backup solution

Gaz1988 · 10 May 2010 at 16:24

Hello,

Friend of a friend has asked me to help them out with backup solution for their small company.

The network consists of one server with 160gb worth of data and 5 windows XP machines.

I was thinking a tape drive is probably a bit OTT for the size of the network and thus was going to suggest external hdd's as means of backing up.

any suggestions would be grand,

thanks.

Over Clocker · 10 May 2010 at 18:08

Secure remote backup all the way!

Gaz1988 · 10 May 2010 at 19:31

Over Clocker said:
Secure remote backup all the way!

for 160gb worth of data? wouldnt that take months to transfer on your average ~8mbit connection?

droyden · 10 May 2010 at 20:00

Depends how often it changes, one big upload over the weekend then just incrementals.
Also, what are the backups for? DR or just incase people delete things they shouldnt?
For DR it should be off site, otherwise (or aswell as, ideally) you could get a decent nas for fast restore locally..

Gaz1988 · 10 May 2010 at 20:14

my calculations show just under a month to upload 160gb worth of data on a standard 768kb upload speed. i think the local nas box/external hard disk drives might be the way to go.

Over Clocker · 10 May 2010 at 20:42

Gaz1988 said:
for 160gb worth of data? wouldnt that take months to transfer on your average ~8mbit connection?

You didn't really specify they were on an standard ADSL connection.

Also, what are the purpose of the backups? Offsite disaster recovery, recovering the odd work doc etc??

Also, 160GB, when compressed with a good backup solution would be more like 100GB.

#Chri5# · 10 May 2010 at 20:53

Find a solution / service that can do an initial seed via a USB drive, then you just have to worry about the changes. A reasonably clever solution should also just send the delta changes - as a rough example, if a 200MB file was edited but only 5MB changed, only the 5MB of changes would be sent.

mrbios · 10 May 2010 at 20:59

Does the server support RAID1 and Hot swap drives? Could always configure it as such and just whip a drive in and out and store the other drive somewhere safe, do a rotation to keep it all backed up

Combine that with shadow copies and you can then restore individual files on the fly as well as having a full backup

Probably not the ideal solution mind you but just thought id add it to the list of ideas

EDIT: what the hell just tried to edit this post and instead of "save" i had a button saying "vote now" o_O

Over Clocker · 10 May 2010 at 22:42

#Chri5# said:
Find a solution / service that can do an initial seed via a USB drive, then you just have to worry about the changes. A reasonably clever solution should also just send the delta changes - as a rough example, if a 200MB file was edited but only 5MB changed, only the 5MB of changes would be sent.

Aye, this is exactly what we use and sell to our customers. It's very popular with small businesses for the reasons you have posted!

bigredshark · 11 May 2010 at 09:19

mrbios said:
Does the server support RAID1 and Hot swap drives? Could always configure it as such and just whip a drive in and out and store the other drive somewhere safe, do a rotation to keep it all backed up

Combine that with shadow copies and you can then restore individual files on the fly as well as having a full backup

Probably not the ideal solution mind you but just thought id add it to the list of ideas

Please do not ever do this. It's a horrible solution that will (and deserves to) go wrong at some point, if you're really being that cheap backup to a USB hard drive or something. Regularly deliberately breaking your RAID set is a bad idea...

bigredshark · 11 May 2010 at 09:26

#Chri5# said:
Find a solution / service that can do an initial seed via a USB drive, then you just have to worry about the changes. A reasonably clever solution should also just send the delta changes - as a rough example, if a 200MB file was edited but only 5MB changed, only the 5MB of changes would be sent.

That's a good solution but unfortunately those solutions tend to be the more professional level online backup products, you aren't talking mozy/carbonite prices generally, more like somewhere between 50p and £1 a gig per month, which even with compression is going to come to £100 a month, which makes a tape drive economical quicker than you think.

Ph4lanx · 11 May 2010 at 09:51

LTO solution perhaps? OK it requires changing the tapes, but I think LTO2 or higher should see it OK. I don't think it's OTT to be honest.

lazer46 · 11 May 2010 at 10:00

What about sharing an external Hard drive between the PC's, use something like Rich Copy to back up? Also, if very important data, surely that can be backed up online? If its not too large?

mrbios · 11 May 2010 at 11:26

bigredshark said:
Please do not ever do this. It's a horrible solution that will (and deserves to) go wrong at some point

hmmm i was recommended to do this on one server by someone i regard to be one of the smartest people i've ever met, we swap the drive once a month on one particular server (only server i would never recommend doing it on is a DC) we've never had an issue with it in over a year of drive swapping, why would you say it is such a bad idea?

SimonR · 11 May 2010 at 12:19

If you want a simple solution, have a look at EMC Retrospect. It will backup the server and all of the PCs. I used to use 3 external HDs, 2 doing incremental backups (alternatlively) and one for a monthly backup. The 2 incremental backups were stored in a fire safe each night and the monthly (or you could do a weekly) backup was taken off site.

You can even download a free 30 trial from their website.

Mushii

bigredshark · 11 May 2010 at 19:03

mrbios said:
hmmm i was recommended to do this on one server by someone i regard to be one of the smartest people i've ever met, we swap the drive once a month on one particular server (only server i would never recommend doing it on is a DC) we've never had an issue with it in over a year of drive swapping, why would you say it is such a bad idea?

It's something which mad sysadmins suggest. It's simply not designed to do it and you're asking for trouble, while it rebuilds you're vulnerable to disk failure (think it's not going to happen? I've seen two RAID10 sets dead due to multiple drive failures in quick succession so it does) and it just begs for a mistake in which disk is pulled or similar.

But the best reason not to do it is because it just isn't designed for it. There are many very good backup solutions designed for the job and this simply isn't one of them. It's like so many things in IT which are possible but seriously inadvisable.

mrbios · 11 May 2010 at 19:08

bigredshark said:
It's something which mad sysadmins suggest. It's simply not designed to do it and you're asking for trouble, while it rebuilds you're vulnerable to disk failure (think it's not going to happen? I've seen two RAID10 sets dead due to multiple drive failures in quick succession so it does) and it just begs for a mistake in which disk is pulled or similar.

But the best reason not to do it is because it just isn't designed for it. There are many very good backup solutions designed for the job and this simply isn't one of them. It's like so many things in IT which are possible but seriously inadvisable.

understandable reasoning

in the future I shall now avoid this approach, cheers

bigredshark · 11 May 2010 at 19:17

mrbios said:
understandable reasoning in the future I shall now avoid this approach, cheers

I understand it initially seeming fine though. I've discovered a nice little mess recently, a server which we rely on for various things which was originally running on some massive 5U box, now somebody needed to move it to a smaller, newer machine. So they cloned the disks onto a nice shiny new server. Seems entirely logical?

Now I have a 3 month old server running Redhat 6 (not RHEL6 - redhat 6 - from 1995) which is running a kernel so old it doesn't know about USB....