What Backup strategys/methods do you use?

[ChrisH]

I am currently redoing our backups as we have simply outgrown the DDS4 Tape drive a long time ago.

I am going to backup to disk now using a mixture of NTBackup and Robocopy.

I plan have a full backup friday and incremental backups Mon-Thu. These will be in a three week cycle.

Until we finally receive our new servers (which is looking like Christmas time) I will be backing up to my workstation to a new dedicated disk and then in turn this will be mirrored onto one of two external HD I have. One will be kept offsite at all times.

I will use NT Backup to backup system partitions and use robocopy to sync data like user files or my user network apps/msi sources. Basically the stuff that isnt going to be in use by the system and/or wont change that much.

These will automatically cycle through week 1-3 folders. This will then be mirrored onto the SATA connected external HD. I will be driving all this with a VBS script.

 

Any thoughts?

 

What methods do you use?

[Dos_Box]

I built a super dooper storage array witj 4 x 300GB SATA drives and an Adaptec SATA RAID card. All of my backups are now done to the server and backed upto tape from there. I look forwards to external SATA II drives to come on the market. This should allow me to back up to external HD's very, very fast indeed.

[OverWorked]

I used to use a Sony AIT3 tape drive to backup the curriculum (teachers and pupils work) to, but the tapes weren't lasting long. At £35 each it was getting expensive.

 

So I built myself a storage device out of a cheap workstation. Put in three 200GB SATA drives on Maxtor SATA controllers. Installed Server 2003 on it.

 

This sounds similar to Dos_Box's system, but lower spec and cheaper.

 

It's good enough for the moment. I can do three weeks on weekly full backups and daily incrementals at the moment. I'll add another drive, then I can use software RAID-5. I know software RAID is slow, but it's only a backup device, and isn't doing anything else.

 

The only trouble is cooling, but then the server room is warm anyway. The case gets quite warm. I added a couple of fans to it and it's not so bad now.

 

There's also the downside that it's in the server room. It really needs to be at the other end of the school in case of disaster. I'll sort this out eventually.

 

I like the idea of external SATA II drives.

[ChrisH]

There's also the downside that it's in the server room. It really needs to be at the other end of the school in case of disaster. I'll sort this out eventually.

 

I like the idea of external SATA II drives.

 

Thats why Im using the exteral SATA connected drive as well once one big backup is done of the data the transfer time is quite minimal as it only copies over the files that have changed using robocopy. It would all depend on how much data you have I suppose.

[MkII]

I just bought a Buffalo TeraStation - 4 x 250Gb IDE drives, a raid controller, a network card, linux embedded [web interface] and not much else for £600. I've put it at the opposite end of my site on a fibre link - where there's a large fire break between buildings.

 

I have it configured as a straight 1Tb. Full backups scheduled from my two file servers and dc monday to Thursday, then every 4th Friday. I take tape backups as well periodically to take off site.

 

The thing emails me every day with usage stats [i'm currently running at 250Gb per file server]. It's also set to sleep when it's not in use and powers up for the night shift. So far i'm chuffed with it.

[tarquel]

Good to hear its going well mark

 

DDS4 - DAT72 tapes currently.

 

I need to work on the backup strategy a bit - along with everything else - but curriculum server is a change of tape mon-thurs [full backup of home & "pool" partitons] and admin just back's up the lot each day to the same tape lol [i switch tape config's periodically]

 

Cheers

N.

[E1uSiV3]

Im lucky in the sense i managed to scaremonger SMT into buying me 2 new servers over the last 2 years running which now have nice big shiny LTO2s in them with Veritas BackupExec with SQL exchange and remote modules.

 

I run a full backup every weekday, as it only takes bout an hour and take the tapes off site

[tosca925]

We have a couple of buit servers in rooms at the ends of our 1gb fibre connection. They both have 600gb of hard drive space in them. Both have 1gb NICs in and we back up out of school hours when the network is quiet.

 

Works very wekk for us just using NT Back up.

[Ric_]

I bought the multiserver version of Dantz Retrospect (now owned by EMC like many other companies). This allows you to backup all your servers and ALL your clients remotely. The pricing is VERY good cos they want to break into the Windows and education markets. The SQL and Exchange agents were pretty pricey though (£500-odd for Retrospect then £500-odd for each agent).

 

I have a LTO2 autoloader (Tanberg @£2500) - I still need to set it up properly (little point until I get AD and the shares set up fully... 2 weeks to go (eek!)