The Golden Rule

I can't help but agree with the sentiments expressed by Paul Randall regarding how we behave towards each other.

Online Backups

No, not the ones you do while your database is available.
This is about the backups you might do to an internet storage provider.

In the recent past I've had two PC failures;
The first was due to a house fire - while the fire wasn't that serious the resulting smoke damage was.
Second was a hard disk failure in my laptop.
For both of these I was able to recover most of my data.

My laptop is sync'd to a network drive at work - but that task isn't scheduled and I tend to run it only when I'm in the office (better network).
Aside - I use SyncToy for this, works a treat.

My other PC is backed up to locally attached storage.

There are problems with this backup strategy (if you can call it that):

1. None of the backups are scheduled so there is plenty of scope for data loss.
2. Laptop backup (sync) is only really effective when it's connected to a decent network.
3. Backups to locally attached storage can be lost.
   Which is exactly what happened to my PC - both my PC and the backup storage were too smoke damaged to recover.
   On that occassion I was lucky to have a (not very) old backup disk.

I've been looking at sending my backups to an online provider over the past few weeks.
There are a lot of them but, in my view, the best is BackBlaze - they offer unlimited storage for $5 per month.
BackBlaze are different from most other providers in that their backup is opt-out rather than opt-in. Which means you have to decide what you don't want to backup rather than what you do. Having started the free 15-day trial period the BackBlaze software told me my backup would be complete in 95 days.
Bear in mind that my ADSL connection has a 40GB/month cap and I'm regularly using 20GB/month that backup period would be more like 180 days - and I'd have to monitor the backup and pause it when I got to my ADSL usage limit.
Don't know about anyone else but 6 months to complete a backup is just too long.
However, I wouldn't hesitate to recomend BackBlaze for smaller online backups.

My backup requirements now are:

1. Local backup for speed.
2. Enough local storage to backup all PC's and (maybe) keep multiple versions.
3. Offsite (maybe online) copy for security.

Now looking at available NAS; and I'm not mad keen on paying nearly £1K (for several TB) for what is essentially a Linux server with a browser based UI. There are also very few NAS available that run ZFS.
As a format, ZFS has a number of attractive options, e.g. compression and de-duplication. The best implementations (in my view) of ZFS are based upon penSolaris and there are several of those and I've looked at most of them (in VM's).
My current favourite is OpenIndiana (OI), several reasons for that:

1. The desktop version of OI runs GNOME and is usable as exactly that, a desktop. It also includes all the ZFS features that you would need to run a storage server.
   My thinking here is that I could use the storage server as my main PC and do away with some of the desk clutter (power,video,USB cables, etc.)
2. Compared to other GNOME desktops I've tried the OI seems better defined - maybe it's just fonts but it seems easier on the eye.
3. An impressive range of packages available that you won't find on Linux, e.g. Crossbow for network virtualisation and zones for lightweight machine virtualisation.

ZFS and OpenSolaris it is then - all I need to do now is build the server.

In case you were wondering - there will be two of these servers.
One on my local network and another located at a distant neighbour with replication both ways - that way both of our data sets are secure.

Did you know #5

I still find scheduled jobs running DTS packages using DTSRun with encrypted parameters.
While it isn't possible to decrupt the parameters there is a manual way to achieve the same result.
From a CMD window:

C:\Test> DTSRun /~Z0x<paste rest of the encrypted hex string here> /!X /!C
DTSRun:  Loading...
DTSRun:  Executing...
C:\Test>

At this point the actual DTSRun command, including package name is on the clipboard.
Paste it into your favourite editor to see the result.