Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape Backup

[enjay]

We're toying the idea of implementing a D2D2T backup, and I was wondering what offerings in that area other people used. We're not after anything too fancy, nor are we looking to back up huge volumes of data (~100GB).

 

Thoughts, comments, suggestions, warnings all welcome...

[greenfieldsupport]

Why not Disk > Disk > Offline storage at another school backed up via your internet connection? especially if its small backups like that .

[plexer]

Why go with the extra step of tape as well?

 

I need to look at my current nas setup for next year.

 

I am thinking of something similar to what we do but a nas or other device in the server room either at night or continuous throughout the day and then onto a nas the other side of the site as we do now.

 

Ben

[enjay]

@greenfieldsupport - not so easy for an indy school like us, also I have mentioned online backups before and never got very far with the idea.

 

@plexer - tapes can be taken offsite, so in the event of serious fire, data would still be recoverable. Infrastructure permitting, we could (as you suggest) just put a NAS elsewhere on site, though. That said, I'm not sure if we could actually get it far enough away, as the site is quite small.

[bossman]

Nick just been quoted for SAN backup solution transfer speeds of 120Gb per hour D2D2tape so i can take them offsite how much?

 

Guess? closest wins!

[mrforgetful]

We used to use Disk to Disk to Tape using a dedicated server and Retrospect 7.0

 

Was awful.

 

Used to take so long to do the backup that it couldn't complete in one night doing everything we wanted.

So we cut out some stuff.

Then because it would backup the data to disk overnight then copy that backup to tape all day, if you wanted to restore something you couldn't because the Backupset was always in use.

 

Why do you want to do it this way?

[enjay]

@mrforgetful - good point regarding the issues of doing restores, hadn't thought of that. The reasoning behind doing it is mainly as an extra layer of defence in case we have issues with the tapes, also it would serve as a backup on days when I'm not here to change tapes.

[mrforgetful]

I don't even bother with nightly backups anymore.

 

As far as I'm concerned Shadow Copies are good enough for day to day backups. If it's something serious enough to need my offsite backup I'm sure there'll be bigger things on people mind than needing to catch up on a weeks work.

[torledo]

Why not Disk > Disk > Offline storage at another school backed up via your internet connection? especially if its small backups like that .

 

Not a bad idea - some sort of remote site replication using an internet connection for relatively small backup size requirements. Wouldn't recommend it if both sites didn't have symmetrical bandwith and a suitably fat pipe - ideally 10meg LES so that would favour a private line rather than transporting it via the internet. Ofcourse D2D2T is perfect if you don't have a remote site or another school who'd be willing to work with you. But effectiveness of different D2D2T implementations differ wildly - the best solution is for your disk array or device to emulate a tape library (VTL) you stage your backups to the array and can restore directly from disk and offload to tape - in answer to another posters comment ideally you should have tape in the chain for offsite and archival storage. Ofcourse if you have got remote replication facility your disk arrays can do archiving and your remote storage can handle offsite storage. Voila.

Most large companies still use tape a LOT.

 

The VTL approach is VERY different to how most schools do D2D - they tend to use rsync or similar tools to backup from disk to disk (cheap and simple) VTL's allows you many many more options and are a much better

way if you need to do D2D2T - it's just a hell of a lot more intuitive.

 

LEA managed WAN's are perfect for backup applications - particularly leased line or mpls vpn based WAN's. LEA's can backup school servers to terabytes of SAN based storage quickly and cheaply....

Obviously requires careful planning by all involved.

[torledo]

Nick just been quoted for SAN backup solution transfer speeds of 120Gb per hour D2D2tape so i can take them offsite how much?

 

Guess? closest wins!

 

couple of questions;

 

is it for an existing SAN ?

 

if so, what arrays are you using and what additional components (including software) are they quoting you for ?

 

If you can let us know i can get very close to guessing how much their quoting you ?

 

Particularly if they've used the works VTL, CDP and de-dupe in their sales pitch.

[enjay]

IAs far as I'm concerned Shadow Copies are good enough for day to day backups.

By which you mean files getting copied across to another server immediately, right? That would be an even better option, and I could then back that up daily/weekly. How have you got that set up?

[dhicks]

> We're toying the idea of implementing a D2D2T backup, and I was

> wondering what offerings in that area other people used.

 

My own Perl script that transfers files from individual servers to a central backup server via HTTP. Only transfers files that have been changed. The filesystem on the backup server uses hard links to maintain "copies" of the filesystem, so you can go back and see what the filesystem looked like a number of days/weeks/months ago. I plan to mount the backed-up copy of each user's file area as a (read-only) drive on their Windows PC, letting them restore stuff from backup without having to ask me.

 

--

David Hicks

[Psymon]

We backup from servers to a NAS LaCie drive (A) every week, and then take all them backups to another LaCie (B) on the other side of site at the end of the month. 4 weekly backups, then push it to another location for the months worth.

 

Using 300Gb of a 500Gb drive at current, and thats backing up last years staff and students untill christmas when we put it onto our third backup drive © that contains leaver data for 3 years before being destroyed.

 

(A) 1 Week Cycle, Automatic

(B) 1 Month Cycle, Automatic

© Manual Yearly Process

 

Done on Friday Night / Sat Morning (1am), and the Monthls on a Sat Night / Sunday Morning. All going over Fibre to the quieter switches on site.

[mrforgetful]

As far as I'm concerned Shadow Copies are good enough for day to day backups.

By which you mean files getting copied across to another server immediately, right? That would be an even better option, and I could then back that up daily/weekly. How have you got that set up?

 

I just mean for day to day recovery Shadow Copies do all I need to do, after all 99% of recoveries are accidentally deleted work, saves over files they didn't want to etc.

