Back-up solutions

[GrumbleDook]

One of the projects I am involved in has raised how some of the docs I have about back-up solutions is a tad out of date ... talking about Zip drives as an option for a back-up solution is definitely a bit behind the times.

 

If people would respond to the attached poll, and where possible comment on what their solution is, the amount of data they would expect to back-up, possible even the frequency (eg full back-up once a week and incremental or differential for the rest) it would be helpful

 

Any information on costs would be handy too.

[SYNACK]

500GB+ of data backed up daily to a directly attached external disk (eSATA or USB3 for speed) rotated out daily from a 5 disk set.

 

Primary school installation, use ntbackup with scripts to automate.

 

One SMB I deal with does their own thing with 80GB tapes probably LTO using ArcSoft and daily full backups. No love for ArcSoft though as it is messy in its implementation of libraries.

[ba9ag]

Various Primary schools - primarily we've been using large external usb hard drives rotated so that one is always kept offsite using Cobian with encryption.

[Domino]

One 5 and 10 ten TB exagrid network backup and dedupe devices, hp tape library for off sites.

 

However we'll be putting another 5tb unit in our boston office, and replicating backups between them, then only doing monthly offsites through tape.

[ezzauk]

We backup our data to some linux iscsi sans (3TB) then onto LTO3 tapes.

[Ambient]

SonicWall CDP 1TB Live Backup NAS System here

 

Works a treat

[gibbo_ap]

i clicked other not other combination ooops sorry

 

we have a tandburg drive which does a weekly backup and incrementials are done to drives

[Hightower]

Fridays:

 

Whole network (400GB ish to a home-made NAS (FreeNAS)). This includes everything (all drives, system states etc etc). BackupExec handles all backups except VM's (see below).

 

Saturdays:

Fridays backup is duplicated to LTO3 autoloader (400/800GB tapes)

Weekdays:

 

Differential backup taken of whole network to home-made NAS. Usually takes about an hour and a half. 6 hours later this is then duplicated to tape.

 

Holiday specials:

 

Each holiday we take a full encrypted backup onto a spare tape and take it home.

 

VM's

 

We have a number of VM's here which are backed up (snapshots) using custom scripts to another home-made NAS. These don't go to tape as we don't have room (well, looking to squeeze them onto the same tapes as the diffs).

 

 

Think we paid about 2.5k for autoloader and tapes, 1k or so for BackupExec and agents, and a couple hundred for 4 x 500GB HDD's to use in the home-made NAS's so maybe 3.7k for the whole system.

 

EDIT: Forgot to say daily diffs are kept 1 week each, while weekly fulls are kept 4 weeks. Special holidays are kept until the next holiday and we also have another spare tape that we use in summer to keep the data for a year before overwriting.

Edited March 11, 2010 by Hightower

[Fuzzz]

We use an LTO-1 tape-library. Every day a full backup using 2 tapes. The tapes created on every friday (except the last friday of the month) are kept 1 month before overwriting. We also have 4 month-tapes which are created every last friday of the month. They are kept for 4 months before overwriting. Twice a year (at the end of the schoolyear and at the end of the calendaryear) we create a backup that is stored for 8 years (the maximum time a studens stays at our school).

[Modey]

We are using a combination of Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2010RC, Symantec Backup Exec 12.5 and Backup Assist 5.

 

All of the major backing up work is done by DPM and amounts to about 2TB per night. That backs up to disk (stored for 7 days) and is also backed up to tape every night. Friday tapes are rotated so that we can go back up to a month. Tapes are kept in a datasafe. We use a dedicated server with 11TB of disk storage for backing up, and the primary tape system is a Quantum Superloader 3 with an LTO4 drive in it.

 

We also backup admin & financial data seperately to this to an LTO2 tape drive (using Backup Exec). As we need to keep these tapes much longer (7 years for the financial info) it's easier to keep it seperate from the main backup (and cheaper).

 

The server was about 2 grands worth a while back and the tape libary was a recent purchase and was about £2500. DPM we aren't paying for yet as it's an RC, but when it goes RTM we'll buy it through the MS Schools agreement. I can't imagine it will cost too much, 100 quid maybe?

[bossman]

D2D2T solution as follows:

 

Backup exec 12.5

 

Disk to 2.4Tb Nasbox coupled up to Quantum Superloader 3 with HP LT04 tape drive (16 Tapes), native 800Gb, 1.6Tb compressed encrypted tapes.

 

Full Backups Friday night

Differential Backups Mon - Thursday night

Duplicate backups of these are then done during the day from the NAS to the tape drive, tape/s stored in fireproof safe.

 

Monthly backups

Term time backups DRPs

Yearly backups of year 11 Student work backed up onto DVDs and work taken off the servers.

 

Year 11 student work stored on DVDs 10 years max then disposed of.

Edited March 11, 2010 by bossman

[Hightower]

tape/s stored in fireproof safe.

 

Not meaning to derail the thread but you realise tapes don't stand a chance in a fire-proof safe in the event of a fire?

 

Unless you have some super-duper fire-proof safe (which is probably true)

 

[6Foot2]

LT03 Tape Library. Considering disk-to-disk-to-tape as a development to the backup regime.

[bossman]

@Hightower:

 

Aye it's the one from that film "Towering Inferno" it was the only thing left and Steve McQueen was still in it alive and well hehe!!

[spc-rocket]

Disk-to-disk-to-tape here.

 

Monday to Thursday - differential (LTO3 tapes) 1 Tape required for all servers

 

Friday Full Backup - 2 LTO Tapes in Dell PowerVault AutoLoader

 

Tapes Stored on Fire-proof safe.

