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Oakford Backup

PaulRenda

By PaulRenda
in Cloud Services

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dhicks

dhicks

Posted
Posted
Has anyone used Oakford Backup for online backup and are they any good?

 

I haven't used them, but I'm currently looking at options for offsite backup. Any idea how much they charge? One of their testimonials mentions £99 for 100GB, is that £99 per month for 100GB, does anyone know?

Nausing

Nausing

Posted
Posted
We currently use DPM for our onsite backup.. this works really well! Couldn't recommend it anymore.. Just looking for an offsite solution to do monthly back ups but seems to be harder then expected......
dhicks

dhicks

Posted
Posted

 

Livedrive seem to be one of the best-value backup services out there, but I'm not sure how their system works in a network environment. I don't want to backup 150 individual workstations, I want to backup a bunch of server virtual machine images in a way that lets me quickly restore them should there be a problem, and I want a versioned backup of our network file areas. I'm thinking to have a locally-accesible, cloud-backed storage device of some kind - a server that makes a storage area available via iSCSI, and that storage is then backed up to the cloud somehow. I'm wondering if LiveDrive's service would let me do that - would it treat a bunch of VM images as just files to be backed up by one user?

Nausing

Nausing

Posted
Posted
Livedrive seem to be one of the best-value backup services out there, but I'm not sure how their system works in a network environment. I don't want to backup 150 individual workstations, I want to backup a bunch of server virtual machine images in a way that lets me quickly restore them should there be a problem, and I want a versioned backup of our network file areas. I'm thinking to have a locally-accesible, cloud-backed storage device of some kind - a server that makes a storage area available via iSCSI, and that storage is then backed up to the cloud somehow. I'm wondering if LiveDrive's service would let me do that - would it treat a bunch of VM images as just files to be backed up by one user?

 

 

I'm in the same sort of boat.. I want to backup a few physical servers to a cloud storage area for long term data protection...

dhicks

dhicks

Posted
Posted
I'm in the same sort of boat.. I want to backup a few physical servers to a cloud storage area for long term data protection...

 

What sort of setup/monthly price would you consider reasonable? Once you start getting into "corporate"-style amounts of backups (2TB upwards), cloud services start to look expensive - I had a quote the other day for £1 per GB per month, and it seems there are places out there actually paying that amount. It has struck me recently that I can simply make my own backup service to undercut that price. I'm developing and testing a simple backup server VM on my home OpenStack cloud server at the moment, with the plan being to move that to either RackSpace's cloud service (about 7p per GB per month) or my own co-located server (around 5p per GB per month).

Nausing

Nausing

Posted
Posted
What sort of setup/monthly price would you consider reasonable? Once you start getting into "corporate"-style amounts of backups (2TB upwards), cloud services start to look expensive - I had a quote the other day for £1 per GB per month, and it seems there are places out there actually paying that amount. It has struck me recently that I can simply make my own backup service to undercut that price. I'm developing and testing a simple backup server VM on my home OpenStack cloud server at the moment, with the plan being to move that to either RackSpace's cloud service (about 7p per GB per month) or my own co-located server (around 5p per GB per month).

 

 

I wanted to use rackspace as its very cheap.. how ever you have to use a third party application to run the backups.. too dirty for me.....

 

We currently have DPM for onsite 10 day backup.. but want a cloud service to provide a monthly backup for 1+ year storage...

 

We were with a company and paid £248 a month for 1TB but the backups kept on failing or erroring up and when it came to a real life DR situation we had to wait days for a external HDD with our data and with that had no permissions so was pretty useless... Luckily I set up DPM a few months before... we recreated a 2008 R2 server with the same name, installed the DPM agent and within 2 days 1.1TB of data was on the new server with permissions fully working....

 

I was looking at CrashPlan Pro by CeeJay.. only £15 a month for 5TB of data storage.. or additions are £40/TB so I was interested... I installed the software under 30 day trail and the UI was terrible.. I requiest support three times but they failed to provide me the answers to my questions so I gave up on them... Still searching on Google for a good company...

 

I would also like to add Exchange mail boxes and SQL to the protection...

dhicks

dhicks

Posted
Posted
I wanted to use rackspace as its very cheap.. how ever you have to use a third party application to run the backups..

 

I figured I'd have a local server device of some kind to sync with the cloud storage. An HP Microserver or a 1U rackmount with 4 4TB disks in would be around £1,000, and that could act as a local iSCSI device. Disk performance wouldn't be great, but should be fine for writing backups, and you could write data to it any way you pleased - with the backup software of your choice, or simply mount the iSCSI drive in your VM environment and use its capabilities to duplicate data over. In the case of XenServer that's simply going to be a script that quiesces a VM disk image, snapshots it, then copies changed disk sectors from the live image to the backup one - other systems might need some backup software to do this for them.

 

You could even have the backup server duplicate its storage out to the cloud in real-time via DRBD or similar, although setting it to do non-syncronouse writes would probably be a good idea.

