Backups to many destinations

[Aprice]

Sorry to steal the thread - On the topic of backups, i'm looking for a new provider for an offsite backup. Currently have 1TB of storage with our current supplier at £150p/m, does this seem expensive?

 

Yes, very. We work with PeaSoup for our customers, their paying a lot less than that per TB inclusive of Veeam licencing.

[tech-man]

+1 PeaSoup. Great company.

[Tefters]

Built a new backup server through Dell last year, £8k for a 35tb HDD raid 5, raid 1 256gb NVMe boot volume, 24GB ram and 2x Xeon silver CPU.

 

Using Veeam, onsite backups go to this and then offload to Wasabi in the cloud where I brought a 5 year 45tb bucket which is immutable for 30 days.

Setup GFS and bish bash bosh!

 

I then threw away 2 12 disk Nas boxes, old backup server well past it's expiry date and 2 WD portable Nas that we used rotation each half term for air gap backups and put into a safe.

 

Best purchase of my budget last year all for around £15k for 5 years.

As for Office365, I'm currently trying to persuade the school to let me buy into Barracuda but it's a slow negotiation to get people to understand backing up Office365.

[Tefters]

I'll have to look into this next week then, it must include some other stuff..

Wasabi.

[dhicks]

Do they offer a UK server?

 

No, US-East, US-West and "EU-Central" - Amsterdam, Netherlands. You have to select a region when setting up an account, I don't think you can switch afterwards, either.

[MartinT]

As for Office365, I'm currently trying to persuade the school to let me buy into Barracuda but it's a slow negotiation to get people to understand backing up Office365.

 

Push for it strongly, it has allowed us to recover a couple of well screwed up Teams in the past. The Barracuda 365 backup service is very good.

[ITGuyNW]

Anywhere know where I can buy Veeam licences without waiting days on end for someone to get back to me?

[TechMonkey]

Anywhere know where I can buy Veeam licences without waiting days on end for someone to get back to me?

 

I used SoftCat. YMMV but my current account manager is very good. Happy to supply email if you don't already use them.

[MartinT]

Anywhere know where I can buy Veeam licences without waiting days on end for someone to get back to me?

 

Phoenix Software Ltd. provide all of our licensing.

[ITGuyNW]

All sorted for Veeam now cheers all.

 

For those that follow 3-2-1 and the like, do you mirror ALL of your servers in 3 places, or do you backup everyone on a main server and then have the essentials in the other places?

[PotNoodleTech]

Just bare in mind that you don't need to mirror your entire backup set, you can get away with just one daily one weekly one monthly one yearly for the emergency/offsite copies - so you won't need big trays full of disks for those.

 

RE: servers you need to ask yourself if i am setting this whole school up in a leisure center up the road, will I need that virtual server? Generally the answer is if you have a server running you will likely need it in an emergency too. There isn't much I can think of here that I wouldn't want to be spinning up, all the app servers phones, printers, etc could be used in a seperate building.

Edited March 6, 2024 by PotNoodleTech

[Tefters]

I do all my servers.

 

1. Backup all server infrastructure to on-site backup server, including itself (excluding drive that holds the backup files itself).

 

2. Have this mirror off-site via a scale out repository to Wasabi with a 30 day immutable tag for ransomware/hacking protection.

 

Have GFS setup with 7 daily, 4 weekly, 12 monthly, 3 yearly.

 

3 copies of data, 2 sets of media/locations, 1 location off-site and immutable for 30 days, simples!

Edited March 6, 2024 by Tefters

[KK20]

If budget is a restriction, synology 365 backup works well enough. You are thrashing your internet connection for 3 days whilst 5Tb of data is downloaded and it all seems a bit backwards in the scheme of cloud these days but you can spool a 20Tb synology box up for £1k which is much less than veeam licensing for one year. Recovery does work, even for granular individual emails. Veeam community can handle 10 workloads for free but will not support S3 buckets in the free tier - you will need to pony up for proper licensing for your offsite storage. Wasabi is cheap and works well, especially for immutable buckets.

[ITGuyNW]

I'm at that stage with Veeam where I'm trying to get the most out of the storage I have.

 

The server was previously setup as a RAID6 and has 13tb available. This is leaving 1tb free after backing up 7 servers.

 

The biggest two are the staff and student fileservers, these are typically 2.5tb backups each as it does one full backup a week.

 

I'd be interested to know how much storage space you have given your backup servers? I was looking to increase ours but that's going to end up expensive.

[PotNoodleTech]

13tb is not a lot. Might be worth making some changes to your backup schedule e.g 3 dailys 1 weekly 2 monthly 1 yearly and then make sure Veeam clears up after itself merging backups weekly deleting old stuff after 14 days etc etc.

 

you can also get around that storage limit by getting a budget synology nas with some extra drives in and using that as a secondary storage target which is what I do -primary storage caters for dailys a weekly amonthly and a couple of yearly then the secondary nas does all the inbetween weekly monthlys and yearlys too.

[MartinT]

Our VEEAM backup server is 15TB, whereas the SAN is 50TB (but very under-used since moving to 365).

[ITGuyNW]

Yeah my thinking is if I can be smart with how Veeam is setup and make it last until we hopefully start migrating to cloud storage, then I won't need to make a case for splashing out..