Refurbed kit?

Mark M

Mark M

Mark M

Soldato
Joined
6 Jan 2006
Posts
3,407
Location
Newcastle upon Tyne
Im looking to bolster my backup solution for my small business (20GB or so) and a friend of mine has kindly offered some rack space in their comms room. I had a look at some 1u rack servers and then stumbled across some refurbed Dell servers that are going for a few hundred quid. Would something like this be ok to use for backup purposes? It wouldn't be my only backup method as I backup onsite and also to a hosted option but I think a proper offsite backup to my own server would mean I could store a lot more copies etc and hopefully cover ever eventuality.

Edit, another option may be to put a 1u rack synology NAS in my friends comms room? We currently use a 2 bay Synology NAS onsite for all data.
 
You definitely want some kind of offsite backup, whether it's a NAS, cloud or a separate server. About 18 months ago we had a ransomware incident on our main server at work. The offsite backup was the only way of restoring the encrypted data as all the local/onsite backups were infected.
 
Yeah that was my thinking, currently Im more of less just cloning the onsite data so wondered if a refurbed kit would be sufficient for my backup needs.

If so, as the server would be offsite what sort of monitoring software could I use? Is there something that will email me if it goes offline etc?
 
I wouldn't hesitate to buy used or refurbed server kit from either Dell or HP, as long as it isn't the very low end entry level kit (as sometimes spares can be harder to get hold of) - they seem to last forever with very few issues, and parts will be available for a long time to come.

At work I normal buy refurbed HP's, run their diagnostics software to give them an initial check, then leave them running for a week or so with something like Folding@Home (as this normally flags up any issues with CPUs,RAM, and stresses the cooling to some degree) whilst still configuring/installing software on them.

Both HP and Dell offer event notification via emails (can't remember what Dell's is called), and offer remote power on/BIOS access via iLO (HP) or DRAC (Dell).
 
Caged said:
Can you take a step back and describe what you have that needs backing up?
Click to expand...

Sure, its a pretty standard office set up with your usual office based files, a couple of databases etc. The largest database file is approx 4GB. Emails are hosted with O365. No documents are saved onto the individual machines.

I basically want a solution that will allow me to drive the 5 miles to my mates office, download the latest backup from that night and be up and running again with as little down time as possible. Id also like to cover for things like the first reply to this post for anything malicious but also anything accidental too.
 
Ive had a quick look at Azure and Amazon but to be honest I was unsure on the pricing of it and what Id actually get charged for due to their being 5 or 6 things that you get charged for on top of the amount of data you use. I just didnt want to get a huge bill because I had misconfigured it etc but will have another look into it and could even set up a trial just to get a feel for it.
 
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