Underground Backup?

[chjade84]

So i was thinking of a way to get our company away from tape backups (at least do them less often) as we currently incrementally backup every day to one tape and every weekend we do a full backup which takes two tapes. The tapes are then taken to a safety deposit box, every day. We are close to physically running out of time in the day to do these backups due to their size alone. The second tape in the weekend backup gets put in on Monday morning and takes till 1 PM to write.

Myself, being a younger person and somewhat of an engineer at heart, wants to find a way to do all of this in a way that is easier for everyone and is cheaper than upgrading the tapes and drive (~$2000 and someone still drives to the bank every day). I have thought about off-site backups but our internet connection is limited to a partial T1 due to our physical location and budget. 65KB/s up simply won't do for 60+GB per day and 100+GB each weekend.

The other IT guys are concerned about storing backups here in any form. We have RAID set up but if a tornado, fire, flood, etc. takes us out we loose everything.

So I thought to myself, what about storing our data underground? It would certainly be safe from a fire or tornado. With water-proofing it would even be safe from a flood.

My NAS would look something like this:
-Intel ATOM Processor and MOBO (for size, low power consumption and low heat output)
-6 64GB SSD drives in a Triple Parity RAID (again, for low heat output and reliability)
-The other applicable hardware of course

Seal all of that in a watertight PVC tube filled with non-conductive mineral oil (to keep things a tad cooler and to keep the water out and eliminate condensation)

Connect that to a double surge protected power source with UPS and connect data with a fiber-optic line to minimize lightning strike effects. (Lightning doesn't like fiber right?)

Bury all that under the frost line (perhaps in concrete) and we should be good to go, right?

This could be (probably is) overkill, but anyone have any thoughts? Is there a better (cheap) way to backup data off-site quickly without trips to the bank? Anyone have any experience with underground data vaults?

Thanks!

 

[jerrardo]

If you make it waterproof then it is air-flow-proof as well, and you are going to have some interesting issues with heat. You could do a really long heat pipe for all of the components. I know some question the number of writes a SSD can take, but if I remember correctly there is a much smaller chance of hardware failure. That might be worth looking into.

It's fun to daydream about these kind of things, but I doubt your company is going to trust their data to a DIY project.

 

[chjade84]

Well i was thinking that being underground should keep the PVC at about 60F and the mineral oil would be a good enough conductor to keep the small amount of heat produced by this thing under control. Pretty much only the processor should produce noticeable heat.

I remember seeing that flash drives can only take 10,000-100,000 writes (from someone on the FreeNAS forums about running FreeNAS from a flash drive) and at essentially one read per day that should last at least 20-50 years; if that guy was right. I'm not sure how many reads/writes are preformed during a backup though.

The one nice thing is that everything we do here is DIY. We design and build custom, one-off automated machinery so if they didn't like the idea at least I shouldn't get laughed at. 😉