After speaking with quite a few people over AIM earlier today and over the course of the past week, I've been doing quite a bit of thinking and this service was brought to my attention .

When it comes to online communities, there's one thing larger "Big Board" communities administrators have that smaller to medium size communities do not and that's a reliable backup solution for their community.

Yes, I'm aware most shared hosting providers do provide a form of data backup for their clients, however, these backups are not always reliable and are often outdated. For those running on a VPS, you're normally stuck managing your own backups. In the event of hardware failure, there's only a slight chance that you'll be able to recover your data from either hosting solutions.

Those operating "Big Boards" either have multiple hard drives to their disposal, they've invested in an online backup solution, or they simply have multiple servers to use. The difference is, smaller communities simply don't have that type of revenue, most barely cover their hosting and licensing fees (for those that use commercial community software, such as vBulletin).

With that in mind, Jason (a long time friend of mine) and I were sitting down over 2 extra strong espresso's from Starbucks and came to the conclusion that small to medium sized community owners need a solution too.

We're looking to bring you guys the solution, but we need your help! We need to know if you would be interested in such a service, if you would use the service and if you would help us to spread the word about the service.

We're looking to provide each community administrator using the service with 500MB's to 1GB of backup space, which is enough to rotate daily backups for a week for most small to medium communities . We'd be utilizing RAID storage and multiple hard drives, ensuring a backup of your website would be available.



If you have any questions or comments, I'd love to hear them. Feel free to contact me on AIM: ForumSupplies or via e-mail at jonathan@forumsupplies.com.

In the end, we're just thinking of something new to help make your lives a bit easier, but we need input first and what better way than to ask a group of administrators ?

It would be an interesting concept, but you would need not only storage space, but at the very least a secure means in transmitting the data to the backup location. I think any administrator willing to send his data over an un-encrypted pipe would be nuts.

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While you raise a valid point Larry, the backups web hosting providers secure and not generally passed through a secure pipe (by means of encryption). Backups are often sent to a secondary or tertiary hard drive or they are off-loaded to another server specifically for backup purposes.

The server we're looking to take on, should we have support for the project, will not be used specifically as a web-server and will be secured. Data will be replicated across multiple drives and accessible only to the community administrator. Security precautions will be taken to limit access to all areas of the server, basically placing a "lock-down" on un-needed services.

Encryption isn't something to be overlooked, I'd be crazy to say "why worry about it", though securing the pipe the data transfers through means nothing without server security as well. It's not as easy to pluck data being passed through SSH as it is to breach an unsecured server .

Again, a very valid point and a note has been made .

I say encrypt the files before thransfering?

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Well that isn't necessarily needed if you are giong to tunnel through an ssh connection via sftp or something of the like. There are a lot of ways to do it, it is just a matter of making sure that there is atleast one method available.

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I think that this is a great idea. Security and reliability are obviously the most important factors here...As a forum owner, I would want to rest assured knowing that my backup is completely secure...that nobody other than myself and the backup administrators can access my files. It could be taken even farther to model a safe deposit box where not even the backup administrators can access the files...but that could present problems if there is a technical glitch.

Reliability would be even more important...I'd want the backups there consistently and would want access to them 24/7/365,

These things may seem obvious, but without either of them, I'd consider a service like this useless. I'd love to see something like this be developed...I know that I have always struggled setting up a backup solution that I'm satisfied and comfortable with. It's definitely a problem that a lot of community administrators face...I know a lot of people don't even have backup solutions because they have no idea how to set one up or get discouraged when they try to do it and fail...Somebody else doing it for you has just not been an option.

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On the side of security, the server itself would be on lock-down. It would be used for nothing more than backup storage, meaning typical web services would be disabled or shut down. Backups would be transferred using SSH. The easiest I've found is using SCP as it is very reliable. SSH would of course, be jailed, limiting you to your directories and yours alone and would prevent browsing outside of your own.

In regards to reliability, we would be looking to secure a server with a reputable provider with scalable hardware for expansion.

With that, we're faced with 2 options, given enough interest. The first is to roll this out as a free service and the second is to offer it as a commercial solution.

The first is what I would like to see happen, however, to make that a reality we would either need to line up a sponsor for the dedicated server(s) it would require or open up donations and hope for the best.

I was actually under the impression that this would be a paid service, because it's hard for me to see somebody offering a quality backup service like this for free. If the service is easy to use and is reliable, I can definitely see a lot of people paying a subscription fee to use it...as long as the price is right

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I personally wouldn't use this, it seems in-secure, and i currently find my current backups reliable. (cron job to be made every 6hours, saved to the server, with the 3 latest backups available, in case of errors, and every 3 days, the 3 latest transferred to my PC)

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What do you feel would be a feasible monthly fee for such a service? What should be included with the service (i.e. disk space, bandwidth, additional services, etc)?

Still looking to get a few ideas. It still remains 'on paper', so the more ideas we have to go with, the better a solution we can work to develop .


@Captain Kirk:

What specifically seems insecure about the service? As above, we're looking to get a feel for the need for such a service, so we are fully into exploring all areas. This isn't something we're planning to launch in a day, so input is greatly appreciated!

Specifically, such a service, in my mind, would be more secure than reliance on the backups your web host would provide and they would not be prone to infection from viri in the case of accidental infection of your home PC.

Please do not take that as a personal attack on your comment, I am simply stating that if the service was locked down to where services that are most commonly attacked are shut down and the backups are protected through redundant RAID storage, security should not be an issue.

Passing data over an encrypted URL should not be an issue either. A secured certificate will cover such. From there, it is merely ensuring the data is available when needed. Given we select a reliable provider and build the machine ourselves, data loss should not be a factor, especially when RAID is used to ensure data is replicated across multiple drives.