What do you use to backup your File Stores?

Hi All,

We have a dilemma at our school... we are having more and more requests for students to have additional space.... which we want to meet!

However the issue is... we are quite a large school and to accommodate the increase in file quotes we would be talking about TB's of Data... how on earth would this be backed up...?

If we were to use tapes it would take days!
If we used NAS/SAN that would be on-site which would leave no redundancy if something happened to the school?

Has anyone found a solution to this problem? :confused:

Cheers

DK

you could buy a load of 1TB HDDs, a load of hot swap bays and have 1 HDD for every day of the week and each year group.

eg:

MonHDDYr7, MonHDDYr8 ...
TueHDDYr7, TueHDDYr8 ...


or combine some year groups etc.

Better method for you will probably be Disk to Disk to Tape

Disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) is an approach to computer storage backup and archiving in which data is initially copied to backup storage on a disk storage system and then periodically copied again to a tape storage system (or possibly to an optical storage system).

We use External 1TB Hard Drives, backing up over USB. It does 360GB in 11 Hours for a full backup once a week, and then we use differentials for the rest of the week. The drive is then swapped out and taken offsite and another put in its place for the following week.

We've got 14TB, about to move up to c20TB.

At Gigabit 20TB cannot be backed up in less than 45.5 hours.

Before you consider how the heck to back it up, just think how long it would take to restore after a disaster.

It is pretty important to spread the storage over multiple arrays and controllers. Preferably on separate machines. I know people who had this amount of data in a SAN. The fabric messed up and trashed the lot. At least across three servers with DAS, a single controller or server failure only trashes a third of the data.

For the backup - Disk to Disk to tape is the only sane option. Multi-drive Autochanger for the tape system. The backup system including tapes will probably cost a similar amount to the live storage system. I'd recommend Daily/live backups to the D2D and a full backup to tape once a term with daily incrementals, these tapes are then only required if both an array and the D2D system have failed, i.e. theft, fire or act of god.

Pay for 4hr 24/7 hardware and software support on the array, backup system and backup software. If anything goes wrong at any point with that amount of data, knowing that you have paid for the best support available is the only thing that can comfort you.

Oh and make sure SMT understand how long it will take to recover from an array failure, what steps you have taken to militate against 'an event' and what steps you have taken to mitigate the impact should one occour.