How do you backup your Server(s)?

[laserblazer]

Has anyone bought a fire safe recently? We are looking for a small one.

Our SMT is now concerned about the Fin. Manager taking the backup tapes home with her. We use NTBackup which I would have said was secure enough based on the level of sensitivity of the information they contain.

I also backup to a fileserver in another building so I suspect the tape backup would only be used for somebody wanting a previous version of a particular document.

I'd be interested in other school policies regarding backup.

[dhicks]

Has anyone bought a fire safe recently? We are looking for a small one.

Yes, we bought a Datacare 2000. Sorry, can't really tell you how it works without setting the place on fire... It's about as small as they come, which by the time it's been insulated to keep magnetic media safe from fire for two hours means it's about as heavy as I can lift. It took a couple of weeks to turn up - seemingly the couriers lost it, so it wound up rattling around the country for a while until it got here.

--
David Hicks

[boomam]

We have been using Symantec 10d on both of our networks.
With both backing up to various types of tape. Daily.

Just 10mins ago, i setup scheduled NTBackup jobs on both servers:
Weekly user data (home drives) backup on curriculum to NAS1 on saturdays, and on sundays, the system state backup.
And on the admin network, a complete system backup that runs on saturdays.

[sahmeepee]

Our fire safe is made by a company called Phoenix. It's pretty small inside the inner safe, but I reckon you could cram about 30-40 DAT tapes in there.

I'm hoping to move away from tapes soon (to remote SAN setup) so the fire safe may well become the liquor stash in anticipation of nuclear attack/ofsted inspection.

[placky]

We have two backup servers both running DPM 2007 with

4 x 150Gig Sata HDD's
4 x 380 Gig Sata Drives
1x 40 Gig System disk
1x 40 Gig database disk

and backup to tape using a HP Storageworks 1/8 Autoloader with LTO tapes which we keep for 4 weeks

[DarrenM]

We have one LTO3 drive and run Backup Exec 10d. We now have to use two tapes so have backups running during the day. I Plan to move to terabyte SATA drives for the following reasons.

Benefits (as I see them)
Cost
Easy to restore even if your tape drive got burnt!
Increase in capacity doesn't need a new £3000 tape drive.
Easy to get a couple running at same time (one backing up and one restoring)
Quick
Can buy big drives for full backups and some smaller for daily.

Problems
Not as robust as tape
Err there must be something else!

Costs
LTO 4: a drive and 20 tapes is £4680 Capacity is 400MB
SATA: 20 drives £3870 Capacity is 1000MB

My plan is to get something like 9 three drive SATA caddys and mount the drives in the caddy's. That way I can plug three drives in at one if need be. I can upgrade drives cheaply. In theory SATA drives should keep pace with my server storage capacity better than tape is likely to.

I have always used tape in the past but think it ain't worth it nowadays.

[torledo]

We have one LTO3 drive and run Backup Exec 10d. We now have to use two tapes so have backups running during the day. I Plan to move to terabyte SATA drives for the following reasons.

Benefits (as I see them)
Cost
Easy to restore even if your tape drive got burnt!
Increase in capacity doesn't need a new £3000 tape drive.
Easy to get a couple running at same time (one backing up and one restoring)
Quick
Can buy big drives for full backups and some smaller for daily.

Problems
Not as robust as tape
Err there must be something else!

Costs
LTO 4: a drive and 20 tapes is £4680 Capacity is 400MB
SATA: 20 drives £3870 Capacity is 1000MB

My plan is to get something like 9 three drive SATA caddys and mount the drives in the caddy's. That way I can plug three drives in at one if need be. I can upgrade drives cheaply. In theory SATA drives should keep pace with my server storage capacity better than tape is likely to.

I have always used tape in the past but think it ain't worth it nowadays.

LTO-4 is 800gig native capacity not 400MB.....i'll put that down to a typo..

LTO-4 drives are exensive, but you don't really need that capacity even when backing up multiple servers to a tape autoloader. a second drive could come in handy, the most cost effective option would be a SCSI LTO-3 auto loader scalable to 2 drives. A standalone external LTO-3 drive with 20 LTO-3 tapes you can get for less than £2000.

Damn, I'm getting sick of being the last defender of tape technology. Maybe i should just bite the bullet and buy SATA caddies like everyone else on here. ;-)

[flashsnaps]

Like a few Edugeekers have said, go with Backupexec and back up to a NAS, or a plain external.
The price of external storage has dropped in price dramtically, even with a tight budget. I mean I picked up an 8gb memory stick off eBay for just £10 the other day. Bargain!

Tapes need to be ditched!

[sahmeepee]

Damn, I'm getting sick of being the last defender of tape technology. Maybe i should just bite the bullet and buy SATA caddies like everyone else on here. ;-)

I quite like this quote:

Network connected disk to disk backup systems for the enterprise have come a long way since the first pioneering products started to appear in the pages of STORAGEsearch.com in the late 1990s.

Some of the growing sophistication in the market can be seen by the way that the marketing terminology has morphed from the early D2d (let's kill tape backup), via D2D2T (let's be friends with tape / peaceful coexistence) to the current VTL (Virtual Tape Library - let's just see if they notice that it's more reliable and works faster - and don't tell them that there isn't a tape in the box) type of approaches.

from here:

http://www.storagesearch.com/d2dhistory.html

[torledo]

I quite like this quote:



from here:

http://www.storagesearch.com/d2dhistory.html

All of the major d2d and vtl products being used in industry aren't of the removable media variety. They're essentially raid array solutions, some will work similar to how rsync is used.
Other options are to use existing backup software to copy data to a raid volume on a disk array or storage server where the backup software can support a disk copy/backup function.

critics of vtl's argue that they are looking back not forward, similar to solutions first deployed on the ibm mainframe years ago, where the vtl software emulates a variety of tape libraries. So the backup software is used in the same way as it is used in tape environments except the media being backed up to is a raid group. Because the VTL software can mimic a tape drive, the normal tape specific functions are still available, except they're applied to vitual tape drives and libraries.

Because both examples will use RAID for added protection over a number of disks they still have the problem of how you store data offsite.

Remote copy can provide site redundancy, but for single sites offloading to removeable media is still required, hence D2D2T is popular...and VTL with tape caching is very popular, because a VTL only emulates a tape library you still need to have physically removable media in the chain to store in a safe or take offsite, and i think for industry tape is still the media of choice even with VTL's. D2D and VTL technologies integrate into existing tape environments, they rarely elimiinate the need for tape completely.

[The_Traveller]

LTO2 on our four main servers, running symantec backup exec, we have sql on all four. Tapes for mon-thurs, end of week1-week4 and end of month1-month13. (month13 is important, it freaks people out) its a lot of tape,84!, but does bring peace of mind.

[DMcCoy]

Damn, I'm getting sick of being the last defender of tape technology. Maybe i should just bite the bullet and buy SATA caddies like everyone else on here. ;-)

You are not alone!

If I could get something as portable with nice archiving option that I get with my LTOs I would change!

I do find that I can stream data much quicker to my tape than to most consumer NAS boxes though.

I suppose I prefer *versions* over one or two large backup devices.