offsite backups

Ish

Ish

Ish

Associate
Joined
11 Jan 2006
Posts
1,813
Location
West Midlands
Hi

How do these prices seem for offsite backups?

10GB=£35
40GB=£72
50GB=£85
100GB=£150

These prices are per month and + vat.

Are there any companies you would reccommend for this service?
 
Is this complete Disaster recovery service or literally just a backup copy of data?

Personally I'd just use a USB HDD/ Ultrim Tape and take it home for the volumes you've mentioned. Get the company to pay for a small safe in your garage or something.

Are those quantities total storage or storage increase?
 
It's just a straight online backup of our data.

Which tape drives would you suggest with a capacity of around 200gb?
 
Ultrium-2 will cover you for 200 uncompressed.

May want to consider Ultrium-3 for headroom.

What interfaces do you have available? SAS, SCSI?
Internal or External?
 
I'd strongly recommend decent online backup over tape if possible. If you're happy with those prices then you'll get a decent solution for that kind of money, the company I work for offers a online backup service (complete with delta blocking, versioning etc) for around £3/Gig per month.

There are other cheaper options out there too. It's automatic, no need to worry about tapes and you have previous versions of your files as well as simply a point in time snapshot. You even have the option of offsite CDP, which you'll never get anywhere near with tape.

Seriously I think if you're connection is up to it you need to have a decent reason to use tape these days. I'm saying that as technical advice rather than pimping a product we sell, if you google for online data backup or similar you'll get a good snapshot of what's out there. We use software from Asigra to power the platform and I know there are some other resellers of the same in the UK (some of them big names too), it's reasonable software, has it's flaws but generally does the job and is fairly comprehensive in platform support terms.
 
I agree that I would take an online backup/imaging over WAN solution over tape but certainly in a country like mine there is simply not the bandwidth and/or reliability available for these solutions.

One dis-advantage of online backups is speed.
 
Sin_Chase said:
I agree that I would take an online backup/imaging over WAN solution over tape but certainly in a country like mine there is simply not the bandwidth and/or reliability available for these solutions.

One dis-advantage of online backups is speed.
Click to expand...

depends, most solutions do fairly decent delta blocking now, so all you're transmitting is a compressed version of the changes since the last backup. The initial backup might take a long weekend to run but thereafter it takes a couple of hours is fairly common among our customers. Even a 2Mbit line will back up 40+GB in two days...
 
Those prices do seem quite cheap, so find out whats included. Ask about security (do they hold an encryption key, is the data stored encrypted or just in transit) and recovery process for larger volumes. Some services will offer a virtual recovery service where they recover it to their servers and you can VPN into them. I wouldnt expect it at that price though! Also check what they are charging you for, is it data stored or data protected. If its the former, you'll need a percentage overhead for old versions. if its the latter, how many old versions do they keep?

I went through a process of evaluating offsite backups for my company a few months ago, and came out of it with a slightly different solution.

I bought DoubleTake Livewire, which does continuous replication into an image, which can then be recovered directly into an ESX virtual machine. Our 350(ish)gb of data replicates quite happily over an IPSEC VPN capped at 1mbit (4mbit LL at head office and 8mb ADSL at the remote site).

I bought a Sun X4250 server to run the whole thing on. 2 x 3.0Ghz Xeon Quads, 32gb RAM and 16x146gb HDDs. 10 of those are RAID5'd for the image store (they're snapshotted with shadow copy every 6 hours locally so we can roll back) and 6 are there for recovery. The whole lot sits on top of ESXi and means I can bring our entire network back online within 6 hours of a failure. :cool:

It was a relatively large up front cost but the ongoing costs are very low. It might not be the right fit for you, but its an option that might be worth looking at.
 
bigredshark said:
I'd strongly recommend decent online backup over tape if possible. If you're happy with those prices then you'll get a decent solution for that kind of money, the company I work for offers a online backup service (complete with delta blocking, versioning etc) for around £3/Gig per month.

There are other cheaper options out there too. It's automatic, no need to worry about tapes and you have previous versions of your files as well as simply a point in time snapshot. You even have the option of offsite CDP, which you'll never get anywhere near with tape.

Seriously I think if you're connection is up to it you need to have a decent reason to use tape these days. I'm saying that as technical advice rather than pimping a product we sell, if you google for online data backup or similar you'll get a good snapshot of what's out there. We use software from Asigra to power the platform and I know there are some other resellers of the same in the UK (some of them big names too), it's reasonable software, has it's flaws but generally does the job and is fairly comprehensive in platform support terms.
Click to expand...

Who do you work for? Would be interested in discussing this a bit more.
 
Its not the time taken to backup that makes online not that suitable for largish backups its the time taken to get the backup info back down to your office. If this is for office DR and you are a smallish office then in the case of a proper disaster you can easily get a few PC's up and backup restored off a hard drive within a day. If you have to download a 200GB (also need to get a new internet connection/utilise someone elses)this would seriously increase the downtime.
 
oneilldo said:
Its not the time taken to backup that makes online not that suitable for largish backups its the time taken to get the backup info back down to your office. If this is for office DR and you are a smallish office then in the case of a proper disaster you can easily get a few PC's up and backup restored off a hard drive within a day. If you have to download a 200GB (also need to get a new internet connection/utilise someone elses)this would seriously increase the downtime.
Click to expand...

This is exactly why i still use tape. Ultrium2 can go to 400GB compressed.

The other problem people don't like with online backup's is essentially your giving all your data to a third party.
 
we use both LTO-2 for our main backup and offsite backup for our important data, HR, accounts etc..

We use Perfectbackup, their software is great, can backup Exchange, SQL etc.. and it can also backup locally too.
 
Seaniboy said:
The other problem people don't like with online backup's is essentially your giving all your data to a third party.
Click to expand...

Any decent online backup provider is storing and transmitting data encrypted and don't hold a key to recover it.

Causes more problems than it solves to be honest - the number of customers who forget the encryption key and are dismayed when they get told we simply can't get their data back - but it's very secure.
 
Basher said:
Who do you work for? Would be interested in discussing this a bit more.
Click to expand...

The company is hSo (www.hso.uk.com). We're using Asigra software to tie it all together and HP hardware, we are fairly expensive for an Asigra vendor but we're targeting a fairly high end market (and we're providing a lot of the customers internet connectivity too so we avoid bandwidth issues by openning up their 10 over 100mb internet connection to the full 100mb capacity for initial backups and restores).

Prices aren't online but expect between £3-5 a Gigabyte depending on how hard you bargain (we charge on stored size rather than protected so you benefit from compression - exchange data compresses particularly well - but if you keep lots of generations of files then can start to add up).

For reference and to look impartial, another Asigra based vendor is intechnology (www.intechnology.co.uk)...
 
bigredshark said:
Any decent online backup provider is storing and transmitting data encrypted and don't hold a key to recover it.

Causes more problems than it solves to be honest - the number of customers who forget the encryption key and are dismayed when they get told we simply can't get their data back - but it's very secure.
Click to expand...

Don't get me wrong i think online backup's are a great idea but for example there are quite a few people on here that will not even use logmein (in my eyes a reputable company ) for remote adminitration because you go through a 3rd party.
 
Seaniboy said:
Don't get me wrong i think online backup's are a great idea but for example there are quite a few people on here that will not even use logmein (in my eyes a reputable company ) for remote adminitration because you go through a 3rd party.
Click to expand...

I know exactly what you mean. While we werent adverse to using a third party, the self managed solution (described above) appealed more - partly for that reason and partly on cost
 
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