Backups

[caffrey]

In light of everything that's going on in the world what backup software is recommended ?

 

I know everyone is going to say veeam, but I've no idea of the cost of it.

 

We've been using Backupassist for over 5 years, mainly because it's cheap and it works. We have a backup plan to rotating external usb drives (Cold storage) stored in a fireproof safe and a mirror to a NAS. The NAS is in another building, and the plan was at the time if the main building burnt down there would still be a backup. Now recently the NAS failed and backupassist has just been causing me issues (nas copy is sloooow) so I'm thinking of a change, plus I want to start using cloud storage

 

Anyone else have similar to the above?

[mrbios]

Veeam....

 

I've used Arcserve UDP, Nakivo, MS DPM. Veeam trumps them all for features and constantly pushing the latest backup trends out the fastest.

 

My backup routine is incremental disk backups 3 times per day, synthetic full backups weekly, and one active full monthly (ReFS direct attached disks make this super fast) full backup to tape every weekend with tapes setup in a GFS media pool (yearly, quarterly, weekly setup in my case), and everything offloaded to Backblaze B2 cloud immutable storage after each disk backup. Tapes are taken out and put in a fireproof safe elsewhere on site every Monday. Then SureBackup does a verification job every weekend, automating the restore testing. Although i do a manual restore test most holidays from tape just to be sure those are good.

 

Unfortunately Veeams pricing has gone up substantially in the last 4-5 years. Assuming you don't have lots of physical hosts though, look at the essentials kit.

Edited June 19, 2021 by mrbios

[Jcx500]

Redstor is a decent solution although i think its cloud only. Another one is altaro. Although i do prefer veeam these days

[TwistedHelixis]

For onsite server I just use Windows server backup. We backup each vitual machine to an older server setup with iSCSI, after the backup has run each night I have a script on the iSCSI server to copy the backup to a USB drive. I have a rotation of USB drives so there are always 2 cold backups.

 

I do a full VM test restore every term and I have been doing it like this for over 10 years now.

 

For our Google Workspace backups I use both Spanning and Cubebackup.

[caffrey]

I do similar with our VMs, there's a drive in each host that backs up each day - I've yet to cold store them though but that's next on my list, I might just go the same way as yourself . I know Backupassist has a vm module but as I understand it Backupassist is more or less a front end to windows backup.

Before backup assist I just had my own backup script to a rotation of external usb drives, tbh doing a robocopy script to do this is trivial

[Guest Guest]

We use Veeam and backup daily to an on-site immutable repository running Ubuntu, we also run a daily off-site copy via cloud connect.

 

We also have an external hard drive connected to a timer I got off Amazon, we run incremental backups to this twice a week and for the rest of the week it's powered off

[slugshead]

Veeam for the hypervisors - Target location is two Synology NAS, one close connected at 10gb and the other in a different building 1gb

 

For the art department and their endless requirement of storage, two 76TB Synology boxes, one uses the built in backup to the other (in a different building)

[ThatBoringBloke]

Backup Assist (coz it just works) to a Windows server with some big hard disks in it located in another physical building. Weekly backups of our HyperV hosts.

Redstore Cloud backup of AD and SIMS daily.

Shaddow copies enabled on servers.

 

Annual backup to a USB drive.

[caffrey]

Backup Assist (coz it just works) to a Windows server with some big hard disks in it located in another physical building. Weekly backups of our HyperV hosts.

Redstore Cloud backup of AD and SIMS daily.

Shaddow copies enabled on servers.

 

Annual backup to a USB drive.

 

How are you doing the backupassist backup ? via shares ? I used to do it with rsync but that's not recommended now (I don't think network shares were a thing back when I started using it)

[ThatBoringBloke]

Exactly that. a Hidden shared folder.

Not ideal, because it 'could' be compromised, but with the right permissions it works.

[caffrey]

That's what I've done, the share is only available to a local admin account I created for the purpose of backing up via backupassist. Like you say it's not ideal but it's something at least, I might set up a scheduled task to disable the nic when the machine is idle

[cw222]

As part of a layered approach, something like this is very useful (if you use veeam), but the concept could work with other agents:

 

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/veeam-hardened-linux-repository-part-1

 

You set up the box with single use credentials and set the box up so it doesn't accept any connection other than the veeam transport agent and then disconnect the box when you arent running jobs (either with cron or physically).

[ITGURU]

If you sign up to Cloud technologies for cloud backup storage (which has a 7 day recycle bin if backups are deleted and soon to be immutable backups) then they supply you with a Veeam license FOC!

[caffrey]

If you sign up to Cloud technologies for cloud backup storage (which has a 7 day recycle bin if backups are deleted and soon to be immutable backups) then they supply you with a Veeam license FOC!

 

Got an URL for that ?

[ITGURU]

Got an URL for that ?

 

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