What backup methods do you use?

[kingswood]

Veritas here too and I also complete a full backup to Lacie external hard drive once a month. In addition we have a Recovery Manager Server on our network, so this helps with dynamic backups of student and staff saved data and recovery of lost files (much like volume shadow copy).

Paul

[john]

NTBackup here (I want Veritas as I have always used it in the past and its excellent), with muggines here swapping the tapes (Ultrium 1s) daily. We backup all pupil data, images, finance stuff and admin home areas daily in full (about a 70GB backup) Takes just over 1 1/2hrs now its on a new server. Don't backup exchange, SQL or profiles, or anything else really atm, need to look at doing something though.

[Ric_]

One of the main reasons for me choosing Retrospect over Veritas was the pricing structure.

* £525 for Multi-Server license - allows back up of all your servers, workstations, laptops, etc.
* £299 for an SQL agent
* £295 for an Exchange Agent

This is a lot cheaper than Veritas (especially if you are pulling data from 4 servers as I am).

[altecsole]

Thanks for all the replies.

Just out of interest; has anyone used SonaSafe? We need a better solution for backing up Exchange and this caught my eye. We currently use NTBackup to backup the infostore, but this means we can only restore the whole infostore, not individual mailboxes or email - no ideal!

Veritas looks good, but it also looks very expensive.

Our plan is to backup to a network location and then use a USB external drive for off site storage.

Thanks for all the input, it's appreciated.

[tarquel]

Need to update my backup plan a bit after looking at this - although I have already started.

Have a Buffalo Terrastation 1TB waiting in a box for the task of night backups.

Thinking along the lines of adding the shadow service thingy [brain gone to mush right now] also but can someone point out the overhead and cot of storage before i start using up the unpartitioned space on the new 146Gig HDD hehe

Also gonna daily backup [mon-fri] to tape over a 2 week period and probably do a single one during the holiday period [tho the tape drive is making some odd sounds hehe]

Regards
Nath

[john]

Just to update mine - just got a USB2 DAT72 drive for backing up all the other servers stuff. HPs have front mounted USBs so just plug her in and away we go, the tapes are dirt cheap, and I mean DIRT cheap. So thats all the machines done, will probably back up mailserver and SQL maybe once a week, and other machines, system statuses & OTDR maybe once a month or maybe maybe every 1/2 term.

[Richie1972]

We're currently running Retrospect 7.0, but find it to be slow and, well, a bit crap compared to Veritas 9.1 that we use on the SIMS server.
We're probably going to rip it out and install Veritas 10 later this year and implement a better DR solution that involves a PC sitting in another building with a load of hard drive space that runs NTBackup on a nightly basis - this will also mean that we can restore lost work in less than a few minutes.

Anyone else had problems with their Retrospect grinding to a halt or just with its general performance?

To be honest, as we're running Win2003 is there any need for some of these backup software apps with "open file" backups when there's volume shadow copy?

[Ric_]

@Richie: Dos_Box and I love Retrospect (we are both now running 7.5 but it's virtually the same). We also both use the Tandberg LTO2 Autoloader - I suspect that some hardware works better than others.

The main advtange of Retrospect over Viritas is the price. A multi-server retrospect license is the same price as 2 veritas licenses. It therefore makes sense to go for retrospect if you have more than 2 servers!

[rupturedtoad]

I use Bacula (free open source network backup system - www.bacula.org) to back up the servers to three ultrium drives. Daily incrementals, Set of four full weekly backups and a full monthly that goes to an offsite storage facility (a shoebox in the network manager's back bedroom).

[Richie1972]

We have a backup server, so all we'd need to buy are either clients for the other servers, or just back them up across the network for veritas.
I had thought that I could download and install retrospect 7.5 as an upgrade to our 7.0 - in case that fixed the performance issues - however it seems that you have to pay for 7.5 - it's not a free upgrade from 7.0

[Dos_Box]

Retrospect 7.5 also has the wonderful 'Proactive' backup system where it detects idle time on your servers and backs up what it can when it can, so you don't have to schedule anything. With an autoloader it means that I can have 3 difernt backup sets (exchange, daily and weekly) all running at once. It works smashing. I've found Retrospect 7.5 to be the easiest and most friendly backup software I've ever used.

[Richie1972]

I would have liked to have tried 7.5, but as i said in my previous post, I found that it is not a free upgrade from 7.0 - it's classed as a whole new product

[eejit]

[quote="Quackers"]Admin Server:

Backup onto removable hard disks, daily, stored in fireproof safe.

Curriculum Servers:

Volume Shadow Copy everynight.
Followed by a Robocopy onto another PC other end of the school.
/quote]

I've never used Volume Shadow Copy, but why do you use it AND Robocopy? Are there limitations with VSC?

[TimH]

I've never used Volume Shadow Copy, but why do you use it AND Robocopy? Are there limitations with VSC?

Volume Shadow Copies are used to recover accidental file changes, it won't allow for drive failure.

We use a very similar regime, Volume Shadow for immediate/user recovery of deleted/overwritten files. Robocopy to backup server in server room, robocopy to big drives in a couple of secure workstations and robocopy to removeable USB drives swapped in/out of safe.

[ITWombat]

The holidays seem like a good time to reduce the number of backups but one or two of the admin staff keep popping in. The day I don't backup will be the day they loose something.