Backup ideas? (Frog)

[BassTech]

Hi all,

 

We have recently moved to frog and are looking for a way to back up our servers. Currently frog backs it's self up to another HDD in the server but we want a back-up we can take off site daily. For our other servers we use AIT-3 & 4 tapes and take these home but with frog the HDD is 1TB which is too large for a tape. Has anyone got any ideas we can look into?

 

Thanks a lot.

 

Lee

[Dom_]

Get an external hard drive?

[BassTech]

That would mean buying 5 external HDDs (one for each day) which would be expensive and hard to get home.

[Disease]

We use an HP ultrium Autoloader with tapes capable of backing up 800gb of data each. I would not be taking backup tapes home either, unless I wanted to open myself up to being sacked or prosecuted if they get lost or stolen.

[plexer]

You shouldn't be taking data off site.

 

The hard drive is 1TB or it contains 1TB of data, it's the data you need to backup.

 

Cloud based network backup?

 

Ben

[Dom_]

Wouldn't cost you that much...

 

Samsung EcoGreen F2 1TB Hard Drive SATAII 32MB Cache - OEM - Ebuyer - £57 per hard drive

Sumvision USB Hard Drive Docking Station + Card Reader & Hub for 2.5" & 3.5" SATA Hard Drives - Ebuyer - £18 for a USB dock

 

Do you really need 5 seperate daily backups of frog? Wouldn't 1 weekly one and then a couple of dailys cycling be ok?

 

(also would be no harder to get home than a tape, surely?)

[john316]

Best to investigate a nice Disk to Disk to Tape backup solution really.

[mattstevenson2005]

whats wrong with taking backup tapes offsite??? what happens if you have a full site fire all your data would be lost!! as long as the data on the backup tape is encrypted i dont see the problem??

[BassTech]

You shouldn't be taking data off site.

 

The hard drive is 1TB or it contains 1TB of data, it's the data you need to backup.

 

Cloud based network backup?

 

Ben

 

The data space is expanding so we could use tapes for now but eventually it will get larger than a tape can handle so it's easier to find a permanent solution now.

 

Why shouldn't we be taking data off site? What happens if the School was to burn down (touch wood) the backups would go with it...?

[plexer]

Do you really want to take a load of personal and sensitive data home with you?

 

What if your house gets broken into and the data stolen and then the school burns down?

 

Ben

[BassTech]

My School has a policy where it is acceptable to take backup tapes off site. I'd get into more trouble for not having the tapes off site than them being stolen, we always have a backup off site. I'm quite shocked that you don't have any backups off site really.

[Messa]

If you speak to frog about this they will sort you out with backing up to another server (i.e Your File Server) on your network and then you can take this off-site on tape or your preffered method.

[mattstevenson2005]

Do you really want to take a load of personal and sensitive data home with you?

 

What if your house gets broken into and the data stolen and then the school burns down?

 

Ben

 

I am really shocked that you dont take your backup tapes offsite , if your house was broken into the data is still encrypted so you would be fine, and the average burglar is properly not that interested in a backup tape he/she is gonna be more interested in the 50" plasma in the lounge or the macbook pro/iphone on the desk lol

 

 

Matt

[Dom_]

Fireproof safe ftw

[BassTech]

I am really shocked that you dont take your backup tapes offsite , if your house was broken into the data is still encrypted so you would be fine, and the average burglar is properly not that interested in a backup tape he/she is gonna be more interested in the 50" plasma in the lounge or the macbook pro/iphone on the desk lol

 

 

Matt

 

I'm with you. Also I have a better chance of winning the lottery tonight before "my house gets broken into and the data stolen and then the school burnt down"

[plexer]

So what are you all using to encrypt your backup then?

 

Atm we have more data than will fit on tapes without an autoloader.

 

Our data is currently backed up to a san in a remote location of the school away from the main building.

 

I would never take backup tapes home with me period.

 

Ben

[Crowmanuk]

We built a SAN in the 6 weeks holiday in a separate part of the building so we backup everything to that currently, how often you'd have to back frog up I wouldnt know, we've just signed up for it so that'll be something else to look forward to messing about with.

[Michael]

@Lee91 - Bearing in mind how much Frog costs, I'm shocked a backup solution of some form isn't in place. Is the server they provide RAIDed or just a single hard drive?

 

If you're unsure, taking a look in the BIOS and counting the number of physical drives may give you a clue.

 

I would say the cheapest option is a NAS (Network Attached Storage) physically located away from the server room, but still somewhere on site. Taking data off site is a big no no these days, irrelevant if it's encrypted or not. There's just too much to lose in one go and a fire proof safe (if using tapes) is the recommended approach.

[enjay]

Taking data off site is a big no no these days, irrelevant if it's encrypted or not.

 

Care to cite that statement at all? A number of people here - me included - currently take data off-site, so would no doubt value seeing something to support a change in policy, rather than just say to SLT "we're not going to do it any more".

[tmcd35]

I'm with you. Also I have a better chance of winning the lottery tonight before "my house gets broken into and the data stolen and then the school burnt down"

 

I think this sums it up nicely. At the moment I take a two pronged approach to backup. Both NAS based.

 

I have an onsite rackbased 4Tb RAID-5 NAS for daily/weekly/monthly/yearly full/incremental backups. This is kept in a secure location in another physical building seperate from the server room.

 

I then have a portable (!?!) 4Tb RAID-5 NAS for offsite backups. These are either clonezilla images or copies of .vhd files taken once every term anlong with systemstate NTbackups of the three DC's.

 

If both sets of data was lost, well that's just bad luck and we'd have to start again.

 

I think I should be looking into encryption of the offsite filesystem though - good point

[BassTech]

@Lee91 - Bearing in mind how much Frog costs, I'm shocked a backup solution of some form isn't in place. Is the server they provide RAIDed or just a single hard drive?

 

If you're unsure, taking a look in the BIOS and counting the number of physical drives may give you a clue.

 

I would say the cheapest option is a NAS (Network Attached Storage) physically located away from the server room, but still somewhere on site. Taking data off site is a big no no these days, irrelevant if it's encrypted or not. There's just too much to lose in one go and a fire proof safe (if using tapes) is the recommended approach.

 

Frog comes with two standard 1TB 3.5" SATA hard drives. One of these backs itself up onto the other one so there is some form of backing up. However we are not satisfied enough with this so we have ordered 5 external hard drives as this is the cheapest option and should do the job nicely. When you say "taking data off site is a big no no these days" could you elaborate because (as a another user pointed out) I have yet to find a good enough reason not to take data off site.

 

Also, our School is made up of old Victorian buildings which are extremely close to each other so storing the tapes the other side of School is not an option for us because if there was, say, a fire it would spread everywhere.

 

Lee