IT Nerds – I am working with a small company, about 50 users at this site right now, that are all migrating our data to servers and off local PCs. The worthless contract IT group we have has a piss poor box set-up with a 500GB HD in a RAID 1 set-up. I’m a bit anxious about losing tall of the data and am getting tired of mirroring it to my laptop every night (greeaaaat system).
What should I be looking for in terms of providing some backup for this data? I’m used to having automated nightly tape backups that were over written once a month or something like that, but I’d think in this day and age I could get ET to phone home and dump all of the stuff to a remote server so it was backed up off site too, suggestions on what I should be demanding from these nuckleheads?
Budget probably isn’t an issue for the right solution.
Right now we have ~100GB of data. It is mostly word files, the amount of content change on a daily basis probably isn’t HUGE. We do have large piles of CAD files, but those aren’t updated all that often.
I’ve always been a fan of LTO3 400/800GB backups for that amount of data. It allows for growth as well as off-site storage.
At our one office with 22 users, we use a 114T. With 45 users we have a 132T. And I won’t get into what we have for our 250 user site…
Dell PowerVault 132T library -> holds 12 tapes so you don’t have to manually swap every day.
Dell PowerVault 114T single drive -> swap out the tape daily.
LTO-3 400/800GB tapes are fairly inexpensive now
Backup Exec 12.5 has always been a favorite of mine. Great support and works awesome once configured.
I don’t know your budget, but I agree that a RAID-1 configuration just don’t cut it.
LTO-3 = tape backup accoridng to google. Is the benefit there that you aren’t using a proprietary tape? I’ve never looked in to this stuff before.
132T seems like a great option (changing tapes with no one responsible for it is going to be a bad idea).
What about options for sending things off site?
What does a 132T system start at? I’d assume that with 12 tapes I’d just keep taping over, perhaps with a once a week off site backup or something like that. Would be nice if I could do a differential backup to somewhere online. Like I said, I haven’t looked in to this much, was looking for suggestions on where to start.
I appreciate the suggestions.
Data is pretty priceless… I would think I could justify a good system, but I’m sure that is a battle you guys know more about than me.
I only work in the home user market, so i don’t know much about business backups. So is there anything for businesses like windows home server? it creates a nightly image of every hard drive in the network, but it’s only a differential image every night.
Then do tapes for Week 1-Week 4 on every Friday and I would also suggest monthly.
Depending on the amount of data you have you might be able to get away with 2 nights on one tape.
Make sure someone does a test restore from time to time off the tapes I find people do tape backups for years and never test a restore then realize their tapes are shot.
I would probably bring the data off site also.
There are other solutions like offsite back up to a 3rd party site over a WAN link but that depends on how much you’re data changes from day to day and what kind of bandwidth you have.
If you have a bigger budget you can look into a entry level MAID(massive array of idle disks) its basically a server with a bunch of harddrives and you’re back up software treats each HD like a tape in a tape drive. The benefit of this is quickly being able to restore data.
So tapes 1-4 would be daily for M-Th, tape 5 would be a backup of tapes 1-4 and friday?
I would probably bring the data off site also.
something like taking the monthly tape to iron mtn or something?
If you have a bigger budget you can look into a entry level MAID(massive array of idle disks) its basically a server with a bunch of harddrives and you’re back up software treats each HD like a tape in a tape drive. The benefit of this is quickly being able to restore data.
What are we talking (rough ball-park order of magnitude numbers) for an LTO system vs. MAID?
First question how much data currently and what is expected growth?
Second question is taking data off site a requirement or not?
If there is no offsite data requirement I would look at EMC Avamar Appliance it is realtively speaking low cost solution that can deduplicate(google for explainaton pretty simple concept) data.
If you want to offsite look into buying a tape drive and using backup software and take tapes offsite.
Second question is taking data off site a requirement or not?
Not necessarily, but it would be nice in the event of a fire or something, it could be far less frequent than the routine backups.
If there is no offsite data requirement I would look at EMC Avamar Appliance it is realtively speaking low cost solution that can deduplicate(google for explainaton pretty simple concept) data.
If you want to offsite look into buying a tape drive and using backup software and take tapes offsite.
EMC Avamar is a software solution for backing up over WAN/LAN it seems?
I know it seems silly, but why not just designate someone in the office (trustworthy and dedicated to sticking around) to take a copy of a tape home with them once a month? It’s not ideal, and certainly not nearly as good as an off-site backup service, but in the case of your office flaming up, you might actually have a chance of recovering the data.
EMC Avamar is a software solution for backing up over WAN/LAN it seems?
Negative, it can do WAN replication and wan backup but it is a Appliance (basically a server with web interface for configuration) and the box you want to back up gets a avamar client, it works almost like all other back options out there but it is disk based.
Disk based is much faster and dedupe is a nice way to reduce your backup footprint over time. A idea solution if can be afford is use something like Avamar then spin off to tape from Avamar’s tape out and off site that.
This is a great topic. Thanks Walter for Bringing it up. My office is in a similar situation where backup isn’t really taken seriously. I tend to back everything I have up to an external drive and bring it home, but it is far from a good solution. I’ll have to look into some of the solutions that were given here to see if they fit what we are looking at as well.
The boner of a IT group replied with the fact that we’re using a USB backup nightly and differential backups nightly to remote server. He told me “no one in industry uses tape any more” I made the ::ugh::picard: