Backups

[Gatt]

What backup strategy do you use?

 

Looking to start a regular system here, but not got a clue as to how to actually do it - which method to use (normal, dfferential, etc)

 

Sugestions and recommendations welcome!

[Norphy]

OK, software and hardware first of all:

 

Legato Networker and a Certance Ultrium LTO 2 tape drive.

 

Every friday a full backup is made. Every other week day an incremental backup is made. The tape gets changed daily. There are about 10 "weekly" tapes and about 20 "daily" tapes. Seems to work well enough for us.

 

Since we started using volume shadowing in Windows 2003, it has completely eliminated the need for regular restores from our backups for when kids delete something or cock it up. Seriously consider using it, its worth it

[john]

Daily full backups onto LTO Ultrium 1 tapes, 2 week cycle, that covers staff and student work, shared work files, admin data, finance data etc... about 80GB of data, takes about 2hrs at the most on a busy network. Then once a week(ish) backup onto just 1 LTO tape our Applications stuff / IT technical stuff, so thats Library, managed typing program, geography software etc...

 

No volume shadow copies in use yet, we are thinking of them maybe for admin to start with rather than the kids, as the kids are surprisingly good at not having incidents with data, it tends to be badly written software corupting its own files the only reason I seem to ever do a resore.

[MkII]

Robocopy script to do complete backups every night, then one every four fridays to a Buffallo Terastation at the other end of the school site - roughly 100Gb. Once termly to two tape drives as well using Arcserve.

 

No shadow copy here - most common cause of loss is students deleting each others work - I presume shadow copies wouldn't help as the kids could just empty that as well.

 

See previous threads on the topic:

 

http://www.edugeek.net/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=1573&highlight=backup

 

http://www.edugeek.net/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=373&highlight=backup

 

http://www.edugeek.net/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=126&highlight=backup

[dodgydave]

Finally after having No working backup system (long story involving a visit to the wailing wall of woe )

Curriculum:

Veritas Backup Exec with Advanced Open File Option and SQL

2 x LTO2 Drives, 1 x 400GB HDD

Tapes -

Full Backup Completed everyday, Tapes kept on a Daily (x4)/Weekly (x3)/Monthly (x3) Basis.

HDD -

Daily Full Backup of Userspaces.

 

Admin:

Veritas Backup Exec with Advanced Open File Option and SQL

1xSony AIT2 Drive

Full Backup Completed everyday, Tapes kept on a Daily (x4)/Weekly (x3)/Monthly (x3) Basis.

[ChrisH]

I use ntbackup to backup the servers system drives with a full backup on friday and incremental Mon-Thu . I then use robocopy to backup apps and user areas.

 

The ntbackups are done in a 3 week cycle. All this is done to a disk on a seperate machine. This disk is then robocopied to an external caddy which is taken home every monday for off site backup.

 

This is all automated from a VB script which is run from a scheduled task.