Backup solution - ideas

[alan-d]

I'm looking to improve our backup solution and hopefully reduce future costs by removing the need for tapes.

 

2 domains totalling a useable 2TB

 

Possibly looking for a NAS or SAN solution to give me the ability to do at least one full backup a week and incremental each day plus some to store images.

 

I've looked at the Buffalo Terrastations but was wondering if anyone out there has used a different option?

 

It would need to be located in another part of the building, so rack mounted would be useful as I may be able to stick it in a comms cabinet.

 

Any suggestions?

[plexer]

Don't forget a ups in your solution.

 

The terrastations are easy to setup for this purpose.

 

Or a big box with some big disks running openfiler or another companies nas.

 

Ben

[Face-Man]

We have been using a terasation with robocopy for non critical data fro a while. It works welll with robocopy (or backup software hung when trying to connect to it). I would suggest that you buy a seperate switch and nic's if you can afford it as you may be moving a lot of data. The only thing I would say is that backup onsite are just as risky in fire as original data and so you still need an offsite soloution for critical data.

[plexer]

I use ntbackup with backup assist to make the whole process painless. Can also do ASR backups to nas to enable bare metal restores.

 

Ben

[klawd]

I have found the buffalo boxes to be shockingly slow. What I have done is get some old clients, load them with windows 2k3 (because of the cheap license) and shoved a few SATA hard drives in there.

 

Having a seperate machine means its really easy to add more storage and you also get the flexbility to upgrade other components.

 

I then use ntbackup with some custom vb scripts to rotate the backups and sort out the logs.

 

This seems to work fine for backing up SQL, Exchange and user data.

[ChrisH]

I have found the buffalo boxes to be shockingly slow. What I have done is get some old clients, load them with windows 2k3 (because of the cheap license) and shoved a few SATA hard drives in there.

 

Having a seperate machine means its really easy to add more storage and you also get the flexbility to upgrade other components.

 

I then use ntbackup with some custom vb scripts to rotate the backups and sort out the logs.

 

This seems to work fine for backing up SQL, Exchange and user data.

 

I have a similar setup to that

[plexer]

I'd seriously suggest you take a look at backupassist it's really good for managing ntbackup jobs with email reporting of the logs as well.

 

I know you can use scripts to also do that using something like blat or maybe even native from a vbs but backupassist makes it so easy.

 

Ben