 

We do it by weeks i.e. Week 1 to Week 8 for the full backups, after week 8 the tapes are used again in the full backup. The differential tapes are rotated as normal on Mon - Thursday.

 

Admin server - seperate tape backup (in the same strategy of Defferential on M-T and Full on Friday) AIT3

 

End-of Term Backup (2 Tapes) - Full

 

SIMS End-of tem backup (burned on to DVD) and retained for two months

 

Software:

 

BackupExec 11d (will be updating to 12.5 soon) installed on the backup server (3Tb) which is attached via SCSI to Dell Autoloader.

 

 

Ash.

[mac_shinobi]

not related to myself making backups or anywhere else for that matter but with the way storage is going ie Solid State so normal hard drive prices are going down and if they make solid state drives that support trim with more capacity for servers etc might push sas drive prices down so will that make NAS'es, SAN's a bit more affordable so you could have a number of NAS'es or SAN's ( depending on the price factor obviously ) in different locations and get them to all synch at specific times using robocop or something else to keep permissions or whatever ??

[maniac]

I've literally just implemented a new backup solution here, which is a nice shiny new LTO4 tape changer. 800GB native, 1.6TB compressed. I did look at disk to disk to tape solutions, but to do that properly was out of our price range. To rely solely on Harddrives as your backup solution I personaly think is a bad idea.

 

I'm now able to do a full backup every night, as the system only takes about 4hrs to backup 450GB of data, compared to the old AIT3 tape changer which it replaced which took over 24hrs to do the same.

 

I keep 1 tape every friday which are over written every month, and 1 end of month tape which is kept for 12 months.

 

Mike.

Edited March 11, 2010 by maniac

[ascott2]

Backup exec to LTO autoloader. Friday full backup then daily incremental backups all to LTOs. All tapes taken off site for a week. Monthly backups are also done to LTO but then stored in the fireproof safe.

[AngryTechnician]

I have a Microsoft DPM server that backs up to a 2TB iSCSI device located in the most remote building on site, which is the Sports Hall. It's 40m from the next nearest building, and over 200m from the server room. If we manage to lose both buildings in a single event, chances are we've lost pretty much the whole school and management agree we'll have bigger things to worry about.

 

Changes are synchronised from protected servers every 15 minutes, checkpoints created twice a day and retained for 30 days.

[mac_shinobi]

To rely solely on Harddrives as your backup solution I personaly think is a bad idea.

Mike.

 

Even with the tape solutions - there is normally something in place to replace the tapes every so often ie once a year or something along those lines and am guessing you would do the same with hard drives.

[GrumbleDook]

If anyone has figures they could share about setup costs and then running costs (eg consumable cost of tapes, etc) it would also be helpful.

[maniac]

Even with the tape solutions - there is normally something in place to replace the tapes every so often ie once a year or something along those lines and am guessing you would do the same with hard drives.

 

LTO tapes have a lifetime of approximately 200 read/writes of the entire tape - to be a bit conservative I look to replace the tapes when they reach around 150 total read/writes or the tape reports its first error - whichever occurs first.

 

I estimate it'll be 2 years before I'll need to replace any media unless any develops faults.

 

With hard drives, it's much more difficult to estimate their lifetime as there are many more varying factors that can influence how long a Hard Drive lasts for - we've probably all had the dreaded server re-boot that's caused a drive failure. It's this sort of failure that you just don't get with tape, tape tends to degrade gradually and backup software reports errors long before the media physically fails - discs don't tend to do this and are prone to sudden failures. Knowing my data is safe on a system purposely designed and tested for backup purposes rather than a hashed together NAS box or simelar helps me sleep better at night. I think some people don't class backup systems as a priority, and will just 'make do' with whatever that have or can get their hands on, where as I see it as one of the most important componants of the system - it's the one part you really don't want to let you down - ever!

 

I have suffered data loss in a previous job, and it's no laughing matter - jobs have been lost, luckily I didn't lose mine, but there were some very tough questions asked. Not a position I ever want to be in again!

 

Mike.

Edited March 12, 2010 by maniac
Spelling again!

[pete]

Currently:

Disk > Disk | Encryption > Tape > Offsite.

 

Windows servers backup to disk using ntbackup.

*nix servers backup to disk using rsync.

VMs get snapshotted and backed up to disk as well.

Data and user areas are backed up differently depending on what they are - duplication-heavy areas get backed up using a script that calls subinacl and imagex and dumps them to .wim, generic areas are backed up using ntbackup/rsync.

 

The disk-based backups are then either compressed (or not, depends if cpu/space tradeoff is worthwhile).

 

Friday backups are encrypted with gpg over the weekend, dumped to tape on Monday and taken offsite Monday evening. They're also retained on disk in unencrypted format for ease of restoration.

 

Mon-Thurs is incrementals

Friday is fulls

We keep 4 weeks of Fridays and a backup from the beginning and end of each term/half-term for a year.

Other stuff may be kept for longer for auditing purposes.

 

In the near future, disk-based deduplication is on the cards.

[teejay]

D2D2T

Dell Server with 10TB DAS, LTO4 Autoloader and Arcserve 12.5

Use GFS scheme for tape rotation

Tapes encrypted and stored in fireproof safe

[plexer]

D2D

 

2 DC's use R1Soft CDP to do a twice daily backup to NAS.

Other servers use backup assist to do weekly full and daily diff to NAS.

 

NAS located in secure air conditioned cupboard in remote part of school.

 

No offsite vaulting.

 

Ben