Hi everyone, can you please give me some ideas of the best media to use for server backups? We are a small business running a server with obviously very important data on. We need to perform backups on a daily basis. Whats the "going" backup strategy that you guys use? Tape backups? Removable HDD? Network HDD?
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Small business backup options?
- Thread starter JJRM
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The ideal solution would depend on your budget and volume of information.
What sort of data needs to be backed up? Databases? Single, large files?
Anyway, I have heard great things about http://www.r1soft.com CDP, I am considering implementing it for my clients. That would obviously be network storage and for a very organised setup.
Removal hard drive would be the other better option, especially for off - site backups.
What sort of data needs to be backed up? Databases? Single, large files?
Anyway, I have heard great things about http://www.r1soft.com CDP, I am considering implementing it for my clients. That would obviously be network storage and for a very organised setup.
Removal hard drive would be the other better option, especially for off - site backups.
slayerza
Senior Member
Networked storage with RAID config and removable HDDs for offsite backup. Although this might be overkill for a small business.
The_Techie
Resident Techie
rwenzori
Honorary Master
You've first got to work out the amount of data you have to back up. Very often there is lots of old historical **** that does NOT need daily copying but can be copied say 3 times and stored. Removable drives are not so sensible IMHO, especially for off-site backups ( which you need to have ), as they will soon bug out with the daily or weekly schlep to the offsite location. Network HDD is also a bad plan without the offsite procedures - think fire, robbery ( hmmmm.... wot a lekker NAS device, I'm sure I can get $$ for that ). Make sure you have copies of critical software keys and media offsite too, for the day you get to the office and find it burned down. And do regular test restores to make sure all is working.
Oh, and don't dump magnetic media in the boot of your car next to that motherfscker of a subwoofer LOL!
Oh, and don't dump magnetic media in the boot of your car next to that motherfscker of a subwoofer LOL!
Its primarily a file server. Initially, obviously, we'll need to do a full backup and then just store offsite. But on a daily basis we'll need to backup db's so worst case scenario if stuff goes awry, we lose only a days work. We had a network HDD but it failed on us unexpectedly so now the boss is very skeptical about getting another.
rwenzori
Honorary Master
Some ideas. Never do a single full backup - you are going to look like a poephol when it cannot be restored for some reason. Look into RAID for when them pesky HDDs fail.
Arthur
Honorary Master
Thoughts: How important is the system/data to business continuity? How confident of recoverability do you want to be? Do you want to restore just data, or the whole system? How long can you be without a server if say it burns or gets stolen?
Increasingly I'm seeing businesses of all sizes using Acronis True Image Echo Server for Windows.
If it's on MS SBS, there's a special lower-price version of Acronis True Image Server for SBS.
Increasingly I'm seeing businesses of all sizes using Acronis True Image Echo Server for Windows.
If it's on MS SBS, there's a special lower-price version of Acronis True Image Server for SBS.
What's most important to us is the data. The server can go down and we'll be able to work a few days even without it until we get it going again. Its the data that we need to protect. Is the Windows Server 2008 backup utility not an option? We evaluating SBS2008 currently
+1
Thats what we do, RAID PCI card thrown into an old P4 is cheap.
Throw in a weekly rotation of CloneZilla for the other office PCs and its exactly what we do.
We use 2 removable drives. One stays offsite and the other on, backing up at night, then the next day they get swapped out. So lose 1 day of data if the server goes down before the backup/server and backup get stolen.
We backup our data, from various servers to amazon S3, using a combination of rsync, s3fs and jungledisk (depending on the server of course). Once you've created the initial archive (pretty BW intensive depending on the data) the daily updates are fairly low in terms of data over the pipes. Of course we encrypt all the data, both in transit and for storage.
That's good thinking - good use of utility computing you got there.
Im using an NJC version for my business , running sql, exchange 2010 and server 2012.,took some configuration to get the DB's working but works out the box. i think its roughly 400pm for the cloud backup licenses, right now i dont have the money for a tape drive and someone to swop tapes on a daily basis, check www.ibsafrica.co.za