Disaster recovery

[Chrispy]

How do you back up your data?
Where is the back up data kept? By this I mean what physical location?
What happens to your back up data if the school burns down?
We're currently looking at trying to rent space at a remote location for the purpose of data storage.
Any suggestions on what to look for are gratefully received.
Chris

[Ric_]

In answer to the first question... search the forums. There has been several discussions about backup media and plans.

In answer to the second question, I think most people (I may be wrong) simply take the media off site.

[Chrispy]

Hmmm... taking media offsite each day may be difficult for us as we have automated backups to a small array of six hard disks each night so that, at most, we only lose a days data.
I could ask the other staff members to ensure they've backed up all their own data and removed it I suppose...

[Ric_]

@Chrispy: Dump it to tape or use removable hard disks. It's got to be cheaper than offsite server space.

[indie]

We have a daily backup to tape which gets stored on site then a weekly backup to tape which gets stored off site.

We also have Veritas Intelligent Disaster Recovery which creates a bootable CD for each of your backed up servers which makes it insanely easy to restore from a backup if you do have hardware failure.

Obviously there are steps to try and prevent hardware failure/downtime also, redundant hotswap PSU's, Hotswap RAID etc.

[OutToLunch]

My disaster recovery plan is to run to the car and drive rapidly into town to get a job with the nearest company that hasn't just had a disaster.

I did attempt to implement a proper disaster recovery plan but as nobody would fork out the £400 for the tape drive, or the £1k for the drive recovery when they didn't buy the tape drive and the disk drive died, it hasn't worked fantastically well.