, make a full copy of the entire hard drive, then backup your most important files and folders. Your Home folder is a good place to start, since it probably contains a lot of files that are irreplaceable, like photos and home movies. The Home folder is the folder named with your username, and is found in /Users on your hard drive, or under Desktop in the Places menu in your Finder sidebar.

You can either use Time Machine or SuperDuper! to do this backup, or simply just drag and drop a copy of the folder onto another hard drive. You might want to look around in the Finder to check for other important folders which aren’t in the Home folder, as well.

Step 3: Remove incompatible apps

Lion is going to be the first version of OS X which doesn’t support PowerPC applications. That means any application without an Intel-specific version won’t work on Lion, and is best uninstalled.

In order to find which of your applications are PowerPC only, you can use System Profiler. Hold down the Option key, then click the Apple menu. The top item in the list should be System Profiler. Click that, and System Profiler will open. In the sidebar, find Applications under the Software heading. After a few seconds, a list of every application installed on your Mac will appear on the right. Now go through the list and for each application, look at the Kind in the bottom pane. Applications which say either Intel or Universal are fine; they’ll work on Lion. You’re looking for anything which says PowerPC.

If you find any PowerPC applications, you’ll want to uninstall them before you install Lion. You can also check your other apps as well to make sure they will work with Lion; some applications are bound to have issues, even if they aren’t PowerPC applications. A great way to check is using RoaringApps, a website which is gathering data about which apps are compatible with OS X 10.7.

Step 4: Make space on your hard drive

A typical install of OS X usually takes somewhere between 6 GB and 10 GB of hard drive space. You’ll need to make sure you have at least that amount, and preferably more, free on your hard drive in order to install Lion. To quickly check how much space is available on your drive, open a Finder window to any folder on the drive. The amount of free space available will be shown a the bottom of the window.

If you find that you don’t have enough space left, you can use a tool such as OmniDiskSweeper to find the biggest files and folders on your hard drive. Once it’s been through your hard drive, you’ll see a list of everything, sorted by size. Anything that has a large file size and you no longer need, delete in order to make room for Lion. Remember, the more space you have available when it comes to upgrading, the better.

Step 5: Install Lion

Once you’re sure that everything is as ready as it possibly could be, your Mac is now prepared for the upgrade to Lion, which should arrive sometime within the next couple of weeks. Are there any vital extra steps I missed? Shout out in the comments.

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I suggested some reasons why to encrypt your iOS backups before, the main one being that your data is then protected. But this new software, called Phone Password Breaker Tool, is available to anyone wishing to pay a small fee for it. It’s being marketed as a tool to ‘recover’ password-protected devices, but it could also be used as a way for hackers to get access to your phone backups.

Able to get past the encryption on backups of both Apple’s iOS devices and BlackBerry devices, Phone Password Breaker will not only reveal the password set on the backup, but also extract passwords for mail accounts, websites and third-party applications — data that could be of great interest to malicious characters.

Luckily, the software requires the device to be physically connected to the computer in order to crack the encryption. That’s good news, since a hacker will need access to both the device and your computer — and if you’re sensible with your hardware, that isn’t likely to happen.

However, as Cult of Mac notes, it’s perfectly possible that a partner or other family member could grab your phone and take a sneaky look through your recent call history. If you have anything to hide (that call to the jewellers to arrange to pick up the engagement ring you bought, of course), make sure you keep an eye on where your phone is. To be really safe, remember not to store anything on the device that you wouldn’t potentially want a stranger reading.

Like I said, as long as you have your phone with you, there’s no need to worry, since physical access is required to use the tool.

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Online Backup

Online backup refers to copies of files that are directly accessible. Some examples of online backup would be copying files to USB thumbsticks or an external hard drive, and cloning a drive with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper. Online backup is convenient because you don’t need any additional software to get access to the backup files and you save the time that would be spent on restoring files from some other type of backup archive. Cloning is particularly good for system drives because you can boot up your computer and get to work right away instead of waiting to reinstall everything or restore files from a backup archive like you would with Time Machine.

Examples:

• USB thumbdrive
• External hard drive
• SuperDuper! clone

Nearline Backup

Nearline backups are usually saved in an archive format that is saved to storage that is directly attached to the computer, or available on the same local area network. Nearline backups use additional software to manage the copies and provide some additional benefits like compression, incremental updates, versioning of files, and maybe even centralized administration and security. The disadvantage of nearline backups is that you can’t boot from them if your startup disk is down and you can’t directly access the files if you take the backup drive to another machine. Time Machine is the most familiar example for Mac users, but other software like Retrospect can be used this way too.

Examples:

• Time Machine
• Retrospect
• Tape drives

Offsite Backup

Offsite backups are simply copies that are stored in another physical location from the computer. The purpose of offsite backup is to protect you in the case of fire, theft, or some other disastrous event like a lightning strike or flood that would destroy both the computer and the backup storage next to it. Offsite backups, by nature of being physically removed, take time to recover and restore and are really only there for catastrophes. You can rotate physical drives offsite, use cloud backup service like CrashPlan or a filesync service like Dropbox.

Examples:

• Second Time Machine drive
• Cloned drive
• CrashPlan
• Dropbox

These different layers can be combined to provide you with the right amount of protection for your needs. Here are three ways that a casual, moderate and hardcore user might implement online, nearline and offsite backup for their important files.

Casual

Online

• Copy your most critical files to a USB thumb drive. Repeat this process every quarter.

Nearline

• Buy an external hard drive and turn on Time Machine.

Offsite

• Take a second USB thumb drive with critical files to work.
• Get a free Gmail  account and email an encrypted disk image (use Disk Utility) of your files to yourself (don’t forget the password!).
• Get a free Dropbox account and copy up to 2 GB of files.

Moderate

Online

• Clone your system drive to an external hard drive with SuperDuper! Update your clone at the beginning of every month.

Nearline

• Use Time Capsule for automatic network backup. If you have a laptop, don’t underestimate the convenience of having Time Machine just run while your computer is on without having to remember to plug anything in.

Offsite

• Buy more storage from Dropbox or…
• Sign up for CrashPlan, possibly the best cloud backup service for Mac users

Hardcore

Online

• Clone your system drive to two different external hard drives with SuperDuper! Take one clone off site and rotate them every week.

Nearline

• Time Machine with Time Capsule.

Offsite

• CrashPlan
• Dropbox in addition to Crashplan
• Second cloned drive
• If you’re really, really hardcore, set up a second Time Machine drive and rotate that offsite as well. You will have to manually switch drives in Time Machine preferences each time you rotate the drives.

Whatever your level of preparedness (or paranoia), there’s a backup strategy for you. Take a little time this Worldwide Backup Day to choose one and implement it before you have a reason to regret putting it off any longer.

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