 Hello guys, welcome back to another one of my tech videos for the Daniel's Tech world medium channel and my YouTube account and so for this video today. I wanted to take a look at a multi cloud Multi cloud is an interesting tool and it's kind of I've been thinking a little bit about it this week Just because I have been on a backup backup bonanza I guess you could say of taking backups and making backups I've written about backups a little bit It's probably something nobody really wants to think about but it is good to think about it because Well, if stuff goes wrong, then you'd be happy you did basically So I've written about three to one rule for backups about how if you have your primary data source like your computer or your You know a server on your network or whatnot and that you should always have two copies of that two copies on Different storage media and working down the three to one system here That means for example that if you have your computer and you're going to take two backups Well, let's say one of those is on a drive in your computer a backup drive Which is a perfectly legitimate way to create one backup copy the other one could not be on the same storage media so that could be for example putting that on a External drive and if you just think about the practical reasons for all this it actually makes a lot of sense that if God forbid you your computer was zapped in a lightning surge or something like that and all the You know connected drives in the computer were completely fried If your two backups are just on different drives and that wouldn't make a lot of sense But just say they were Then you would have no backups if on the other hand you had your backup sitting in a tech Habit or just you know a tech habit or something else Then that might survive that lightning strike And then the final the final step in the three two one the one stands for one off-site copy So you should you should have one copy of your one backup copy of your primary data repository that is stir stores off-site So that's something like in the cloud it could be in your office It just needs to not physically be in the same place as your primary in your first backup copy so coming back to these kind of far-fetched scenarios of why that might be useful if you take the case of Hives that I don't know the The house caught fire again. God forbid Your house caught fire and that would mean that everything would be would be gone your computer would be gone your First backup even if that was you know somewhere else in your house would obviously be in synders as well and in that case if you had something off-site whether that was in your office or on a You know it could be a it could be like it could be a private cloud it could be a server you run in your office or it could be a commercially run cloud service like for example AWS S3 or Google cloud storage or Azure or whatever whatever whatever you're comfortable using whatever you are using the point of all this of all this Preamble here is to basically say that this should also be applied to cloud storage Cloud storage is a bit more debatable as to whether you need to back it up at all because The whole advantage of a cloud and what is a cloud is kind of a misnomer a cloud is just a publicly Managed data center really it's somebody else somebody else's server But that that has quite a lot of advantages that somebody else is managing the server. It's a professional server It's a managed server The where the data center which the server lives in is going to have power redundancy and stuff like that That would just be kind of impossible to really set up adequately and cyber security. I should have added added added to that list So you can't really replicate that in a home environment But at the same time it is prudent and best practice and I would say you know Take backups of all everything that you are in any way uncertain about Even if it's that's like a hosting company, you know, they might not be they might provide backups But they will not be responsible if you screw up if you screw up your stuff on the cloud and it gets destroyed so don't in order to not rely on The backups of other people and to keep your own to keep your own stuff your own This is a reason why backing up clouds is good. So more clouds comes into this picture because it's a cloud to cloud backup service basically So more cloud works. Basically, you're just adding your clouds Into more clouds and then you're using it to sync and move stuff across So I subscribe to this service premium for many years a little bit embarrassing that I'm now on the Freebie tier the free the freebie tier. I'm on it now because they don't really use this all that often anymore And the advantage of getting it to a paid on I think is you just got better You got better backup More options as we'll see shortly in the type of sync and the and the limit is higher It's worth pointing out just one thing while we're talking about cyber security it's one concern about the service that I certainly have and I'm not really using it for anything majorly sensitive. So I'm not super worried about this for that reason, but You know, it would be it is prudent to just kind of investigate the company behind anything that has access to your data So as you can see in the footer here where my cursor is this is made by a company called AOMI tech and You can go on to the website and check out there Not super glowing Reviews on trust pilot. I certainly have a bit of questions particularly. I think it's a Taiwanese company These are Taiwanese or Chinese. I can't tell what these the difference between these three variants of that alphabet are I'd be a little bit kind of concerned about that and imagine that some Companies would not be able to use a tool