Online Backup Strategy
Here's a few pointers that I'd be looking for:
- Transit costs (transferring data to the backup provider)
- How cost effective is the service given the size of the backup (100GB will cost a fortune, 10GB not so much)
- How will the data be stored by the backup provider
- Will the data remain within this country (be that US, EU, etc..)
- How will I access the service? Can I use rsync or do i have to use a custom client?
- How will the data be encrypted?
- For any given provider, what happens if they go out of business?
- Related to the above, What is their history like, how stable are they, etc.
- What is their network infrastructure like?
- Are they compliant to PCIDSS, SOX, ISO9001 or whatever accreditations mean anything to you.
The one thing that everyone seems to forget about is restoration after a disaster. If you've got a small quantity of data, there's no real problem, because you just copy it back over the network. However, if you've got a growing data set that could ever get pretty large, the amount of time (and possibly traffic costs) required to copy all of that data back onto your live setup to restore operation is likely to be prohibitive.
Remember that you can't generally start copying all your data back until your storage infrastructure is in place, so you can't easily parallelise the data copying and hardware setup. It's a big problem that not enough people think about.