Backups in a secondary school

[CyBeRkId2002]

Looking for a little bit of advice on what people generally have in place for backups at the minute. I have been setting up Azure backups for a number of primaries we support and am generally very happy with it. Our current back-up server is getting a bit long in the tooth and have been investigating options for ourselves here (medium-ish secondary).

 

We have audited our actual data usage:

 

• We currently have about 2tb of essential data (Home drives, shared areas, databases etc.).
  
• I would guess if we actually backed up EVERYTHING to be on the safe-side we would probably be hitting 3-4tb.
  
• With a 7 day, 2 month, 2 term backup system in place I am guessing this will be around 7tb (our current server running DPM is sitting at 7.5tb of used space).
  

 

Having done a quick a simple calculation based on the worst case scenario of backing EVERYTHING up we are looking at £2844pa which seems prohibitively expensive. As such a bulk cloud backup of everything is out of the question (which I am guessing is what most have concluded).

 

We haven't specced a backup server yet (colleague is working on it) but I am guessing £2000 would get me a decent system with at least 10tb of RAID5 enterprise storage and some large external drives to make encrpyted backups to another building. Other option is virtualise DPM and purchase a SAN and appropriate storage. This can be stored in seperate building (same site).

 

Interested to here what others are doing for large-scale backups, and why...

[CHiLL]

We have three stages in our backup:

 

1) On-site production backup: We use VEEAM to back up all of our VMs to our backup SAN, located in our primary server room. Our backup jobs are running forward-incremental, which means the first job that ran was a full backup and all subsequent jobs are incremental.

2) On-site fire/ransomware backup: We have 2x old NAS devices with 4x 3TB drives each, located in two other physical buildings. They have a power on/off scheduling and I've configured them to come on weekly for 3 days...however not the same 3 days. They're never on at the same time, in an effort to tackle ransomware...we always have one NAS that has been offline and can be used to recover data. VEEAM is configured to run Backup Copy jobs to these on a weekly basis, with a script to enable/disable the job via Task Scheduler (otherwise VEEAM constantly complains that the NAS is offline). This also kind of works as a fire backup solution, as our data is in three different physical buildings...however it's not actually fire-proof.

3) Cloud Backup: Google for Education has a loophole where you can have unlimited cloud storage. The main VEEAM jobs are configured synthetic backups, so that it creates a full backup file each month for each job. We copy these full backup files and the metadata files to Google Cloud once a month, as an off-site backup.

[mrbios]

Step 1: Veeam backs up to local attached storage on the backup server, 8 x 8TB drives in RAID6. Backup server is in a separate building from the main server room, connected by 10GB link.

Step 2: Weekly backups to LTO7 tapes, these tapes are changed every Monday and put into a fire proof safe in a third location on site.

Step 3: Eventually will be a 3 month and 6 month restore point in Azure Archive tier storage, copied over using cloudberry backup.

[mavhc]

https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/ 8TB = $575/year

[CyBeRkId2002]

To those using Veeam, simple question. Is it possible to do off-site archiving to encrypted HDD? Would guess so but with DPM we had to purchase an extra product (firestreamer) to enable this.

[Squelch]

I have a secondary backup location going to rotated external hard drives, at the end of each day I take the latest one home with me and leave the other connected for the next backup. Rinse and repeat.