Stop Frontin’, Back Up

Chill Uncategorized

I can answer this!

But first, most places are terrible at backups, and it’s (usually) not the fault of IT. It’s often lack of budget — leadership does not prioritize backup as it looks expensive on paper and isn’t needed often. But when it is needed, damn you really need it.

So let’s look at a small city like Riviera Beach. It’s got about 35,000 residents and probably around 350 city employees (full and part-time). That’s at least 400 workstations to back up. The workstations, though, aren’t that important comparatively. Still, we’ll include them.

It’s hard to know the exact IT infrastructure of a town — it varies too much. But we can make some guesses and generalizations. A small town will be keeping long-term records (usually in PDF or TIFF format), do GIS, HR, etc., and all the ancillary data to support that. Say it’s 50,000GB, total, just for the server systems. That’s 50 terabytes of data that would be vital to city. Again, that’s just a guess, but I bet I am not too far off (been working in IT a long time).

If their IT department is competent enough, they can build a 100TB NAS dedicated to backup for about $7,000. Use something like Veeam Backup and Replication to back up the vital server systems — that should enough to keep about 180 days worth of backups. Veeam would add about $10,000 in licensing to that cost.

There’s $17,000.

For long-term backups (usual dance of monthly/yearly/every seven years), you would need to go offsite, of course. Backblaze B2 storage is a good choice for this. A year of this for 50TB of data plus monthly increases would be about $3,050 a year.

The 400-ish workstations are a harder task, but also far less important. I wouldn’t consider backing up the entire workstation — too expensive what you get. I’d set a policy of only backing up user profiles, and only certain folders at that. That’d be about 10TB of user data also on our NAS, which should fit fine with de-dupe and compression. First, I’d put it on that aforementioned backup NAS and then I’d move it also into B2 storage, with a 180 day-retention period.

That’s another $640 a year.

So, let’s look at our backup costs:

Server/infra backup: $17,000.
Offsite long-term: $3,050
Workstation backup: $640
Labor/setup (est): $40,000 (assuming two employees take two months to set up all this and cost is $100 per hour. This is probably an overestimate because I could set this all up by myself in about two weeks)

Cost of decent backup, including labor: $60,690
Cost of paying hackers: $600,000
Savings from good backup: $539,310

As I noted, there a lot of assumptions and unknowns here. I can guarantee, though, that my costs and estimates aren’t that far off.