Backup Strategy

[greggpb]

We had a hard disk failure yest.. luckly the server was in raid 1.. so we ok..

but we have been using raid as out Back up

Looking at how to do backup going forward, we are mirroring

- Directory structure
- MsSql Databases
- PostgreSQl databases.



What do people recommend ?

I was thinking :
1. Live server server with raid 1
2. Then backup server with raid 1 to miror primarty server
3. Backups - we have previously mirrored everything. shoudl we be keeping backups ? once a week once a day ?

looking for sort of best practises


Many thanks
Gregg

 

[Sinbad]

Yes you should definitely keep backups - and if possible keep them (or a copy of them) offsite.
RAID will not protect you from data loss caused by a virus/bug/user error etc... or by theft of your equipment.

Do a full backup once a week, and either incrementals or differentials every day, depending on how much your data changes. To restore from a differential you need the last full backup and the latest diff, from an incremental you need the last full and all incrementals since that...

 

[greggpb]

Thank mate,
Something like this ?

Full Backup 1
Incremental 1.1
Incremental 1.2
Incremental 1.3
Incremental 1.4
Incremental 1.5
Incremental 1.6
Full Backup 2
Incremental 2.1
Incremental 2.2
Incremental 2.3
Incremental 2.4
Incremental 2.5
Incremental 2.6

Full Backup 3
Incremental 3.1
Incremental 3.2
Incremental 3.3
Incremental 3.4
Incremental 3.5
Incremental 3.6

So this would mean I have a 2 week rolling backup

questions ?
do I back up the database seperatly or do I do a full backup everyday and then usea backup program to include them in my file system back

 

[Sinbad]

Depends how big your DBs are. If it's practical, simplest method is just to export/dump them daily and allow the filesystem backup to back that file up for you.

 

[greggpb]

full db backup is about 4gig dif are about 50meg..

 

[Tim the Techxpert]

Full backup at least once a week and incremental in between.
Remember though that a backup is only good if you can restore it so you need to test your backup as well as doing it.
I would suggest the approach be to test the backup at least once a month.


Regards

Tim

 

[CataclysmZA]

Tim's got the right idea. This is the programme I gave to a small business that kept mission-critical software on their server, and they only had one.

1) One Full backup of the server monthly on a separate external hard drive. I suggested a 1TB drive despite the fact that their server was a mirrored 250GB array. The idea was that they could store four month's backups so that if they needed something from the previous months like a registry value or .dll file that changed since month 2, they could retrieve it with ease.
2) One Weekly incremental backup using four 250GB drives, one labeled for each week. The data on those drives was only remived right before they would start the backup.
3) One Daily incremental backup using either six or five 16GB drives. Because the company wasn't yet open on Saturdays, they only needed five drives because the server wasn't in use during the weekend and was idle, the sixth was added later.

This is an approach commonly known as Grandfather-Father-Son. Its the one approach to backups that takes the longest time to complete and requires more meticulous planning, but does offer a much faster turnaround time. If the server fails for whatever reason, you load up the last monthly backup, the last few weekly backups and the daily backups up to the day before the failure. Since the company had their daily sales data replicated on their workstations, figuring out which sales and which amounts were involved the day of the failure was an easy task.

Since the mission-critical software was Pastel and Payroll, I also configured a daily backup on IronTree. If everything went balls-up, at least their business data was safe. That's what I recommend. If the cost is too much, you can scale back to Tim's suggestion of a full backup each week and a daily incremental one, using two drives for the weekly backups and five flash drives for the daily incrementals. You'll have to test with daily incremental backups and see on average how much data changes on the server per day and base that average on the size of the flash drives you'll need to buy.