  • Thanks 1
Nausing

Nausing

Posted
Posted
I figured I'd have a local server device of some kind to sync with the cloud storage. An HP Microserver or a 1U rackmount with 4 4TB disks in would be around £1,000, and that could act as a local iSCSI device. Disk performance wouldn't be great, but should be fine for writing backups, and you could write data to it any way you pleased - with the backup software of your choice, or simply mount the iSCSI drive in your VM environment and use its capabilities to duplicate data over. In the case of XenServer that's simply going to be a script that quiesces a VM disk image, snapshots it, then copies changed disk sectors from the live image to the backup one - other systems might need some backup software to do this for them.

 

You could even have the backup server duplicate its storage out to the cloud in real-time via DRBD or similar, although setting it to do non-syncronouse writes would probably be a good idea.

 

 

Look at Microsoft DPM.. .this is pretty much how I have it set up.. The DPM is using an iSCSI target to a 3TB NAS drive which basically writes a backup 3 times a day for 10 days

  • Thanks 2
  • 2 weeks later...
Wyvern

Wyvern

Posted
Posted
Our business manager decided to go with oakford backup about 4 years back now and I have to say I'm pretty impressed with them. I used to faff with tapes every evening but now I pretty much do nothing regarding backups except restore files for dosile students and install the client on any new servers we get which is pretty damn easy. I don't know how much they charge now as the business manager still deals with the IT budget but it certainly isn't £100 a month(no way we could afford that!). I have just taken on a primary school and recommended it to them too (they had no backups.....whaaat!) and I will find out what their quote was and post it here. Either way 4 years, a ton of document restores for students and staff and one entire restore of a SIMS server....no complaints.
  • Thanks 2
Wyvern

Wyvern

Posted
Posted
Hi again, I can't get hold of the primary I am starting at but I have spoken to the business manager at my normal school (secondary) and she says its about £99 for the year. We have a 100gb of space which covers our three fileservers, SIMS and VLE using incremental backups and also takes a weekly system state of each of them plus an extra couple of system states for our AD and TMG servers. Working out at quid a gig for a year is a pretty good price so on that note I can't recommend it enough!
  • Thanks 1
Edu-IT

Edu-IT

Posted
Posted (edited)
Hi again, I can't get hold of the primary I am starting at but I have spoken to the business manager at my normal school (secondary) and she says its about £99 for the year. We have a 100gb of space which covers our three fileservers, SIMS and VLE using incremental backups and also takes a weekly system state of each of them plus an extra couple of system states for our AD and TMG servers. Working out at quid a gig for a year is a pretty good price so on that note I can't recommend it enough!

Seems a bit *too* cheap.

 

Do they provide software to manage the backup?

Edited by Edu-IT
Wyvern

Wyvern

Posted
Posted (edited)

It does come with software (I think you get it with the free trial if I remember right). They have their own installer and client that I put on each of my servers. When setting it up you can choose when to take backups etc. and it uses the same program to make restores - you click a different button and chose the folder or files you want to restore and where to put them (or let them copy back to where they were).

 

Looking at Edu-IT's comment I will now have to double check that what I have been told by my busniess manager isn't an old quote from yonks back. I can't find a price on the site either.

 

Even if it is a little more I am still pretty damn pleased with it as it means I dont spend my friday afternoon P*ssing around with tapes!

Edited by Wyvern
Wyvern

Wyvern

Posted
Posted
Just seen the price on the website! (I got a bee in my bonnet!). It's in the data sheet download, there are some screen shots of the software too though.
speckytecky

speckytecky

Posted
Posted (edited)

Got to be said - this does look good.

 

How can they do it at that price I wonder and still make a profit?

 

Plus why aren't they advertising on here!

 

Don't need to at the moment I suppose as this thread is doing it for em:)

Edited by speckytecky
localzuk

localzuk

Posted
Posted
Still, at that price, it'd work out at about £2500 a year for us. Compared to our NAS + external disks + software solution which is £3.5k every 3 years, ish.
  • Thanks 1
  • 7 months later...
ajsidike

ajsidike

Posted
Posted
Check out http://www.relaxyourdataissafe.co.uk...its cloud backup run by Education & It Ltd, they're doing really well in the west midlands area. Its a managed service in that they install their software and they take care of it all. So if anything were to go wrong, or go over quota they get in touch with you to tell you...add to that the use a 120 day retention policy...how much space would you need to store that much data??
  • Thanks 1
divadiow

divadiow

Posted
Posted
does anyone have any more thoughts on Oakford? I note they're not Capita accredited, like Redstor, and there's no mention of the ISO certifications on the web site. An employee did reply to an email query to say they were ISO9001 and ISO27001 certified. I'm trying to get confirmation of this.
uffy2000

uffy2000

Posted
Posted
We currently use DPM for our onsite backup.. this works really well! Couldn't recommend it anymore.. Just looking for an offsite solution to do monthly back ups but seems to be harder then expected......

 

Theo, I know this is totally off topic here but do you have any guidance on setting up DPM? SQL setup etc and do you use any of the other packages i.e SCCM

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