Simple Reliable Backup - Onedrive?

Pulsedriver

Pulsedriver

Pulsedriver

Soldato
Joined
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Hey folks, I am doing some work for a company at the moment, and the final stage is to sort out a backup schedule for them, this will basically be quite a simple backup process, as it is essentially one big folder of data, however, I can't use Dropbox as the folder holds a live database so essentially I need to backup a 'backup' of the folder nightly.

I was thinking of doing something like;

Set Windows 10 backup schedule (or syncback) to backup the folder to another location, so for example, right now the folder is;

D:\ALLDATA

I can set up windows backup or syncback, to backup that folder to

D:\MYBACKUPS

And then have something like OneDrive or similar backup the 'MYBACKUPS' folder, is that unnecessarily complex? We just need something to do incremental backups nightly.
 
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If its just a DB that you are backing up then depending on the size you might want to do a FULL and differential backups of the database (for the incremental side of things).

For SQL Server Normal backup software won't be able to backup a DB whilst it is attached as SQL Server will have a lock on the file so you will need to backup the DB then copy that off site.

Might be worth checking with them regarding the IT policy etc. if they have one to ensure one Drive is suitable (i.e. security/data location, agreed data loss period etc.)

Another thing to allow for (although unlikely) is to accommodate a failure of the server (i.e. if the Backup folder is on the same one) whilst the backup is running or the synch to office site is running. i.e. if your backup file is the same name and a synch is running when the server fails then you could be left with no usable backup. So should really alternate names/days/weeks etc.
 
How big is the DB?

I'm a fan of daily full db backups, then 7z'ing those backup files and copying them to multiple locations.

And using forfiles to clear out files over a specific age.
 
Depending on what DB system it is as well you might be able to compress (and encrypt) the backup without relying on external programs. i.e. SQL server 2008 onwards supports backup compression.
 
If its a shared drive with lots of files and a large DB in a subfolder then I would use a scheduled Robocopy job to mirror the two directories and then use OneDrive/Dropbox if appropriate for offsite from the 2nd directory. You can configure this to write the log file out as well so you know what file changed when. You also control when it runs etc. and for what files etc. i.e. sometimes it might be best to delay this by 24 hours for certain directories (user error overwriting single file etc.)

In addition to this I would (if SQL Server) backup the DB using compression to the shared directory. Depending on use of the DB (how much changes per day and size) I would then either do a full daily (different name and overwrite end of the week) or a full weekly and diff daily. You need to check what data loss they are happy with should the worst happen etc. (check restoring backups etc.)
 
Its going to depend on the DB size and how much data changes per day, and line speed etc. then if the DB backup is 100Gb then you are going to struggle to synch that offsite daily without some serious line speed, if its 1GB then it will be fine to be daily. If the DB is large generally but not much changes per day then FULL backup weekly and diffs daily might be the best bet.

Compressing SQL Server Database backups generally reduces a backup file from say 10GB (when uncompressed) to 1-2GB depending on what data is stored (mostly text then all good, more blob data then not so good).
 
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