Server Backup Solutions

RangeR

Hi guys,


I just inherited a network. It currently has a very old tape backup unit, with a good few tapes. Enough for daily backup for two weeks and a monthly or two. We use CA ArcServe 15. Currently our backup is approx 510GB daily. We do full backups every day rather than incremental.

As the tape unit is very old, I'm going to replace it soon. However, it occurred to me that I could just replace it with a bucket load of 2.5" external HDD's instead.

I was thinking of getting 15 or 20 of these. That gives me 10 for daily backups over two weeks, one or two for monthly and a few spare, just in case.

Will ArcServe work flawlessly with HDD's as a destination? The plan is to just rotate the HDD's as we currently do for Tape. So I don't want to have to scrub the HDD's every morning, etc.

Then there is the case of purchasing 20 HDD's from the same batch. Increasing the likelyhood of multiple failure. Maybe purchase 3 or 4 different makes HDD's but similar capacity?

Am I mad to go HDD?
What do you guys do for non tape backups?
Cloud backup isn't really an option.

LoGiE

Hi,

You can use disk based devices in Arcserve and set the job to overwrite but to be honest if you're willing to spend 2000+ you should be looking at a far better solution.

As I don't know anything else about your environment such as the number of servers, or if you use virtualisation I suggest you engage with a IT support company to talk about a backup solution that suits your data needs. They want your business so it won't cost you anything!

If you're backing up that amount of data take a look at NAS or SAN options, either way substituting tapes for external USB HDDs is not the way to go. For starters the time it takes you to back up your data would increase dramatically as USB 2.0 max transfer is 60 MB/s vs Tape (LTO3) which is 80 MB/s

Regards,
LoGiE

RangeR

LoGiE wrote: »

Hi,

You can use disk based devices in Arcserve and set the job to overwrite but to be honest if you're willing to spend 2000+ you should be looking at a far better solution.

As I don't know anything else about your environment such as the number of servers, or if you use virtualisation I suggest you engage with a IT support company to talk about a backup solution that suits your data needs. They want your business so it won't cost you anything!

If you're backing up that amount of data take a look at NAS or SAN options, either way substituting tapes for external USB HDDs is not the way to go. For starters the time it takes you to back up your data would increase dramatically as USB 2.0 max transfer is 60 MB/s vs Tape (LTO3) which is 80 MB/s

Regards,
LoGiE

Cheers. Disk [USB] speed is something to take into account. NAS or SAN is out as we require the previous night backup to be off site. This is the only reason I was looking at portable HDD's.

We're not virtual but should be soon [read 1 to 2 years].

We have a support company [Baldonnell, N7] but I'd rather do some ground work first. I like to walk into a meeting [consultation] semi educated on the topic. I just don'pt like [or trust] tape.

ressem

There's RDX drives, which put modified 2.5" drives in a sealed cartridge.
Using a USB 2 connection they take about 3 hours to back up 200GB. Another 2 hours to verify. About 1.1GB per minute. The sata one is a bit quicker, and there is a USB 3 version in the pipeline.

The cartridges are much more suited for being brought offsite than loose drives, in a suitable LTO like form-factor and plastic box.

LoGiE is right, I wouldn't recommend the USB 2 version for your setup.

Mr. Fancypants

Could look into cloud backup also. Wouldn't be cheap for that quantity of data mind you but it does take a lot of the admin work out so can save that way.

RangeR

mbroaders wrote: »

Could look into cloud backup also. Wouldn't be cheap for that quantity of data mind you but it does take a lot of the admin work out so can save that way.

Nah. Cloud is not an option. We have a 2Mb leased line that we must use. No one else can match the 4 hour SLA from eircom.

And 2Mb would struggle to backup our size. I guess we'll just get an up to date tape drive. :-(

vibe666

you're talking about backing up 510gb per day, but how much of your data is actually changing on a daily basis?

as long as you aren't backing up a huge amount of changed data every day you could use a secondary offsite disk based storage solution (either a NAS/SAN built and managed yourself in a rented datacentre, or cloud based) mirroring your primary storage 24/7/365 with very little intervention needed by yourself and then just back that up to tape at the offsite location as required.

the upside to that is that restores would be a lot easier if the files exist online at the offsite location rather than offline on tapes that need to be recalled before they can be restored from.

if you know how much data is actually changing on a daily/weekly/monthly basis, it might be a realistic option for you.

mickquinn05

How about fitting a PCI USB 3.0 card about €40 and portable USB 3.0 HDD about €95, done it with one server recently and got 60gb done in 20 mins.

Capt'n Midnight

ressem wrote: »

Using a USB 2 connection they take about 3 hours to back up 200GB. Another 2 hours to verify.

Not so sure you need to do a full verify since the drive should pick up errors on the fly in exactly the same way tape can't ever do.


If your full backup is only 500GB consider mirroring your data drives unless you need RAID speed, it makes recovery so much easier.


Another option is to use differential backups (Never use incremental)
and full backups at weekends.

Depending on what changes and if it's just files you could also consider rsync / robocopy over to another site

RangeR

EDIT : Damn, wrong post. I'm still with that company, but I've settled in and learned a few things... The backup tapes no longer scare me. We have off site replication of everything, as well as nightly tape etc.

