Backup Advice

[Moo]

Hello all.

 

I'm looking for a little advice on backup solutions. I've recently inherited a system and one of the many issues is the backup system currently in-place. Each night, a full backup for each the student areas, staff areas and shares is scheduled, however these are taking quite a significant time to complete - looking at the logs, they're sitting at 9.5, 22 and 23 hours each, on average (there's a lot of data - currently everything is being backed up and as there are no quotas in place, some of these areas are massive, so another problem to sort...). All of this is backed up to a 16TB NAS box in a separate building. "Rotation" is a case of manually removing old backup directories when no longer needed. Only two of the virtual servers are being backed up, using the free version of Altaro, however there are five VMs on the box. The current server setup is like this:

 

 

• Physical DC
  
• Physical DC/file server (._.)
  
• Physical SIMS server
  
• Virtual host with DC, print/application server, WDS/WSUS server, web server and Sophos
  

 

Out of all of this, only the files on the file server, as well as the web and print server VMs, and the SIMS database are backed up. The SIMS stuff is backed up off-site (Redstor), but everything else is on-site only. The NAS box is set up as an iSCSI target and connected to the file server. None of the other servers were being backed up in any way. It looks like there is no backup of AD, Group Policy etc. either. To get this going in the mean time, can I just use the built-in Windows Server Backup to have something in-place? I'm guessing the system state backup covers AD, but does this also include GPOs or do I need to add those separately?

 

Unfortunately I've never actually really been involved in dealing with backups before, short of being responsible for changing over the tapes at my first job. What I'm looking for is an idea of what kind of backup software I should be looking in to, what sort of backup types and schedules are ideal to use, how long it's good to retain backups for and so on. Is there an all-in-one piece of software which can handle all of this? What kind of things should I be looking in to? I'd also like to look into getting more of the data backed up off-site. I realise this might be a bit tricky, as we have 3.5TB of data just in terms of the file server, and a fairly limited budget to work on, but if I can start getting some of the more crucial data off-site then that would be great. Presumably Redstor is again an option here, but I'm open to suggestions of alternatives as well. I need all the advice I can get, I think. I have been made aware of Amazon Glacier, which seems pretty cheap to store data, but it also looks expensive to get it back. Seems like it might be a good option as a storage option for total disaster recovery, but perhaps not for the day-to-day? Perhaps someone with more experience of these things can shed some more light on the potential options.

 

I'd be very grateful if someone can point me in the direction of some suitable software/service providers, give any tips and advice on getting things set up in a robust manner, or any links to essential reading to get a better grasp of the situation.

 

Cheers.

[Davit2005]

What software do you use to backup at the moment.

 

I've normally allway's setup Incrementals or Differentials through the week then leave the full for the weekend.

 

Do you backup to tape, disk, cloud or a mixture off both.

[Moo]

Currently it's a really old version of Cobian Backup. We back up to disk, to a NAS unit in a separate building, with the exception of SIMS which is a cloud backup. How long do you keep the full backups for? Four weeks or something?

[LukeRowberry]

Veeam. Definitely Veeam

[penfold]

We use Veeam for our Virtual and Symantec Backup Exec for Physical boxes. We run full backups at the weekend with incremental run during the week. Veeam backs up to a Backup repository and then we run tape jobs for weekly/monthly backups. We also run 2 archive tapes a year which are basically monthly tapes which don't get overwritten.

 

Obviously there is a cost in getting these backup solutions installed in the first place.

 

in the first instance you need to get backups of the systems you have, even if that is getting jobs pointing to your NAS drive. In the long term you need to establish what kind of service level they need if you were to loose everything in a fire. That's where tapes/off site storage/fire safes etc come into play. Once you know what they expect you can then look at products which will give you that level of protection.

[Moo]

Veeam. Definitely Veeam

 

We use Veeam for our Virtual and Symantec Backup Exec for Physical boxes. We run full backups at the weekend with incremental run during the week. Veeam backs up to a Backup repository and then we run tape jobs for weekly/monthly backups. We also run 2 archive tapes a year which are basically monthly tapes which don't get overwritten.

 

Thanks. I'll add these to the growing list of things I need to look in to.

 

Obviously there is a cost in getting these backup solutions installed in the first place.

 

in the first instance you need to get backups of the systems you have, even if that is getting jobs pointing to your NAS drive. In the long term you need to establish what kind of service level they need if you were to loose everything in a fire. That's where tapes/off site storage/fire safes etc come into play. Once you know what they expect you can then look at products which will give you that level of protection.

 

Yeah, convincing them that they're going to need to invest is one of the hurdles I'm facing, especially with the current state of finances. But I figure it's likely to cost them more in the event of a total loss than it is to get a solid solution in place, so hopefully it'll be fairly straightforward to convince them. I'm working on getting an idea of exactly what they need but so far they seem less interested in really getting involved in the process and just want it sorting. Mildly frustrating to say the least!

 

Thanks to everyone who has replied so far, I really appreciate the assistance.

[jonathan.lees]

I work at a school with little to no budget for IT and still use Cobian 11 for data backups. I just have it set to do a daily incremental to a NAS box kept in our sixth form block which is not attached to the main building, so effectively it is offsite. I also use Cobian to do a weekly full backup on a Friday to an external drive, I have 4 of these and rotate them on a weekly basis. Every term I archive an external drive and purchase another to replace it. The external drives are encrypted with DiskCrypt. For our VMs I use Veeam free edition, it does full backups and not incremental, I do a daily backup of our SIMS VM which is saved on our NAS and a weekly backup of our other servers - VLE, SCCM, Cashless catering, Web etc. Again on a Friday I do a weekly backup of the VMs to the external drive just in case and that way I have two copies. I don't backup our VM DCs as they are easy and quick enough to rebuild however our main DC is physical and I use Windows Server Backup daily to another external USB to backup system state etc

 

All of the software I use is free of charge, the only cost is the 5TB external drives I purchase once per term. I would like to backup to the cloud and be able to afford better backup solutions but our SLT say no money!

[markwilfan]

If you have an ees licence dpm is included. We use the latest version dpm 2016 which fits our needs perfectly. Integrates with windows file servers too to manage previous versions centrally

[fiza]

If you have an ees licence dpm is included. We use the latest version dpm 2016 which fits our needs perfectly. Integrates with windows file servers too to manage previous versions centrally

Is dpm 2016 a standalone product or do you need to have sccm too?

[markwilfan]

Is dpm 2016 a standalone product or do you need to have sccm too?

It is stand alone. There is a completely free version too but will not allow local or tape storage so azure only. So technically not free

[fiza]

It is stand alone. There is a completely free version too but will not allow local or tape storage so azure only. So technically not free

 

Just had this from our Reseller ;

 

DPM cannot be purchased on its own anymore, they will need system centre licence for all the servers that needs DPM.