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Posted
Ours is all off site, with a third party, it's great never need to worrie about tapes and space etc and if the school burns down its all safe still! :D

 

How much does that cost?

Posted

I was going to post this in a seperate thread but i thought this may be better since it is closely related.

 

We have numerous posts about the backup process that people use but i would like to know how people resoter their DCs when they have a failure. I ask because as of yet i haven't had to but it is only a matter of time.

 

I tried to do a ASR from NTbackup but i think i went wrong by removing the DC from the AD before bringing back online. I thought this was necessary since the machine was being re-built but apparently it isn't since it is using the same name.

 

As this was the case when being brought back online it messed up the replication between servers and i then had two machines with the same name in the replication monitor even though i had removed the one. It was using its old GUID.

Posted

 

How much does that cost?

 

its not too bad, 4k for 3 years, at 100gb.

 

they keep a months increments, the first upload took about a week, but after that it just as fast as tapes and has given us peace of mind as well!

 

Its through ScoMIS Attix Remote Backup Solution

Posted

are fire proof safe's worth it, i mean they may prevent them from burning, but they sure as hell dont stop them from melting.

 

Probably not, but its safer than just having them lying about

Ours is worse than most - theres a sticker on it saying it was last checked in 1991 :oops:

 

Im confident enough having the servers and the tapes 300/400 metres apart - whichever one gets burnt down, the other should be alright

Posted

are fire proof safe's worth it, i mean they may prevent them from burning, but they sure as hell dont stop them from melting.

 

Probably not, but its safer than just having them lying about

Ours is worse than most - theres a sticker on it saying it was last checked in 1991 :oops:

 

Im confident enough having the servers and the tapes 300/400 metres apart - whichever one gets burnt down, the other should be alright

 

Very true, just make sure you have your running shoes on if one part sets alight :D

Guest kerrymoralee9280
Posted

Probably not, but its safer than just having them lying about

Ours is worse than most - theres a sticker on it saying it was last checked in 1991 :oops:

 

Im confident enough having the servers and the tapes 300/400 metres apart - whichever one gets burnt down, the other should be alright

 

Exactly, the tape may melt or whatever, but it's sure as hell safer having one in there than one on the desk. Like I said, we have ofsite backups too, it's just another step to try and make sure if something does go wrong, we have copies of everything spread everywhere.

 

Not sure about this 3rd party backups though. Firstly it sounds like a lot of money for only 100gb space and secondly, do they back up the back ups? What happens if their servers crash?

  • 4 weeks later...
Posted

I use 2 x 500GB external harddisks (Freecom SL which have usb & lan interfaces) . I use the Lan interface and sited the 2 disks in discreet locations on site.

One is Week 1 and other is Week 2. and backups alternate.

 

I use software called Novastor server backup (about £80). Nice and eady interface and can do disaster recovery backups and open file (something you have to pay for as an option on some other software...Veritas etc)

 

This works very well for me. Hope this helps

Posted

We ordered a 2TB Lacie rack mounted drive from Dabs.com for about £550 to put in a different building for fire reasons....

 

We got it a tad cheaper because we moaned about how much stuff we were ordering...

 

anyway,

It seems fantastic...

If only it would fit in the damn cabinate!!

:\

 

oh dear.

 

were in the process of putting it somewhere else, secure...

Posted
We have 1 cache server where robocopy copys all the network shares such as user data and any other shares. We then robocopy that copy to a nas drive which is in another building. We then use our sony tape autoloader to back up the cache servers data with backupexec 10D. It has taken us 3 - 4 months to get it working 100%
Posted

I use a variety, we have little in the way of cash since we are a small junior school.

 

So I use an external HD for weekly backups, another HD in another server for bi monthly back ups, and also tape for monthly backups. Its not a perfect system, but it does work. However I am putting in another HD back up in a remote PC this half term for weekly backups.

 

I can foresee in the very near future, swapping to flash drives as an alternative to conventional removable media. 32gigs is enough for our back up needs and USB drives of this capacity will cost less than a tape within the next two years (£25 per tape approx, 4 gig USB drives are now £20, tape drives are ££££). Plus there's no drive to go wrong and they can be read without any specialist hardware. And then theres the speed, instant access to back ups at near NAS speed.

Posted

Hows incremental backups actually work? I mean.. we have done FULL backups. Ive assumed a incremental backup requires a fullbackup initially or does it make a full backup first?

 

Say MONDAY's backup file is 200GB then 1 week later its 230GB... does it make say a file called monday.bak (200GB) then monday01.bak 30GB then use monday.bak and add's the additional data to that or does it simply check files and only make the changes required?

 

Theres soo many different methods that I get very confused. Our backups now take from 11PM to 10AM sometimes even 12PM to finish. So would an incremental backup only write the changes meaning it will be done in a few hrs?

 

Does incremental also remove the old data thats been deleted from the server since?

 

Cheers ( sorry that may sound noobish to alot of you )

Posted
Hows incremental backups actually work? I mean.. we have done FULL backups. Ive assumed a incremental backup requires a fullbackup initially or does it make a full backup first?

