Backup versions - best practice?

[Mark M]

I am reviewing my backup options and Im getting a bit confused about what is the best way to do it. I appreciate this is sort of asking how long is a piece of string but giving my data is critical to the business then Id rather have a REALLY long piece of string!

I have a NAS drive that syncs daily to a USB drive in a separate location within the building but Ive recently signed up with BitCasa which operates a lot like dropbox and will sync the data to their servers and then also to my computer at home providing an offsite backup too.

My area of concern is that my "sync" would mean that any accidental/malicious deletion of files would also be synced over so I need to considering how many backup versions I need to keep etc.

I use Cobian Backup which allows for multiple versions to be stored but even with a full weeks worth of backup that isnt really going back very far and it could be weeks/months before a missing file was spotted.

Can anyone shed any light on what I should be considering? I was thinking 5 daily incremental backups followed by a full weekly backup keeping 12 historic weekly versions and then 8 monthly versions or do you think that is overkill?

Data wise we have some where in the region of 10GB to backup so nothing huge but wanting to make sure I am covered for all eventualities.

Thanks

 

[Euphoria]

Do you dedupe your data and are you creating too many backups?

Why not just...

Create daily backups. Then round these up into a weekly,

the following week overwrite the dailys from the previous week and start creating more dailys, at the end of the week create another weekly.

and so on...

until you hit your monthly.

keep your monthly and then start overwriting the oldest weekly one

keep this cycle up. if you have more storage just keep data longer and more frequent.

With backup nothing is overkill, keep things simple.

 

[RichIbizaSport]

I don't know anything about BitCasa but I started using Jungledisk (Amazon S3) for offsite and archive backups at work. The client is a pile of **** but it does the job. Deletes etc are no problem because it effectively takes a snapshot on the day and stores that. We're currently storing data for 3 months, around 200GB of which <5GB changes daily, some fairly heavy dedupe happening on the client means it costs around $50 a month.

We of course have 7 day local backup, which is used most of the time but on the odd occasion we've needed a few months back - where jungledisk saved the day.

Incredibly simple, daily email for a successful backup and that's it. Runs on it's own after initial setup. Stuff sorting daily, weekly, monthly backups! Jungledisk does it for me

 

[memyselfandi]

One thing you need to ask yourself is how useful are the months old backups if the data is critical? If you did have to go to a 4 month old backup would the number of changes which have happened since then mean that too much has changed and it is not really of that much use. I agree though that having a backup which is a sync to another copy is an issue for the reasons given in the OP and hence really you need your backup to be independent of the current system data until such point that it is no longer needed. Syncing is more for availability, I.e. we have lost the server/storage array but we can now bring up things very quickly at the sync destination without having to go to our backup hence with a shorter RPO and RTO than recovering from the normal backup may mean.

Most companies I deal with work on daily full or incrementals, weekly fulls and work on a four or five week cycle. Longer lasting backups only being taken for archiving or regulatory requirements in some cases.

 

[dhallam]

On my backup systems at work we use veeam and its very good, give Veem Endpoint a go its free but still in beta at the moment. Its very good and i use it to do daily incremental backups of our last 3 physical servers. You can set it to do hourly incrementals if you wish.
Im thinking of also scraping windows backup on my server at home and using it.


at work i do daily backups of all virtual servers, and a repliciation at 12pm. The file server and email server get archivied off weekly for 4 weeks then 1 per month for 12 months, then 4 quartly, and 1 per year for 3 years.