like this just for that very reason that it would be considered questionable They do say that they manage your data what not carefully wonderfully and all that but You know, it's basically up to you as to whether you want to rely upon What companies say and and take it as unquestioned truth or whether you're not going to do that So just that's just kind of a side note about this thing So let me was that as it was that aside. Let me show you the whole how this works So basically you you create your cloud you kind of just create your own little cloud network here And again, this is this is for cloud to cloud backups. This is the use I'm showing demonstrating for it The advantage of cloud to cloud as opposed to home to cloud. Let's say is a typically Cloud stuff is closer to the core of the internet. So you have faster exchange speeds I know for example that might upload my uplink here at home is Pretty terrible. It's like two megabits per second and that makes Transferring multi even, you know, 10 gigabyte transfer could take something like 10 hours. So it's not really feasible When you're using cloud to cloud you might find that you're you're moving data quickly over a good protocol between two Good data centers and that can really speed up and their up links might be as fast as your down links So basically in terms of the cloud coverage here that more cloud offers. It's pretty good I would divide it into a few different tranches. You have your main. Let's say the let's call these consumer facing You know clouds your Google Drive all the major ones Dropbox Dropbox for business one drive They have the main ecosystems all covered nicely here Microsoft Google Dropbox as well as a couple of more obscure ones As you can see, I'm a fan a massive fan actually of P cloud. They also have mega And then they have that's that category Don't forget on cloud on cloud is pretty cool And then they have the next one I would say is these kind of like individual services. You're looking at Flickr You're looking at Evernote. You're looking at That would really be us in terms of the biggies then the you know the big Professional places to put your data. They have those two most importantly. I would say for my purpose. They have S3 They also have back plays and they have webdav webdav is a kind of slightly old school protocol HTTPS protocol for transferring stuff into webdav servers So that's really it and in terms of FTP worth pointing out that they they do support SFTP over port 22 So if you're concerned about the security of unsecured FTP transfers as you should be Then you should know that you can use this to to drive FTP transfers across port 22 Use over SFTP. So basically connecting stuff is just a case of You know, if you just want to create an S3 bucket, for instance You can just if I can get back to where I was for a second add cloud drive and You know go on to Amazon S3 and you'll just need your access key ID and your secret key in the bucket name You don't actually need the You don't need the Location in which, you know, which SW3 region it's in So that's that and then once you have them connected now I'm just going to show you what you can do just kind of what I'm doing the various Permutations of what's possible for backups. So let's say I want to do Let's actually go into sync over here. I want to cloud explorer by the way Just lets you look into clouds and see what's there So let's take a use case here of I'm backing up my P cloud and you know, this is one cloud Data source I'm using so according to my 321 methodology I should be keeping that two copies of it to keep the first copy Keeping that somewhere locally is pretty simple. I would just you know I can just compress P cloud into a nice little tar or tar GZ or a zip archive and keep that Either on my computer or I can keep it on an external drive And let's say I also want to keep it somewhere in the cloud somewhere else in the cloud I should say So that if P cloud were to lose all their customer data tomorrow, I would have a I would have a copy of it somewhere So your source volumes on your left and your destinations on your right And what you can do is you can do a two-way sync or a one-way sync And you can just give it a nice description. It's gonna call this P cloud to s3 And this is kind of something I actually do use all the time because s3 is just so affordable for storage And I think that for the small cost You know, even if you could argue that there's no point backing up your Google Drive or your Microsoft office or What have you basically? I Think that for a few dollars per year or a few tens of dollars per year or whatever it comes to for your storage costs in s3 I think it's very smart to have them somewhere else in the clays and they're not trying to Maybe a bit of modest to call myself right this really isn't isn't my idea And I'm sure there are alternative approaches, but this is one that just Does a trick pretty easily in the grand scheme of things So this is a backup I've made for my client backups and I'm just gonna I've created a little folder here Now the little kind of workaround trick is if you're on the if you're on the unpaid tier What you can do is just create three subfolders here And you could call those, you know, you could call those for example, this is pCloud now This is there's pCloud here because I've got it. I've done something weird in my pCloud for Back of purposes and created another folder called pCloud at the root of pCloud. Usually you wouldn't have this You could have for example weekly Then build out another folder called monthly Did you get me and then another one called daily and you could just kind of have three snapshots Running at all times and just create a sync from a daily sync to this one a monthly sync here in a