On 08/28/17 07:50, Josh Fisher wrote: > I have considered a cloud solution as an off-site storage, but abandoned > it for now for due to that very reason. Cloud storage is simply not yet > fast enough, or I should say that the Internet is not yet fast enough. > What if the restore would require multiple TB? What if even incremental > backups required large transfers, say for some data collection services, > busy mail servers, etc.? At some point the Bacula service would require > a dedicated Internet service or else dedicated bandwidth. Where I live, > that would make cloud storage the most expensive media. [...] > Nevertheless, I do believe cloud storage is the future for backups, or > at least as off-site backup storage. It is just a matter of bandwidth > becoming faster and cheaper.
I simply do not see Internet service — at least in the US — increasing in speed faster than robust, non-volatile local storage increases in capacity-per-unit-cost. Most of the US does not HAVE Internet service that meets the FCC's working definition of broadband, most non-business customers who *do* have access to broadband have only one choice, and at that ISPs have dragged their heels for decades on delivering. The telcos accepted vast amounts of government funding to deliver high-speed Internet service to US consumers, and spent it on building out cellular infrastructure instead because they could make more money off that. Verizon finally started rolling out fiber service to the home in 2005, and then five years after that they basically stopped expansion and sold off all of their northern New England physical plant to Fairpoint Communications because they were making more money off cellular. Fairpoint almost collapsed absorbing it, hasn't run a single mile of fiber since, promised to have broadband throughout New Hampshire within five years, and still hasn't delivered. Fairpoint has abandoned two infrastructure plans and has finally fallen back on ADSL over copper phone lines, which is laughable as a broadband solution. You may be able to get a couple of megabits down and half a megabit up if you're close enough to your nearest telco central office. I have small-business internet service through my local cable carrier, the only broadband choice available to me short of having them run a fiber link to me all the way from Boston, and with 4.5 megabits upload it would take me 27 days to run a full backup to the cloud, saturating my uplink the entire time. Then I'd have three to four days of usable Internet before the next full backup. And the odds are, the faster a connection you can afford, the more data you have to be backed up, so there's limits to how well throwing more money at your Internet service scales. Typical broadband internet - in the US at least - is going to have to become at least two full orders of magnitude faster before it is viable as a backup solution for anything significantly more than local settings and preferences, your email, and the contents of a typical cluttered desktop. If you need *FULL* backups and your only choice is to back up to the cloud, you're better off doing it by some form of continuous-incremental scheme such as nightly rsyncs. The US likes to think of itself as the world's technological leader, but in terms of broadband availability nationwide we're almost on a par with North Korea. -- Phil Stracchino Babylon Communications [email protected] [email protected] Landline: +1.603.293.8485 Mobile: +1.603.998.6958 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
