Best external hard drive backup solution?

[marsdenprimary]

Hi,

 

Here at our primary school we are currently using a tape drive to back up our information but this is proving to be slow and we get intermittent errors with it. Even though this is a good enough backup solution we're looking at changing it to a more convenient hard drive backup solution.

 

What would be recommended for this kind of thing? I was thinking some kind of multiple hard drive external HDD bay might do the job? Perhaps with 5 HDD's? Anyone know of a good solution to this without it being too expensive?

[tech_guy]

Go for a QNAP device? There's some good offers on at the moment. We use one and I've had no problems with it.

[marsdenprimary]

Go for a QNAP device? There's some good offers on at the moment. We use one and I've had no problems with it.

 

Hey thanks for this Is there any particular brand you'd recommend?

[pcstru]

I'd be careful if switching away from tape. Tape often forces the good practice of cycling full backups (keeping last weeks, last months, six months) with daily incrementals. With disc some folks seem to think that a 'copy' of their data, updated every night, is OK. That might save you from a disc failure but when you find you have been 'backing up' a corrupt file and need to try and track back to when it was good, you will need more than a copy. Tape still gives the best value in a robust backup strategy (IMO).

[marsdenprimary]

I'd be careful if switching away from tape. Tape often forces the good practice of cycling full backups (keeping last weeks, last months, six months) with daily incrementals. With disc some folks seem to think that a 'copy' of their data, updated every night, is OK. That might save you from a disc failure but when you find you have been 'backing up' a corrupt file and need to try and track back to when it was good, you will need more than a copy. Tape still gives the best value in a robust backup strategy (IMO).

 

What I thought might work though is using the same system but with hard drives... Using a full backup cycle. Daily and a monthly Friday backup. Wouldn't this be a good method? So the server literally backs up to drive one on a Monday, two on a Tuesday etc... and when it gets to Friday it backs up to four separate folders on the drive depending on the week... is this possible?

[plexer]

I'd be careful if switching away from tape. Tape often forces the good practice of cycling full backups (keeping last weeks, last months, six months) with daily incrementals. With disc some folks seem to think that a 'copy' of their data, updated every night, is OK. That might save you from a disc failure but when you find you have been 'backing up' a corrupt file and need to try and track back to when it was good, you will need more than a copy. Tape still gives the best value in a robust backup strategy (IMO).

 

I would have thought most people migrating from tape to d2d are using the same s/w they used with tape and just changing the target to be a disk array somewhere therefore the same rotation scheme will still be used?

 

Discuss!

 

Ben

[tech_guy]

We have off-site backups, tape, and NAS solutions here - not that we're paranoid or anything

 

The QNAP we have is a TS-410. There's a good offer going on Amazon at the moment for the TS-412 (you'll have to purchase your drives separately):

 

QNAP-TS-412

 

At this price I'm tempted for getting one for use at home.

[glennda]

I've been playing with Iomega devices recently - they seem ok.

[Danp]

4 QNAPs here, love them. They are currently doing our backups, hosting our intranet via Joomla, internal Wiki, internal Picasa style photo software.

[marsdenprimary]

I would have just used a system of plugging in a hard drive at the end of the day then the following day swapping it for another but a self-enclosed system seems to make more sense. That way it can be in a secure location and i won't need to swap them about all the time...

[marsdenprimary]

4 QNAPs here, love them. They are currently doing our backups, hosting our intranet via Joomla, internal Wiki, internal Picasa style photo software.

 

This sounds like a great setup!! Would you be able to give me some kind of guide how to setup something similar? x

[Danp]

I can, buy a QNAP, we have 4 x TS-439 Pro II+

 

Once plugged into network and setup, very easy, you can setup webserver, iTunes sharing etc.

[pcstru]

I would have thought most people migrating from tape to d2d are using the same s/w they used with tape and just changing the target to be a disk array somewhere therefore the same rotation scheme will still be used?

 

Some are, some aren't, but even the ones that switched in a disc array, may now have a compromised strategy. With tape, your rolling 6 month full backup is on it's own set of tapes hopefully sitting in a fire safe, off site. If you just replaced the tapes with a disc array then your weekly, monthly, 6 monthly yearly and all your incremental are sitting on one device. That seems like a lot of eggs in one basket and the cost of disc vs tape tends to make people adopt those compromises.

[plexer]

With tape, your rolling 6 month full backup is on it's own set of tapes hopefully sitting in a fire safe, off site

 

How many schools properly off-site vault their tapes?

