Server Backup

[Sp!ke]

You should get a reasonable speed on these tapes... maybe 15-20Gb an hour transfer rate. It depends on a number of factors including the state of the server(s) where the data is.

If you use LT0's or something and you could achieve over ten times that throughput so the limiting factor here isnt the fact that you are using tape but the tape format you are using.

These tapes have a claimed shelf life of 30 years and a life of a million end to end passes. Compare that to a mechanical HDD. Not cheap though and perhaps overkill for a SME but somewhere in the middle like DLT might be a better compromise.

 

[Beetnik]

Forget tapes, hard drives, remembering to take data home with you of an evening, possibility of turning up and the building burnt down etc etc.

Having lost some significant data many years ago due to backup disc failure I'm very protective of my data. Now it resides on my pcs, server and backed up remotely in Sweden and the USA.

Easy and very configurable is mozypro which would cost you about $25 a month. Try a month's trial while you umm and aah about what to do next!

 

[WLeg]

Easy and very configurable is mozypro which would cost you about $25 a month. Try a month's trial while you umm and aah about what to do next!

and very expensive ! There was a disscussion here a few months ago about online backups. I went for carbonite (see previous post in this thread), as for $55.00 per year, per server I get unlimited backups. I am sure that other companies offer similer pricing. - I chose them as they were the award winners at the time, and I din't have the time to look into it too deeply.

Had to restore one file, for a remote server/user, all done in 15 mins.

 

[Beetnik]

I wouldn't knock Carbonite, I've used it but didn't find it as configurable or as easy as Mozy.

As to expense, the consequences of losing my data would be astronomical so the cost of preserving it is worth paying for.

I go back to my original point - offsite is the only sensible way to do it as far as I'm concerned and I'm not going to start carrying tapes, hard drives or anything else around with me all the time. Firstly, it's too much hassle and secondly it can still go wrong.

Six incremental backups a day and the ability to right click a file to then quickly and easily go back to previous versions is well worth paying for imho.

If you want cheap there's plenty out there, I've got 100GB of online storage and unlimited backups for any number of personal (i.e. not business) PCs with Diino (use it for the kids who are dotted about at various Uni's) for about £35 a year. It works but not so well as Mozy which for one personal PC is maybe $60 a year for unlimited backups - perfect for anyone with a large photo collection.

 

[Dryce]

Having lost some significant data many years ago due to backup disc failure I'm very protective of my data. Now it resides on my pcs, server and backed up remotely in Sweden and the USA.

Depending on what data you hold you may have to be careful with what you're backing up to a foreign location.

 

[Dryce]

you'd lose them all unless of course you used different HDD units on different days of the week.

It's not just damage in transit you have to worry about - there's also the potential for loss on site as part of the same event that causes loss to the data on the site.

And you have to worry about recovery strategy after you lose one of your sites.

Worst case happens. You lose your primary site completely. Hey but not to worry you have an off site backup that you can use for complete recovery. Then somebody damages that in transit to the new recovery site. Doh.

You need several drives or media sets and a robust rotation/archive/retirement handling policy to do it properly.

 

[Beetnik]

Depending on what data you hold you may have to be careful with what you're backing up to a foreign location.

Encrypted before it's sent

 

[timskemp]

Hard disk is fine - make sure you format all the drives identically and make sure windows sees them all as the same drive letter (you'll need to do this manually from Disk Management)

Bear in mind consumer USB hard drives are fragile, built to a price. Would recomment making a foam filled carry case for them for rotating them off site. If you're going disk to disk on the cheap use an imaging backup tool, Acronis is my choice when people insist on doing it this way.

I still prefer tape - If you drop an Ultrium cartrigde down the stairs it can be rehoused and restored cheaply, and it's cheaper to buy a proper 20 tape rotation of them than 20 hard drives, most people doing hard drive backup only do 1 or 2 drives, which gives them a DR plan but nothing more, if you discover that someone deleted a file three months ago on a 20 tape set you've got a month end tape from there with the file on, your hard disk backup may not do.

Most of my SBS customers regardless of other forms of backup have a hard drive with Acronis running nightly to it. Universal restore makes recovery so easy.