weekly sync here I'll just nuke these after the video is done Right, so that's that so let's let's just put it in the top level folder pCloud now You have pCloud on the left and s3 my bucket here and that on the right Lovely now what you can do two cool things in in more clothes here You have a number of different sync types now the simple one is a simple sync as the name says it's just going to move stuff Across basically add and modify deleted will be replicated and in the target So this is actually fine for simple backups, right? You're just going to literally move across from source to targets You can go for one of these more exotic ones now I did have I did use this actually to sync Google Drive and Dropbox for a few years and Was kind of hard to set up The problem is when you're doing this in Google and Dropbox and people are You're telling them there's a sync and they don't listen and ends and add stuff on The target namely Dropbox. That's when stuff gets a bit confusing, but it did work in the end So that's for backup purposes. The simple sync would work. Okay. If you're using my approach here I've just shown of creating three points obviously this will add to your s3 storage cost because You know, you're going to have three times the the data moving across But as you said, it's relatively relatively small money. We're talking about here mirror sync Will Will basically knock off extra files on the target site So if you have stuff being added to target, this will destroy them when it sinks move sync I'm just gonna I'm just gonna run through the rest of these pretty quickly. I'm not actually totally a Couple of these I've not used like move. Oh move actually just moves it. It literally will Move everything from source to targets Cumulative sync I Will ignore deletions in source. They will not the deletions will not occur on the target Update sync The target will be deleted and then that modified added and modified files in the source will be transferred to the target directory Now incremental backup and full backup are relevant for that for this backup discussion So presuming that you know, you know people watching this video know the difference between full backups and incremental backups This one will create a source directory just for the incremental so That could work with some people. So in other words, you'd have you know, you could take a main or first Snapshots and then put the incremental backups into their own folders and that will that will create the folders automatically That might be a little bit tricky for restoring stuff, but the final one here is a full backup Now this will kind of do the job I was talking about except the problem is and this is why I'm telling you about this the daily weekly monthly approach This will do it every single time. So if you set this up to run weekly, let's say on a schedule You will eventually end up with 52 Weekly and this will batch them into their own folder you end up with 52 folders in here And yeah, that could end up to something substantial in data and it'll just accumulate and accumulate Until such time as you as you stop it. So sim simple to three ones kind of controls sets the amount of snapshots you want to keep In the target cloud. So let's just just to show how this works, right? I already have have done this process yesterday Finally, here's where here's where you can set a schedule. You can run this up to three times daily You can run this Weekly on a certain day and set a certain time I can and you can do multiple options here Like what run it every Monday Tuesday and Finally, you can run it you can run it on a certain day of the month And this is just basically I guess creating creating, you know cron jobs on the on mull cloud server Let's say I'm just gonna do this I can set it for you know, I can create a weekly job over here save schedule and that's really is What you can do then is you can either add this to your task list and sync now or You can just add it to the task. So I'm gonna actually start the sink and just show you how this works now you need to click on this guy up here task manager and You can actually see all your all your sync jobs in progress over here. And as you can see I have this is just started and you can click down into details and you can see It gives you a whole report here. How many files it's at the kind of file checking stage. It tells you basically, you know, you're The the time left in the elapsed time and the start time and everything all the details are there as well So that is really it and the final thing to say is that you can get an email alert I'm just gonna take that off So that basically you'll get an email when it's finished so that is basically That is basically how it works more cloud. As I said, I do have Press marks about the the security of it, but if that if that were not something of particular Concerned to you and you're happy with transferring stuff, you know between Between between two cloud buckets over a protocol you're happy with Then I think it's a it's a very good tool. There aren't really many tools Like it on the market that I'm familiar with at least And it's certainly like I will say this that it's very very reliable. I've had a couple of things running for years at this point and When we were looking at syncing a Google Drive in a dropbox a few different tried a few different tools And really more cloud was the only one that did the did the job very very capably every time without any problems That's it. That's my video for today. If you've any any questions or thoughts or feedback or anything like that My email address or just go on the website Daniel Rose Hill to Allison Rose Hill or OSC H as the American say or H as the British say HILL.co.al. Thank you for checking out the video