How do you successfully manage your backups and...

[sidewinder]

We do disk-to-disk overnight and then disk-to-tape during the day, with EOW media stored in a safe in a different building. One thing I seldom read about during such discussions is this: if your server room burns down then you've probably got bigger problems than your hardware, such as all your cabling coming into your comms cab. I suspect that would be the longest part of any recovery job.

 

Yeah I've thought that before - server hardware is relatively quick to get up and running, cabling isn't. Though I guess in such a scenario draping some CAT5 along corridors and between windows wouldn't be the end of the world until it could get sorted properly

[Trapper]

Curriculum and admin are backed up to the Cloud nightly via the LEA -so the covers all the DPA questions. Assuming that the LEA can be trusted! 30 days instant retrevial rest on tape for request.

 

MIS backup taken weekly and kept on a PC on the other side of the school. Critical documents are the same.

 

About once a term I back a MIS and critical backup stick it in a TrueCrypt container and whack it on our partner schools server and vice versa. Neither can access the others as the passwords are kept on site at the respective schools. As the schools are on the other side of the city that provides a little bit of extra security.

[jmak]

Neither can access the others as the passwords are kept on site at the respective schools. As the schools are on the other side of the city that provides a little bit of extra security.

 

Can see why you wouldn't want to let the other school keep your TrueCrypt password, but if it's really a DR situation on your site, how are you going to get hold of the record of the password?

[robjduk]

I have a large site with our music block as a separate building so backup to disk in there. I use a piece of software called Veeam which I CAN NOT RECOMMEND ENOUGH! so fast with amazing compression and quick restores!.

[MattDLEA]

Is VEEAM just for virtualised servers?

 

Didnt see anything on the website for normal servers

[mattianuk]

I use VEEAM to do a nightly backup of all our servers, our MIS and Bio servers are done twice a day, all to a NAS in another physical building. I do a fortnightly backup into a fire safe and a weekly back up to a separate NAS located in a 3rd building.

 

I am looking to hold an offsite backup at one of the primaries we support as well in the near future.

 

With us, Im hoping its more a case of differences in age of backups, then loosing the backups. All out NAS's have ISCSI - so we could run the VMs straight off there, but likely hood is I would shift them to a new server. Our current setup is a failover cluster with a SAN, so one would hope only a major instance would bring it down...