NAS backup

[Skidder]

Hello, my little company uses google apps for our mail, calendars and google drive for storage. It works very well as we all have remote office and also come together at times.

I want a physical backup that we can go to in case of accidental deletions etc. Rather than google which sync all of our machines immediately, I want a back up which is everyday and then remains on the system for say a couple of weeks, long enough for us to realise we have deleted something in error.

This will be on my home network so a bonus if it is also useful for media. It will be on my wired network (on a switch, if anyone can recommend a good one with at least 6 ports that would be good too!)

What combination of hardware and software would you recommend?

I imagine a NAS server but don't know. I do have an old buffalo terrastation but this is now at least 8 years old with pretty small drives which seem over due a failure.

Our company files are approx 150gb for our daily accessed working folders and around 2tb of occasional access data / older files (which would not need daily backup really)

It's a company expense, so no real budget restriction as long as extra spent is worth it.

Thanks for any input - I am not clued up on this stuff.

 

[OhEsEcks]

A NAS is not a backup solution. NAS RAID provides redundancy and availability. But backups should be made to physical media. Usually tape. Especially if they're business critical.

A NAS can be used as part of a backup solution, in that you use the NAS no differently than you use Google, but once a day the contents of the NAS are backed up to an off-site, secure and tape driven storage service. That way if there's a catastrophic RAID failure, a flood, a fire, a plague or locusts or the hammer of Thor crashes through your building, you have off-site backups.

 

[Skidder]

My thinking was through google we have a version of our files on every machine (prob 10) or so in different parts of the country) so it feels like the risk is human error or issues with google rather than fire etc. I was more trying to hedge against that human error by having backups at a point in time. E.g. Before someone deleted a folder and that change propogated. Why cant the nas be set up to store once a day rather than continually?

 

[OhEsEcks]

I was more trying to hedge against that human error by having backups at a point in time. E.g. Before someone deleted a folder and that change propogated. Why cant the nas be set up to store once a day rather than continually?

You can set your machines to backup to the NAS once a day. But what happens if someone deletes something that removes an entire days work? I'd be ****ed to put it mildly. You can take snapshots of files or folders at timed intervals of your choosing. 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 60, 120 minutes, et cetera, depending on the software used. Much like Apples Time Machine, or rsync.

 

[JonJ678]

Hardware is easy - hp microserver or something similar but faster, enough disks. Software, especially backup strategy, is harder.

I treat the NAS as authorative - it holds the "real" data, and is also backed up to a usb drive periodically. Laptops, computers pull a copy of the data from the nas, make some changes, push the changes back in an orderly fashion. This means broken laptops are a non-issue. I use "source control" from the happy world of software dev to do the heavy lifting.

Backing up every machine separately seems error prone and wasteful. An appropriate read only filesystem export & a view that "if it isn't on the server, it doesn't exist" could work for you too.

 

[Skidder]

It's not that every machine is backed up separately, just that every machine is synchronised with our cloud storage. So what I want is a local copy that does not synchronise but rather backs up the lot at intervals, stores them for a bit and then, gets rid after a period of time.

I currently occasionally put a local copy on a usb drive but want all to be automated.

 

[andshrew]

With your Google Apps alone you should be reasonably well protected against accidental deletions as you get 25 days to restore files after the user has emptied their Trash.