Implementing a Server Backup Plan

[robertwj]

For those of you who are administrators of servers, what backup plan have you implemented for daily backups, weekly and also backups of exchange?

I was thinking of using NT backup with a plan as follows:

Monday - Full Normal Backup
Tuesday - Incremental
Wednesday - Incremental
Thursday - Incremental
Friday - Incremental
Saturday - Incremental
Sunday - Incremental

I would do this to a NAS unit and then also dump these backups onto an external one a week to keep offsite.

Does this sound effective and what could i use for backup of exchange?

 

[fonoi]

I use both a sync backup and a tape drive for redundancy, the sync backup goes to one of our other offices and the tape backup gets stored offsite. Normal Monday through Friday tapes are rotated on a 3 week schedule so there are three sets of tapes.

Monday - Incremental
Tuesday - Incremental
Wednesday - Incremental
Thursday - Incremental
Friday - Full Normal Backup

Also Last Friday of every month - Full backup that gets stored offsite for 5 years.


Our offices are closed on a Saturday and Sunday so no need for backups on those days. I also run the full backup on Friday night as this can take quite a while to complete with the amount of data we backup.

 

[robertwj]

Sounds like a solid plan. Thanks for the input

 

[ghalied]

Sounds good, but my 2cents

Full Backup on a weekend, friday eve kick off, sure your usage are lower over a weekend, backup overuns into say Sunday, gives your the opportunity to amend the routine, thus not affecting users and infrastructure during normal business hours.

GFS rotation

As fonoi, last Friday of the month, swap to monthly tape, every friday, swap to weekly tape

Incremenatals fir week days, depends on your backup data sizes

Exch, just do mail db's and pub db's if you have pub folders, quickert to build a new exchange platform than restoring a backed up version, just a fookin ball ache it is.

Got backup licences, do exch mailbox, brick level backups, restoring options so much better.

 

[SBSP]

I have had an issue with my backups, in total i have a little less than a TB of data to backup.
We make use of a NetApp device which is basically a glorified version of LVM Snapshot, but based on unix and not linux.

It has 12 x 1TB drives which has been arrayed in Raid with a software raid/volume manager on top of the hardware raid.
The device also has batteries to rollback or complete tasks, when the power fails, over all the device is pretty much safe.
It makes 3 backup snapshots a day and keeps the last 21 backups of a file, by use of "Previous versions" in windows when you right click and select properties on a folder via mapped drives.

Problem is its obviously not disaster safe, all the backup software that i have tried including Symantec backup exec does not like
the like the fact that is making use of an emulated Microsoft network (Samba), and it does not have an agent for symantec to feed the backup server with data. even though you can clearly see its interface is unix based, its been modified and almost a NetApp proprietary OS.

We adopted the use of this thing via our mother company in Europe (Costed us R260 000), they set up netapp devices between offices and snapshot back and forth and keep each others data safe, since we are based in SA and i cant transfer changed data over the WAN , i'm sort of left in the dark with this, Local NetApp support is also not so available as its more the Dutch companies that like these NAS devices.
And they don’t know how to help me.

So here is what i do.

I have a Ms Server 2008 T310 Dell Server , with robo copy from mapped network drives , I have set it to copy to a local drive on the server after the batch file has completed it runs another one to copy all of the data from the local 1TB drive to a removable 1TB drive.
And I send that off for offsite backups.

Reason for the first copy is for when someone incase deleted something or restored when they didn’t have to, then I don’t have to pay R1000 to bring in the drive I want.