Can I use old server for backup?

[lumencreative]

Ok so following on from my previous thread, I have decided to buy a NEW DELL T330 server to replace our current Dell T20 (said T30 in previous thread but on checking it's a T20).

We've opted for Sage 50c Professional as our accounts/order management software for the time being which includes cloud backups and cloud access so satisfies my preference to keep things onsite and also to keep good backups.

So...now I'm looking to see whether I can put any reliable software on our T20 to use it as a backup system for the new server, or would it be better to do a vm on the new server?

 

[lumencreative]

You could always use CrashPl... ah, in fact, no you couldn't

Crashplan still do business plans so might be an option if they do server backups?

Are there any problems with the server? Is it in warranty, do you have support on the hardware etc?

If there are no problems then you can use it for a backup - what software are you looking at? You could also look at VEEAM with a vCloud Repository which is how some of our clients are now backing up data that is critical (as well as traditional backups)

There are no problems with the server just that it's not powerful enough to be our main server anymore. It's not in warranty though.

Not sure what software to be honest. Company I used to work for had Veeam so may look at that. Would Veeam need the main server to be set up as a virtualised server though?

 

[lumencreative]

Anyone ever used Acronis's server backup?

 

[lumencreative]

Hyper-V on each physical server, replication from one to the other. Include snapshotting into the mix and you have a pretty granular recovery method.

Thanks. I've spent a while looking online and I think my best option would be to buy a NAS unit and use Acronis Sever Backup to backup the server to the NAS. This then seperates the backup from the server itself (I had originally considered using drives in the server itself for the backup), and I then have the option of cloud sync'ing the backups.

However, I am looking a bit more into virtualization and will certainly look at Hyper-V before I decide on anything as that could even act as a localised disaster recovery should anything happen to the main server.

 

[lumencreative]

It can indeed act as business continuity and form part of your DR plan. Hyper-V replication can be so frequent that data Loss between failover nodes should be minimal.

Ideally you want a backup solution (like your NAS idea) in addition to the Hyper-V replication, mainly for granular file level restoring and offline recovery (for data injection or similar in the event of needing to rollback sage version, but keep the latest database indexes or similar).

The version of Sage we've gone with (Sage 50c Pro) has cloud backup to Sage Drive, but they've not made it clear what happens in the event of an error or as you say, data injection, because any changes made on our server are automatically synced to Sage Drive and visa versa, hence why I was looking at something like a NAS...good to know I'm along the right tracks