 

I don't do anything on a day to day basis except have Shadow Copies turned on.

 

On a Friday night the entire contents of every drive is copied to external USB HDDs. Take it home on a Monday rotational with another set.

[ICTNUT]

@mrforgetful: I can understand your view on day to day user files and I agree but backups is more than that.

 

currently I do a disk > disk > tape but not in the traditional sense:

 

I have a 1TB NAS (A) that has all the users files on it which gets backed up on a weekly basis to a 2TB NAS(B) (200Gb Backup) which gets held over a 4 week period. At the end of the 4 weeks a 300Gb Monthly backup to tape is done from the last week of the weekly cycle.

 

On top of this I have another 2TB NAS© which has my exchange backups going to it, my daily ASR backups of my DC's, and my system state backups for my other servers going to it. These daily backups amount to nearly 100GB and rotate on a monthly basis with a monthly backup going direct to NAS(B) to be caught on tape.

 

Backup is not just user files but DR should be included in it also hence why the backups are big but it does mean in the event of a failure all is good.

[mrforgetful]

Yes that's why I have my backups to take offsite weekly.

 

As I see it, if I'm going to need to recover from an offsite backup it probably means the school's burnt down, in which case redoing 1 week's work is the last of anyone's worries.

SIMs data is done daily to a tape.

 

So other than silly deletions and the school burning down I suppose there's middle ground - a server breaks. If it's motherboard or something of that nature then the drives are fine so can be put in another computer whatever. If it's that a drive's failed it'll carry on until I get another delivered to rebuild the RAID, doesn't even need a backup.

 

Sure your backup regime is nice, it's robust, complete, thorough etc, but how much was it? Mine came in at less than £800.

[broc]

We have a DIY server based upon a P4 Intel server board running Server 2003 sitting in a locked cupboard in the sports hall, a seperate building at the far end of our site. It is connected via fibre to the backbone network. It has a system drive & 5x 250gb SATA data volumes, labelled MONDAY, TUESDAY...... No RAID, nothing fancy.

 

Every night we copy data from each of our servers to the appropriate nights HDD. Each server has its own backup folder, we use NTBACKUP, again nothing fancy to do the backups. Each server disk is backed up seperately.

 

I will be swapping out the 250gb drives for 500gb drives over half-term as we are down to less than 10% free space.

 

We also use a program called Secondcopy to copy changed data from our main file server to another local server in the server room, this is used 95% of the time to recover lost/overwritten data.

 

This process has worked fine for more than 2 years now, the only problems I have encountered was when the PSU in the server gave up the ghost after a power interrupt (No UPS), and a couple of times when the network connection was lost during power maintenance during school holidays.

 

To keep the County MIS people happy we back up SIMS to tape too, and this is kept in a media quality fire safe. I also do tape backups of user data to an old 40gb DLT drive every half term and keep these in the fire safe. We hold these tapes for just under 2 years.

 

If I have time (& remember), I test restore a folder or two to satisfy myself the tape is readable, just in case!

 

Cost of the original setup was less than £600, plus another £280 this month for the new HDD.

[mrforgetful]

Don't Firesafe's just keep things ok for a couple of hours? Always wanted one but always pretty scared when I read up on them!

[plexer]

A media fire tape safe will keep the data intact for a specified amount of time depending on it's rating and therefore cost.

 

Mine for example is rated for 1hr I think.

 

Not that it matters as we only backup to a nas and therefore the tape drives we have are redundant.

 

I wonder if it's possible to get the fire brigade to rescue it in the even of a fire?

 

Ben

[broc]

Our firesafe is in the main office, a single storey building of very little substance, I reckon it would be burnt to a crisp before the safe was 'cooked'. Its better than me having to remember to take tapes home/bring them back

 

The remote server is our primary backup, the firesafe is for 'show' & to keep the MIS team happy.

[ICTNUT]

Yeah firesafes are around an hour for a decent one, I think that is what mine is rated at.

 

As far as cost for my backup solution it came in at around £2k but it was decided that this be spent due to a failure that happened before I got here and seeing as prices have dropped a great deal over the last 12 months i.e 2TB NAS for £400 then it make sense.

[Busybub]

I have an additional domain controller located in a different building which is fitted with 2 500gb drives. Backups are set to alternate between the two drives, and are sufficient for two weeks of rolling backups with space to spare.

 

I also have a pair of encrypted USB hard drives (300gb) which I make backups on over the weekend and midweek.

 

Used to just use the USB jobbies until they started running out of room.

 

Total cost, about £340 so far (not including the server which is basically a spare desktop).

 

Never had any problems.

[DMcCoy]

How many instances are you keeping with just the disk backup? I like the fact that with tapes I can go back to 18 different monthly tapes (I have more, but they are a different format and less organised).

 

I find that people only remember that they deleted *really* important documents when they have fallen off the backup cycle.

[broc]

For disaster recovery, we keep the last 5 daily backups on disk on our remote DR server, these wrap round weekly. To cope with the accidental deletion/overwriting of data, we use Secondcopy which maintains the last 'n' versions of the file. Normally this is set to 5 versions. At the moment, in the event of a disaster we would lose these older versions of files however I am looking at the possibility of copying these to the DR server too, providing I can find some space.

 

I really don't like tape technology, or at least not the sort that typically gets used in PC server enviroments. The IBM Magstar tapes are the only tape technology I would trust. I have seen too many bad tapes in my time, and many more that would only work on the drive they were written on; not good in a disaster

[ICTNUT]

i'm with DMcoy on this one VSS is only going to cover you for a month at best hence the 18 monthly tapes I have also to get around the "I forgot I deleted it" line.