Offsite Backups

[smithson83]

Not online backups, but taking backups offsite.

 

How many of you guys actually take backup HDD's/Tapes etc offsite each night?

 

I always have done, at present I'm taking 2x1TB encrypted drives off site every night, this isn't our primary backup, that goes to a NAS at the opposite end of school. But in the event of a whole school catastrophe, I have all the VM's and data etc and can be up and running once new servers are up and running.

 

My question is (well second question), if I copied the primary backup (which is at the opposite end of school, on another floor, past more than a few walls that are supposed to retard fire) to a fireproof NAS/DAS would that be deemed enough of a backup so I didn't have to take backups offsite each night.

[Steve21]

We have weekly offsites being done (newly put in until something better can be afforded) as had none to take offsite.

 

Honestly don't see a week being an issue if your schools burnt/blown up that much that you'd ever need them

 

Steve

[zag]

Its 2015, no need to physically take backups offsite any more.

 

Haven't done that since the days of tape!

 

A backup server in a different building or block is enough. We have Veeam in there and its backed up every hour now.

 

We also backup to cloud just in case.

[smithson83]

So @Steve21 you have a INSERT BACKUP SCHEME HERE and once a week you run a separate backup and that is taken off site?

[Steve21]

@zag Unless your school is a single block boo for new builds haha

@smithson83 Yep, daily backups (some 4 hours, some hourly on SIMs etc), then weekly backups to 6TB external to take offsite too

 

Steve

[CamelMan]

I take a 2TB drive home about once a term incase of complete disaster, however we backup to 2 separate servers in different buildings at either end of the site, so if we needed it it would have to be pretty bad!

[smithson83]

@zag how much data do you backup to the cloud. I had thought about that, but I also considered 1.4TB to be a bit much to push offsite that way.

Ideally I would love to have a 3rd Hyper-V target and just run a stripped down server at home etc, but unfortunately our County connection won't allow that.

[Irazmus]

Our primary backup is to our second building, but we do still have physical offsite backups in case of total building structural integrity failure (i.e. both buildings blow up). I know someone who used to work for a company whose data centre was right next to the Buncefield oil depot, so I tend to use that as my 'disaster' yardstick (not that there's much likelyhood of anything on that scale happening here).

 

My thinking is that is we have to change site due to a disaster, we'll likely have replacement servers before an Internet connection (it took 18 site visits over several months for BT to get the last set of lines in here ). In such a position, backups in the cloud would not be of much use, so I refuse to be reliant on them and would only consider them in addition to physical offsite backups. Although if we define 'Cloud' to mean a server in another local school which I can visit to grab said backups if need be, that would be a different matter. In fact, my backup server in another school and their backup server in mine would probably be the best option overall.

[zag]

@zag how much data do you backup to the cloud. I had thought about that, but I also considered 1.4TB to be a bit much to push offsite that way.

Ideally I would love to have a 3rd Hyper-V target and just run a stripped down server at home etc, but unfortunately our County connection won't allow that.

 

Ours is about 1tb I think. But its virtual machines so no need to transfer the whole lot more than once. Typical offsite backup would be about 6GB.