Cloud Backup Providers (Recommendations?)....

[R.O.S.S.I]

Hi all.

Fibre optic will be installed at our work premises this week and I'm just looking into the feasibility of setting up some form of cloud backup.

At the moment our entire VM infrastructure is backed up via Veeam, then these backup files are copied to an external HDD every day so we have a daily backup.

Just wondering if its a feasible replacement to look at cloud services? We have around 350GB's worth of Veeam backups to backup.

Anyone any recommendations on providers or any advice on whether it would be even worth it (i.e. too much data to upload every night?)

We'd probably still keep a hard backup but probably a weekly one instead of a daily one.

 

[R.O.S.S.I]

How big a pipe are you getting? It's all about rate of change with cloud backups, the decent ones are bock level differentials. Most work on a guest file level rather than the virtual disk like veeam does.
When you speak to providers they will estimate your storage usage (you pay per gb) based on compression, dedupe and retention needs. They'll promise ridiculous dedupe rates - take their estimate and double it for an accurate estimate.
I've used data barracks before - on the high end price wise but very secure and the support is good - very proactive

Its not actually a leased line or anything. Its just a business fibre line (FTTC). Quoted speed of 69MB down and 19MB up. But as it hasn't been installed yet I'm not too sure what the end figure will turn up like.

I'm just looking into the feasibility of it really, whether it would be worth it etc.
I'd still do a restore but that would probably be a weekly one. At current we have around 350-360GB's worth of Veeam backups.

 

[R.O.S.S.I]

I'm not a fan of cloud backup. The big issue with cloud is data swell and availability, it might be easy enough backing up small chunks each night after an initial seed to the cloud. But that data will swell with time and then getting it back off the cloud if you want it becomes a real pig. E.G if you have to do a restore.

Cloud is great for collaboration and alike but I don't think it's really such a good idea for backups.
Networking 101: keep as much data off the WAN as you can because WAN bandwidth is much more expensive than LAN bandwidth. Cloud backup goes against this idea, yet last I checked the scenario hadn't changed...
LAN bandwidth is cheap as are hard drives these days, cloud will likely be a lot more expensive over time and will increase your time to restore. As you pipe more data up there that window only gets bigger.

We would still have a local copy of the backups on the backup server which would be produced every night by Veeam so doing a restore etc would just be like normal.

I just wanted to see about sending a copy of it all off to the cloud as a permanent off site solution aswell, rather than having to keep carting an external HDD off with me every day which isn't the greatest of 'off-site' backups!