Online Backups

[johnkay21]

Does anyone backup on-line????

 

Is it any good?

 

What are the pro's & Cons?

 

Where is the best place to go?

[localzuk]

We've looked at it, but realised that it would impossible. We have a 10Mbit net connection and backup 180GB of stuff weekly, and 5GB night. To back that up, it would take nearly 60 hours (roughly) for a full backup...

 

At the moment, until internet connection speeds increase, online backups are not practical.

[Pottsey]

I thought the idea of online backup are only the files that change are backed up. When EDIT talked to us about it they said someone would come down and back everything up then after that only new modified files will be backed up online to save bandwidth. Backups are done at night.

[mrforgetful]

Yeh the popular practise for backups is Full then Incremental.

 

I personally just do full ones each weekend, easier to manage.

 

Plus if you're doing them to tapes and your inital tape fails the increments are pretty much useless.

[Guest kerrymoralee9280]

Is that EDit, the Sunderland LEA's support team? If so, do they charge for this service?

[Pottsey]

EDIT renamed them self’s to ICT services and its Nottinghamshire LEA based team.

[zag]

Don't see the advantages myself, we backup to a hard disk that I take home.

 

Costs about 450 quid for the backup server and external disks

[Guest kerrymoralee9280]

The advantages are you are spreading your chances of system recovery if your school ever burnt down.

 

Not very likely and it's less like if your house was flooded the same week but imagine if it was. And you had online backups too to cover it.

[Skoggmeiger]

Redstor and Attix5 are excellent remote storage solutions. We offer this solution to primaries on their admin networks, where they aren't likely to need more than 5GB backing up. It's incremental and only takes about 5-10mins to transfer the data each night, over 2MB links.

 

At the moment this isn't suitable for secondaries due to the costing of roughly £100/GB, but I've heard Capita are trying to offer the same technology, but at a far cheaper price, so that might be worth looking into, if you work at a secondary school.

 

Bye bye BackupExec! You won't be missed.

[ajbritton]

Yeh the popular practise for backups is Full then Incremental

 

Online backup solutions are a lot more intelligent than Full/Incremental. They only upload the changes to files that have changed. If you have a 300MB file which has only change by a few MB, then only the few MB will be uploaded. Services I have looked at can take several days to make the initial 'full' backup, but this only takes place out of hours anyway.

[databarracks]

I Stumbled on your thread as I was researching on the internet and thought it would be worth letting you have my details. Databarracks backup many schools and universities in the UK and US. We basically manage the complete backup from identification and daily management of backups to restoration in the event of a faliure. These days this really is a very effective way for schools to backup no matter how much data you have. The technologies employed have changed dramatically over the past few years and the right ones are are first rate. Online backup used to be seen as an expensive and impracticle technology, but now it is cost effective and can manage not only backup, but also your entire information lifecycle from de-duplication of data to retention, archiving and eventual HSM.

 

As I mentioned, we backup a few schools who I would be happy to put in touch with anyone who was interested in this technology to see how it is working for them. Also if anyone would like more information you are welcome to contact me directly on 07876 500727, I am very happy to chat and give information about your data security even if there is no business in it for us and you would just like some information.

 

Though of course we do very special rates for schools :-)

 

Dont hesitate to give me a call if you think I can help.

 

Peter

[margesimpson]

My school uses the online backup service solution from Attix5 and it's superb. It's provided to us by our LA - we don't do any backups anymore at all as it's done for us. The recovery of computers is really simple as we found out a couple of weeks ago. Really qucik and impressed. I don;t even have to take tapes home with me anymore which pleases my husband and me due to the responsibility of all that data in my hands. I know that we wouldn't be without it.

 

And it costs less to us than having to buy tapes. And when I am away on holiday (malaga this year!) I don;t have to worry about who is doing backups.