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On Tuesday, one of my colleague’s apartment caught fire. While both her and her husband escaped unscathed, a number of their belongings did not. Which led me to reconsider a number of things, including my backup strategy.

One of the things that’s always bothered me about my backup strategy is that while it protects against stupidity (accidental deletion by me), malice (intentional deletion by malware) and failure (hardware crash), it doesn’t really offer any way to protect against catastrophe. Catastrophe, in this case, includes things like fire, flood, lightening strike or tornado, where I’m likely to survive, but I don’t have a chance to take my things with me, as well as those instances where I’m not likely to survive – say an attack on Washington, D.C. While I can’t do much about the latter case, I’ve been trying to figure out how to protect against a human-survivable catastrophes, like those in the first case.

Essentially there are only two things I need saved: my passport, and my data. Everything else is expendable. So my first instinct was to buy a safe and a hard drive to put into said safe. Therein lies a problem: putting a hard drive in and out requires manual intervention to actively save the data, and inevitably, catastrophe is likely to strike when the hard disk is sitting outside in the process of backing up. Plus, for years now I’ve considered non-redundant backups to be the height of heresy – my RAID 0 array is a collection of RAID 1 arrays, soon to be a RAID 0 array of RAID 5 arrays. (And that’s just the first line of defense.) So, next step is a simple RAID 1 array of the most important data – except, you can’t get RAID 1 hard drive casings any longer, and besides, you want simple, so that you can recover even if electronics are soaked, burnt or bashed.

So, by this time I’ve reached a toaster-like device (D-Link DNS-321 or similar) permanently connected, and located inside a fire proof box, with flat wires coming out through seal. The only problem is, running said cables – no matter how flat – will destroy the seal, making the fire-proof box not very fire-proof, and hence essentially useless. So then I thought about online backup services.

I have two major problems with online backup services: (a) the privacy of the data; and, (b) the survivability of the company. While the privacy of the data can be assured reasonably well (why hello, Truecrypt volume, how do you do), the survivability of the company becomes a major concern. So-called well-recommended firms like Box.net and Mozy have only been around for a few years (if not months) and without any idea of how they are performing financially, I’m loathe to let them act as my backup provider. Those companies with a track record which offer backup services, however – Amazon’s S3, for example, or Microsoft’s Live Drive – do not use standard protocols like SFTP, or heck, even WebDAV for transferring files; nor have Microsoft or Amazon ever had the slightest hesitation in killing off service offerings that were unprofitable for even a short time. Thus, even if the company holding my data survives, the service may not. (Though, one thing to consider: an added benefit of using an online provider is that it offers survivability against theft, which none of the other options do.)

So, I’m back where I’ve begun – how do I prevent data loss in the case of a catastrophe? One option I’m thinking about is setting up a toaster-like device at my folks’ place clear across on the other side of the globe. But that would require: (a) my parents leaving their connection on 24/7, which I know they are loathe to do; and (b) likely a trip to configure everything there. I don’t know what I’m going to do as yet – and I’m hoping to find out what all of you do. Any suggestions?

This time last week, DC was under a snow watch, with about 20cm of snow expected, temperatures around -5 (and dropping), and the airports closed (which was a real problem). Today, it was 25, and its not quite the equinox yet. All signs point to a pretty brutal summer ahead and I’ve started developing coping strategies – both for myself and my cat, and my machines. For the living creatures, this is pretty simple: cold water; but the computers present a problem.

Last week, I was using the machines to provide some heat by leaving them on; today all the computers (save for one) are silently suspended to disk. The problem is the one that’s still on – my home server. While it caught the tail end of summer last year, since then, more drives have been added and the amount of work its doing has increased. Last year, each disk was reporting a temperature of about 46-47 degrees; this year, the added drives and load is already resulting in disk temperatures of 50+ degrees. This is despite adding another fan to the case, and improving the ventilation where the system is located.

I’m tempeted to do to it what I presecribe for humans – cold water – but it both seems silly and unnecessarily risky (not to mention, expensive) to take a chance with my home server getting drenched because of a water leak. So, I ask: any suggestions? Something relatively inexpensive I can do to improve the temperature of the case? Some things I’m considering: replacing the steel case with an aluminum one; replacing the 35W Celeron with a 12W Atom, replacing the two sets of 500GB drives with one set of 1TB, disconnecting any drives not actively being used, setting up the system to sleep and WoL if it hears a device calling for it… But I would like to take the server down once only to implement all the changes… so any suggestions?