Backing up from one school to another, should I backup to VM, Host or VHD????

[edutech4schools]

Looking to save a few quid and move our offsite backup from a company that is charging us ££££ to another school that has said it's ok.

 

We do also do onsite backups, so we are only talking about worst case disaster recovery backups.

 

Both schools are primary schools, so not much cash or hardware hanging round.

Both schools are running Windows server Hyper-V 2012r2 hosts with a virtual server that holds all the data.

Both school hosts do have enough spare space to hold the files from the other school.

 

Should I install another windows 2012r2 server as a vm on the host and backup to this from the other school?

Should I simply backup to some space on the the host server directly?

Is it possible to create a vitual hdd and backup to this?

 

Any thoughts?

[TechMonkey]

I'm sure it is possible but what about getting 2 Synology boxes and siting them at each school and use that as a copy job target? OK you have the cost of a box each but that way nothing would interfere with their VM infrastructure and it would be offsite. You would need to look into the insurance and DP issues but that would probably be easier and less chance of issues.

[edutech4schools]

Problem is they are out of cash and have a server with lots of free storage space.

[pantscat]

What do you currently use to backup? Is it veeam by any chance?

[edutech4schools]

What do you currently use to backup? Is it veeam by any chance?

 

Not veeam, a combination of Windows backup (host vm backup and file level backup) and RedStor (off site backup)

 

Think I have a good solution now using the VHD option, but need to do some more testing.

[pantscat]

What's the speed like between the sites?

 

I'd probably want to use some software that's WAN aware so that you don't saturate the link, that's why I mentioned Veeam. It would be a perfect application for this sort of thing.

[twin--turbo]

What's your link speeds?

 

TT

[Max_Power]

Apart from the technological side of things and depending on the type of data you would be backing up to the other school and vice versa, I would anticipate you would need to review your safeguarding and data protection policies?

[zag]

Use offsite backups with Veeam. Works very well here.