[There's a reason that Yoda is the unofficial mascot of SBS. Size indeed matters not.] YABV - yet another backup vendor - THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS DIVA
Thu, Mar 29 2012 22:34 bradley

YABV - yet another backup vendor

A few years ago at a SMB nation there were like 400 vendors of which 399 were backup vendors.

Okay so that's a bit of a stretch, but you get the idea.

Microsoft Online Backup Service - Windows Server Blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2012/03/28/microsoft-online-backup-service.aspx

So along comes Microsoft and offers ...yet another online backup offering.

Does it allow for geographic limitation of the data to not be tainted by the Patriot act?

Does is allow for fedexing and seeding of backups and restoration of backups?

'cause if you ain't got that honey, you are not bringing anything to the table.  And you -cannot- restore an online backup with any sort of reasonable recovery time unless you have a really really fat pipe.

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# About that Patriot Act stuff....

Friday, March 30, 2012 8:07 AM by Joe Raby

The big issue about Patriot Act grievances is that people don't realize that all of the North American backbone providers are US companies.  A lot of the European connections route through the US too, so if the US government wants to get at your data, they still have a direct on-ramp to your lane on the Information Super-highway.  That's a sad, sad truth about the Internet, and the Patriot Act was designed to allow for wiretapping anywhere along the chain of connections.  Love it or hate it, we're stuck with it.  If you don't like it, use direct, non-Internet routed connections between your systems.

Also, Microsoft doesn't allow for saved states in their server backup.  This is just a backup option for file servers.

# re: YABV - yet another backup vendor

Friday, March 30, 2012 12:34 PM by Indy

If you aren't using private encryption so that the backup provider can't see the data either, then you are doing cloud backup/storage wrong.

4th Amendment concerns are legit. Don't host client or ANY corporate data in the cloud, period, without private very strong encryption.  The U.S. government can and will seize data that they have no constitutional rights to.  We just haven't had it challenged in the courts yet.

None of these providers are prime-time ready yet.

I have been testing Backblaze and it has the option to ship you usb keys/disks with your data overnight fedex for a (reasonable) fee.  Even given top 1 Gbps bandwidth, it would almost still be faster to sneakernet the smallest data amounts to you via Fedex.

# @Indy

Friday, March 30, 2012 3:41 PM by Joe Raby

Encryption doesn't matter when it comes to cloud storage in respect to the Patriot Act.  If the US government wants to take packets from some back end connection, they will.  If it's encrypted, they'll make you decrypt it, or just go to the encryption vendor and force them to do it, or else just do it themselves.  Who is going to argue with them, after all?