Best method of backup for rack mounted servers

[tj2419]

Hi

 

We currently have three pedestal servers that backup to tape and using backup exec, backup to another server.

 

We will be switching to rack mounted servers on server 2012 so wanted to look at our backup again.

 

How would you suggest the backups were stored? As we will no longer have the tapes I take offsite. Is it enough to backup to a server in the same server room and then another server the other side of the school on a weekly basis?

 

I am paranoid about not having something to take offsite incase the whole school burned down! Cloud storage seems very expensive as we have about 2.5tb of data from all the servers.

 

Cheers

[SpuffMonkey]

You can still have a rack mounted tape unit if you want, or removeable hard drives, or cloud, or remote backup to a partner school etc

[tj2419]

For removable hard drives is that literally just buying some 1tb hard drives for example setting up a backup schedule and swapping them over? Or is it a special hardware setup? Forgive my ignorance here

[Blue_Cookeh]

Hi

 

We currently have three pedestal servers that backup to tape and using backup exec, backup to another server.

 

We will be switching to rack mounted servers on server 2012 so wanted to look at our backup again.

 

How would you suggest the backups were stored? As we will no longer have the tapes I take offsite. Is it enough to backup to a server in the same server room and then another server the other side of the school on a weekly basis?

 

I am paranoid about not having something to take offsite incase the whole school burned down! Cloud storage seems very expensive as we have about 2.5tb of data from all the servers.

 

Cheers

 

I store user's documents on Amazon S3, and then archive those up to Amazon Glacier. Virtual machine images go directly to Glacier. It's extremely cheap to back up to, a little bit more pricey when you need to pull stuff back down.

 

On site, I have an external drive for our 'master' server (running DFS) in case we need anything quick and easy from one server and then all the rest go to our NAS on the other side of the school.

Edited March 7, 2015 by Blue_Cookeh

[wedemire]

Cloud storage is expensive. I've started using crashplan which has a free version which lets you do site to site backups for free. It does an incremental backup of our file servers and stores them encrypted on an offsite computer that has a large raid 5 array (could just be one large hard drive though). This has worked great for us for almost a year. To pull the files back you just need to put crashplan on a new computer and login to your account and pull the files back. I also get email updates if the server hasn't backed up in a few days and weekly emails with the percentage backed up and space used.

We also do a local backup of our virtual machines.

[Marshall_IT]

I store user's documents on Amazon S3, and then archive those up to Amazon Glacier. Virtual machine images go directly to Glacier. It's extremely cheap to back up to, a little bit more pricey when you need to pull stuff back down.

 

On site, I have an external drive for our 'master' server (running DFS) in case we need anything quick and easy from one server and then all the rest go to our NAS on the other side of the school.

 

How much data do you have on S3 and on glacier and roughly how much per month does it cost you?

 

Have you priced up how much it'd cost you if you had to pull everything back down in case of fire?

[Roberto]

Hi

 

We currently have three pedestal servers that backup to tape and using backup exec, backup to another server.

 

We will be switching to rack mounted servers on server 2012 so wanted to look at our backup again.

 

I'm a little unclear as to why switching to rack mounted servers precludes the use of tape. It's still a viable solution imo, we back all our severs up to tape, and they certainly all sit in a rack.

[Marshall_IT]

I think he has an internal tape drive in each server and you can fit them into a rack server. Not that I've seen anyway.

 

You could still backup to tape using a track mounted autoloader or tape library though.

 

I'm moving away from tapes because i find them too slow though. I might still off load some data to tape until i set up something to the cloud, azure or aws.

[tj2419]

I'm a little unclear as to why switching to rack mounted servers precludes the use of tape. It's still a viable solution imo, we back all our severs up to tape, and they certainly all sit in a rack.

 

Currently all our tape drives are built in to the three pedestal servers. I want something easy to take offsite each night, just incase the worst happened. Cheers

[Edu-IT]

Tandberg do external drives with RDX cartridges you could back up to?

[SpuffMonkey]

For removable hard drives is that literally just buying some 1tb hard drives for example setting up a backup schedule and swapping them over? Or is it a special hardware setup? Forgive my ignorance here

 

I should think you could bodge a cheap rack server with hot swappable drives to function like that - or even an old PC as long as the network connection is fast and theres not too much data