I thought this was a different post


--original post---

I actually don't work in that OP company anymore. I've moved onto a bigger place, running their IT. The current Backup solution is miles ahead, in every respect. Suffice to say, I'm comfortable resolving most data loss scenarios.

I don't think most people [or anyone] would be fully comfortable recovering from total site loss. Part of my looks forward to it, IF that time comes [just for the experience of building green field and restoring all data], part of me hopes it never happens

My current plans, in case of total site loss, [so far untested] gets critical systems [all servers and one pc and printer per department] online within 6 to 8 hours and the remaining within 24 hours of total loss.

I may test that someday...

Ctrl Alt Del

Hi,
Still not sure what to say...

congrats for you/new job...or... sorry for old company !??

Please help me...

Regards

RangeR wrote: »

EDIT : Damn, wrong post. I'm still with that company, but I've settled in and learned a few things... The backup tapes no longer scare me. We have off site replication of everything, as well as nightly tape etc.

I thought this was a different post


--original post---

I actually don't work in that OP company anymore. I've moved onto a bigger place, running their IT. The current Backup solution is miles ahead, in every respect. Suffice to say, I'm comfortable resolving most data loss scenarios.

I don't think most people [or anyone] would be fully comfortable recovering from total site loss. Part of my looks forward to it, IF that time comes [just for the experience of building green field and restoring all data], part of me hopes it never happens

My current plans, in case of total site loss, [so far untested] gets critical systems [all servers and one pc and printer per department] online within 6 to 8 hours and the remaining within 24 hours of total loss.

I may test that someday...

RangeR

Ctrl Alt Del wrote: »

Please help me...

*Hugz*

Ctrl Alt Del

RangeR wrote: »

*Hugz*

Thanks...

I was wondering,coming from an 'older' problem,where you were stuck with evaluation and decisions based on some constraints (budget, politics, technology, exposure, experience) and then landing in to a new job,where you've said is a dreamland...how does that makes you feel,what have you learned and ... what you have to share for us !??

Some advise like ... sysadmin to sysadmin and...sysadmin to IT Consultant ... and sysadmin to Company owner(s) !

Regards

RangeR

Ctrl Alt Del wrote: »

Thanks...

I was wondering,coming from an 'older' problem,where you were stuck with evaluation and decisions based on some constraints (budget, politics, technology, exposure, experience) and then landing in to a new job,where you've said is a dreamland...how does that makes you feel,what have you learned and ... what you have to share for us !??

Some advise like ... sysadmin to sysadmin and...sysadmin to IT Consultant ... and sysadmin to Company owner(s) !

Regards

****, we could talk for hours on the subject....

An enormous amount of wood touching here.... And that's not a euphemism.....

My older problem, from a different company was that of 0 budget. There was a very small It budget. I never knew what the budget was but I know we were knocked back more often than not. We were only a small company, I'd say about 7 employees.

We had no backup strategy. Shortly after I joined the company [about 7 years ago], I instantly realised this. I pushed for something decent, I was given one of these. Not being too impressed, I did as good a job as I could. I messed around with various opensource backup products [BackupPC etc]. None really suited.

I ended up backing up critical data to the LS-CH2 and also backed up one server to the other and vice versa. Trying to limit the amount of **** that would hit the fan, if it did.

The argument of "How much business would you lose if you lose your data" is not a valid argument for small companies. They can't justify the price of the "backup insurance" and play the numbers game...Hoping it "won't happen to us".

We had one or two small data loss issues but we were able to resolve without major issue.


That is now long behind me. I started with my new company a few months ago. While we don't have enterprise grade backup/DR solution, we have a very good one, based around CA AS.

It's been over 10 to 15 years since I used backup tapes. I never liked them. I didn't trust them for restoring. While I still don't like Tape, I'm comfortable with them at the moment.

• Our backup/restore strategy is [not saying it's right, but it works for us]
• Nightly full tape backup, rotated bi weekly
• One Monthly mid term backup, run on the first business day of every month
• One Monthly tape clean, run on the first work day of every month. Takes 5 to 10 mins
• Realtime data replication of all servers [DC, SQL, Accounts, Exchange, FS] to off site data warehouse
• Also store local SQQ backups [one per DB] on local server for quick access. [Never had to use them]
• Realtime [or close to] monitoring of all servers, local and DR, with monthly reporting.
• Leased line with 4 hour SLA. Backup Fixed Wireless connection with immediate failover [well, 30 to 60 seconds]
• Most low level network kit is duplicated.
• Almost no single point of failure. What single points do exist, we are working to resolve by end of year.

Total Site Loss

• We have a DR location, ready to move in at a minutes notice. For the short term, all servers from Data Warehouse get moved to DR location and get promoted to production servers. Purchase one PC and Printer for each department [7 ish] and be up VERY quickly.
• Phone service provider notified to hunt all calls from landline to a range of company mobile phones

Most other data loss issues can be resolved by restoring from tape. Small hardware issues are handled in house. For in dept hardware issues, we call upon our IT Service Partner.

That's a highly sumarised version of our current plan. Hope it helps.

Ctrl Alt Del

Thanks for update !

What i respect at you is the fact that you have made the difference between old/bad and new/good !

Some business owners out there ,just don't understand the importance of backups or...is not been well explained by their IT team !

Good luck in to your new position !

Respect and ...regards !