 

Does incremental also remove the old data thats been deleted from the server since?

 

Cheers ( sorry that may sound noobish to alot of you )

 

An incremental backup stores files that have been modified since the last backup. Hence the saving in time and space (i.e. less files requirng less storage space to backup over a shorter time).

 

The idea is you do a full backup (all files backed up whether recently modifed or not) when it's quiet e.g. at the weekend then incremental backups during the rest of the week.

 

The incremental backup on Monday will store files that have been modified since the full backup on Fri/Sat. Then the backup on Tuesday saves any changes since the Monday backup. The Wednesday backup saves changes since Tuesday and so on.

 

 

A file to be backed up is marked with an archive attribute. That's why not everything is backed up. It can be tricky if e.g. you copy files from one server to another or from CD then they will all get backed up even though they might not have actually been modified recently.

Posted
Hows incremental backups actually work? I mean.. we have done FULL backups. Ive assumed a incremental backup requires a fullbackup initially or does it make a full backup first?

 

Does incremental also remove the old data thats been deleted from the server since?

 

Cheers ( sorry that may sound noobish to alot of you )

 

An incremental backup stores files that have been modified since the last backup. Hence the saving in time and space (i.e. less files requirng less storage space to backup over a shorter time).

 

The idea is you do a full backup (all files backed up whether recently modifed or not) when it's quiet e.g. at the weekend then incremental backups during the rest of the week.

 

The incremental backup on Monday will store files that have been modified since the full backup on Fri/Sat. Then the backup on Tuesday saves any changes since the Monday backup. The Wednesday backup saves changes since Tuesday and so on.

 

 

A file to be backed up is marked with an archive attribute. That's why not everything is backed up. It can be tricky if e.g. you copy files from one server to another or from CD then they will all get backed up even though they might not have actually been modified recently.

 

Most places doing a full incremental back up routine will use the follwing or (minor) variations of:

 

Monday to Thursday (x4 tapes) Week One (incremental)

Monday to Thursday (x4 tapes) Week Two (incremental)

 

Friday in rotation Weeks 1 - 4 (x4 tapes) (Full)

 

Friday Monthly (x12 tapes) (full)

 

[all per drive]

Posted

Aah thanks eduabncs and networkgeezer, I will try and introduce that system as it makes more sense. Not sure who set ours up but I beleive an incremental backup seems the best way of doing it.

 

Cheers again! Your stars :p

Posted

But do remember that if your first tape has a problem when it comes to restoring, then the rest of your tapes are useless aswell and you effectively have no backup.

 

Add that to the fact you'll have to restore the first media, then the additional media in the correct order and it can be confusing.

Posted
Vertitas Backup Exec 11d

 

That would be Symantec Backup Exec (even the PF folder has changed to Symantec now).

 

Deal with it a lot and don't like it much - have hit far too many bugs in not exactly exotic places and every new SP or version seems to replace one set of bugswith another.

Posted
Vertitas Backup Exec 11d

 

That would be Symantec Backup Exec (even the PF folder has changed to Symantec now).

 

Deal with it a lot and don't like it much - have hit far too many bugs in not exactly exotic places and every new SP or version seems to replace one set of bugswith another.

 

Sure it's not an MS product? :lol:

  • 7 months later...
Posted

Has anyone bought a fire safe recently? We are looking for a small one.

 

Our SMT is now concerned about the Fin. Manager taking the backup tapes home with her. We use NTBackup which I would have said was secure enough based on the level of sensitivity of the information they contain.

 

I also backup to a fileserver in another building so I suspect the tape backup would only be used for somebody wanting a previous version of a particular document.

 

I'd be interested in other school policies regarding backup.

Posted
Has anyone bought a fire safe recently? We are looking for a small one.

 

Yes, we bought a Datacare 2000. Sorry, can't really tell you how it works without setting the place on fire... It's about as small as they come, which by the time it's been insulated to keep magnetic media safe from fire for two hours means it's about as heavy as I can lift. It took a couple of weeks to turn up - seemingly the couriers lost it, so it wound up rattling around the country for a while until it got here.

 

--

David Hicks

Posted

We have been using Symantec 10d on both of our networks.

With both backing up to various types of tape. Daily.

 

Just 10mins ago, i setup scheduled NTBackup jobs on both servers:

Weekly user data (home drives) backup on curriculum to NAS1 on saturdays, and on sundays, the system state backup.

And on the admin network, a complete system backup that runs on saturdays.

Posted

Our fire safe is made by a company called Phoenix. It's pretty small inside the inner safe, but I reckon you could cram about 30-40 DAT tapes in there.

 

I'm hoping to move away from tapes soon (to remote SAN setup) so the fire safe may well become the liquor stash in anticipation of nuclear attack/ofsted inspection.

Posted

We have two backup servers both running DPM 2007 with

 

4 x 150Gig Sata HDD's

4 x 380 Gig Sata Drives

1x 40 Gig System disk

1x 40 Gig database disk

 

and backup to tape using a HP Storageworks 1/8 Autoloader with LTO tapes which we keep for 4 weeks

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