Backups Students Staff

[Sunderwood]

Hi All,

I was wondering how people bakup their students and staffs data.

The problem i have is that there isn't enough hours in the day.

im backing up my Students/Staff/SimsData/webservers and SharedDrives and this is all happening as soon as we clock off up to the point we logon.

Also do people limit students and staffs drives? out staff section is 120gb and we have around 70 staff.

But our students section is 60gb and we have 600 students.

What do other people do?

[sdc]

We run two separate backup jobs (both to tape) - Mon/Wed/Fri does staff folders, and Tues/Thurs does student folders.

We are also hoping to implement a "backup to disk" option to run concurrently, so that everything gets backed up every night, but the amount of disk space required for this is a currently prohibitively expensive!

[elsiegee40]

Full backup to NAS (in separate building a long way from the server 'room') every night.

Volume shadow copy for quick recovery of stuff in home and shared folders.

[teejay]

Volume shadow copy to cover the accidental deletions.
Full backup to NAS over weekend, which then gets copied to externall HDD's and taken off site.
Incremental backup Mon-Thu night to NAS.
Also have now started using VMWare converter to take an image of each server over the holidays for speedier disaster recovery.

[dhicks]

I was wondering how people bakup their students and staffs data.

Python script that runs on servers and sends only updated files to main backup server once a day. Files stored in similar way to Apple Time Machine, so folder structure is replicated daily (so users can browse through day-by-day backups) but each version of a file only needs to be stored once.

--
David Hicks

[chrbb]

If you back up each night do you overwrite the previous night's backup? I do mine twice weekly but only have room for 4 backups each on two separate hard drives.

[elsiegee40]

We keep Monday - Friday on rotation, so there are always 5 separate backups.

We are loking at having a second NAS that we would swap monthly with the current one. The one not in use would be stored in a secure location in a third building.

[ChrisH]

Hi All,

I was wondering how people bakup their students and staffs data.

The problem i have is that there isn't enough hours in the day.

im backing up my Students/Staff/SimsData/webservers and SharedDrives and this is all happening as soon as we clock off up to the point we logon.

Also do people limit students and staffs drives? out staff section is 120gb and we have around 70 staff.

But our students section is 60gb and we have 600 students.

What do other people do?

You dont say what your backing up to but I am going to assume a slow tape device since it's taking so long. You need to implement something like a backup to a file server or NAS/SAN etc then put that onto tape. This way the backup is done quickly and it can copy to tape and not be affecting the servers when they are in use.

[dhicks]

If you back up each night do you overwrite the previous night's backup?

Think I'm at about 70% usage of a 2TB RAID disk with daily backups from around about January of this year.

--
David Hicks

[moiebus]

Just to add a little to the mix, we have a Tape drive back up Mon-Thursday, Friday (3x weekly + 1 monthly on rotation) . This backs up all Data worth backing up. System state from DC's is done via Acronis, Daily/Weekly(to remote share) and Monthly(local) AND (!) using the redundant 50%(ish) of hard drive space on five machines, we use Karen's Power tool(FREE) to back up the student 'Year group' shares daily (runs to schedule and filters junk too) This enables us(IT) and certain staff to also 'reinstate' deleted work at a moments notice. Yes, the machines are shut down once the backup has finished

[Sylv3r]

Disk > Disk > Tape

Backing the files up to disk is much quicker and it can take as long as it wants to send to tape from then on.

Differential backups Monday - Thursday, then a full backup each friday and a seperate full backup is kept every half term.

[7andY]

Ultrium 920 SCSI tape drive from HP. We backup all H: drives, profiles, redirected My Documents, Moodle/SIMS/CMIS backups every night. Around 400GB in 3 hours. Mind you, all our data is kept on an IBM DS3400 SAN - the Ultrium will outstrip most IDE and SATA drive data transfer rates.

Cheers, Andy E.

[danrhodes]

Hi,

We Backup about the same, around 600GB - 750GB split over 4 servers using two Tanberg Untrilium, 1 AIT5 and 1 HP DDS3.

We run a Mon - Thur with 4 rotational Friday Tapes, a Monthly Tape, 6 Monthly and Year. We also run a Wekkly Backup to Disk job to a terastation in a sepearate building.

The tapes are kept in a separate building, a good 300Mtrs away from our server room.

Its all covered.

Dan