How do you Backup

[Little-Miss]

Eugh, still fiddling with Backups. NAS was replaced and its now backing up.

 

I just cant decide what method to use (Daily, incremental etc). My full backup is having issues but that might be something im doing.

 

How do you do it? I'm using NTBackup.

[webman]

Full every friday (as it never finishes before 9am the next day); and incrementals during the week. All to a remote NAS. (Using scripted NTBackup) Edited July 7, 2010 by webman

[Polski]

Been a awhile since I used NTBackup, but when I did I used a seperate script for each day of the week, to backup to seperate tapes. You can obviously use it to seperate .bkf files too.

 

(Yes, it did cause problems with some, but at least the majority did not leave the same tape in all year!)

 

Always used 'full' backup as working with the old SIMS Common Platform, it really was not worth the risk.

 

What other issues are you likely to have? Speed? Time contraints? You really have to cut your cloth accordingly.

 

I probably have the scripts lurking somewhere, just not on me.

[elsiegee40]

Small primary network here:

 

Full NTBackup to NAS (located in another building) every night

Separate Monthly Full NTBackup to another NAS in a separate building

[clareq]

Back up Exec, taking a full backup every Friday (which completes some time Monday morning), and incremental backups Monday to Thursday. Disk to Disk to Tape, with the most recent Friday backup and daily backup taken off site. We run a SQL backup from FMS and SIMS prior to the tape backup running, which is then copied to the tape and overwritten the next day.

[laserblazer]

Admin server to tape. Full backup every day, Mon Thurs, then Fri 1, 2, 3. Fourth Friday alternates 1, 2 3. Sounds complicated but means we can go back 3 months. There's only around 30GB so it doesn't take long. Curriculum server goes to a usb caddy with two 1.5TB SATA drives, swapping daily. When each drive fills, I delete the oldest file. Use NTBackup. It starts at 8pm and finishes around 5.30am. On Friday, I backup the media server as well.

[rsenior]

Disk-disk-tape. Use a couple of 6tb seagate blackarmour nas boxes and have just moved from ntbackup that was scripted to run daily backups and full backup on friday night .just for fun we keep a second copy of the full backup as we run a six day timetable in school(soon to be move to 10 day so scheduling wont be a problem anymore) to the latest backup exec.It's like stepping from windows 3.1 to windows 7. No more problems with corrupt backup ,skiped sql file etc.

 

Would love to have a couple of the baracua backup units and online back but like most colleges we're far to poor.

[Roberto]

Eugh, still fiddling with Backups. NAS was replaced and its now backing up.

 

I just cant decide what method to use (Daily, incremental etc). My full backup is having issues but that might be something im doing.

 

How do you do it? I'm using NTBackup.

 

Commvault Simpana users here, backup is done across the network to a 12 Tb disk array on a central "backup server" which is backed up to tape.

 

We do a weekly full backup of the windows network and daily incremental backups during the week.

The VMware cluster/SAN is backed up using the same routine as the windows servers.

The mac SAN is given a full backup on a monthly basis and a weekly incremental between those dates (there's a *lot* of data there but the rate of change is very very low).

 

I'm pretty happy with how reliable it all is at the moment. It's a pain in the hoop to get Simpana working properly but once it is in place it is extremely reliable (this has been my experience of all "enterprise" backup software tbh). It also does very well at talking to and backing up a wide range of server applications (at the time we purchased it, it was literally one of only two possible solutions that could backup sharepoint 2007).

 

We have considered 'online' backup but it is expensive, and we were dubious about our 100mb connection keeping up with our needs. We may look at this again the next time we consider our backup solution, as we're about to upgrade to a 1Gb connection.

Edited July 7, 2010 by Roberto

[tmcd35]

Just re-write the backups here.

 

1 full backup per year to onsite, remote local, NAS, followed by daily incrementals during term time - all using Yosemite Backup.

 

Every term I do an additional full back of all our VM HD images and a robocopy of the main fileshares to a portable NAS box taken off site.

[dhicks]

Assuming we get some money over the summer to implement this, I plan to have a 14TB live server rsync its filesystem to a 22TB backup fileserver every night. A script will then run on the backup server to do file-level deduplication, so we should be able to store several week's worth of filesystem "images" on that server. The backup fileserver will just be a standard Samba-based file server, so we'll be able to mount a read-only "backup" drive to each user's logon so they can restore files without having to ask me. VM images will be snapshotted and copied to a removeable harddrive for storage in a firesafe, probably twice a week.

 

--

David Hicks

[soapyfish]

We have all domain controllers backup using the backup exec remote agent to a backup server that which then duplicates it all the tapes via a locally attached tape autoloader. This way we can backup from tape if there is a serious diaster or from the copy held on the backup server from disk if the issue is a deleted piece of work. We use daily incrementals and weekly full backups as well a an 8 week cycle. We also do ad-hoc backups at the end of the year and each term.

[khugg]

You might want to check out Unitrends disk-based backup appliance. You get the software and hardware in an integrated appliance. There are no license fees like with Backup Exec and it supports more than 100 operating systems and applications.