 

Ben

[marsdenprimary]

Some are, some aren't, but even the ones that switched in a disc array, may now have a compromised strategy. With tape, your rolling 6 month full backup is on it's own set of tapes hopefully sitting in a fire safe, off site. If you just replaced the tapes with a disc array then your weekly, monthly, 6 monthly yearly and all your incremental are sitting on one device. That seems like a lot of eggs in one basket and the cost of disc vs tape tends to make people adopt those compromises.

 

Perhaps if the disks can be removed to a secure and fireproof location every week though- wouldn't this be just as effective?

[pcstru]

How many schools properly off-site vault their tapes?

 

Probably far too few.

 

The trouble with backups is they are entirely a waste of time and money ... until you actually need them.

[soveryapt]

QNAP-TS-412

 

At this price I'm tempted for getting one for use at home.

 

Hmmm .. apologies for a minor hijack .. I've been looking at the HP MicroServer to do the whole home server thing (my current box is sounding less and less happy each day that passes, but it is 6-7 years old or so and runs 24/7) .. so I'm just wondering what people think is best, as obviously the MicroServer has better resources, but the QNap is designed for precisely the thing I want .. hmmm ..

[soveryapt]

How many schools properly off-site vault their tapes?

 

Ben

 

HA .. Off Site .. HA .. sorry .. *breathes*

 

I've pointed out on a number of occasions that currently, if the servers just fall over then we're covered with the backups I have in place. HOWEVER, should the school burn down, we'll lose EVERYTHING .. I've asked for a fire safe as minimum protection, but that's too expensive apparently ..

 

Personally, I weigh that cost agains the cost of losing student and staff work, but I'm not going to be responsible for taking the tapes off site to my own home (something a previous employer once suggested to me as a solution - which when I said "do I get extra pay for this and a safe to put them in at home to comply with data protection they soon changed their minds .. lol)

 

I think we're looking now into upping our off site county storage (which SIMS backs up to) as we're merging Curric and Admin networks this summer, so that at least pupil reviews and what not will be remotely backed up, and depending on space issues, we might have an "exam work" folder on there too.

 

Being in Nelson, have you thought about looking at the OneConnect remote back up service? Schedules for overnight backups and is scaleable ..

 

EDIT: Having said that, I've just seen the costing .. http://www.westfield.lancsngfl.ac.uk/catalogue/products/rbuss-remote-server-backup GAH!

Edited May 8, 2012 by soveryapt

[pcstru]

Perhaps if the disks can be removed to a secure and fireproof location every week though- wouldn't this be just as effective?

 

But then why not just use tape?

[pcstru]

@Sovery - you could get together with another local school which will be facing the same issue and keep each others tapes? I figure that if we get a disaster which takes out two schools on opposite sides of town, we probably won't care too much. But I'm reviewing my paranoia levels ...

[soveryapt]

@Sovery - you could get together with another local school which will be facing the same issue and keep each others tapes? I figure that if we get a disaster which takes out two schools on opposite sides of town, we probably won't care too much. But I'm reviewing my paranoia levels ...

 

True .. we do have a partner school (it's a specialist school, we're the secondary and FE part, the other is the nursery and primary) which is, in fact, across town. I might put it to them, but still, we'd need a safe or something as even though they're a partner school, the head can be paranoid about IT (I recycled about 30 desktops - I had about 15 staff asking whether they could buy one off the school - put it to the head said that I can securely remove any trace of information on there, we can give them an electrical disclaimer - saying that it was last PAT tested on X, but we cannot/willnot accept liability etc .. so instead of getting £50-£100 x15 depending on the machine, she said no in case at some point down the line the machines were used for illegal purposes and it would be traced back .. just to give an example of the paranoia we're dealing with here .. lol)

[marsdenprimary]

Well then... a can o' worms.

 

As a continuation of this slight dilemma I wondered what you might think of the following: Synology vs QNAP vs DROBO?

 

Which do you think from all of those would be the best backup solution? I'm leaning towards QNAP but i've heard that Drobo uses BeyondRAID or something?

@soveryapt We use remote backup but just for our admin and SIMS but like you say, the price for any more is shocking.

[Davit2005]

We backup to both tape and HDD, we can go back at least a week by HDD any further by tape. The HDD's are in seperate building, restoring data from HDD is a normally a matter of minutes rather than mucking around having to fetch tapes etc.

[mavhc]

None of these NAS devices seem to be able to use ZFS, any recommendations for a cheap, low power, server that can fit a load of 3.5" hdds in? 8 should do it.