ONLINE Backups - any recommendations??????

[johnkay21]

Does anyone backup online?

 

Who/What do you use?

 

The head at my school really wants online backups. HELP ANYONE...

 

thanks

 

John

[Oops_my_bad]

Have you asked the head why he wants online backups? Does he have money to burn

[johnkay21]

wE ARE SEPERATE FROM EVERY SCHOOL IN THE LEA, HE WANTS TO MAKE SURE HE HAS NO COME BACKS. HE WANTS EVERY ANGLE COVERED.

 

ONE STANDARD IS OFFSITE BACKUPS WHICH HE WANT SORTING ASAP.

[Joedetic]

Offsite backups doesnt necessarily mean using an online backup service. It can just mean a proper tape rotation cycle with friday tapes going offsite and not coming back onsite until the following friday.

 

We used to have a rotation (Which i've forgotten how many weeks it worked on) where monday goes in a fire proof safe in the ICT services office, tuesday goes in a locked room in another part of the school and that alternated for wed and thur and then friday would go offsite.

 

Over a number of weeks (it could have been a 4 week cycle actually) it ensures that you've got offsite backups. No expensive online services required!

[techyphil]

Im also looking into offsite backup/replication.

 

I got a few PDF's from local companies offering offsite backup via the WAN. Some costing £1600 a month for 400GB!!! Thats extremely expensive. Instead ive suggested we make us of a concrete bunker room we have in a seperate building the other side of the site and backup to that.

 

Now im not sure whats better... making a backup file for each server Monday_Server1 / Monday_Server2 etc etc...

 

and rotate it so we still have backups for 2weeks each server.

 

But I should imagine that would take a while as we will have 6 servers each with 100GB ish used space meaning 600GB a night to a server... unless incremental backup works? Ive never really tired it. We just use FULL tape backups for each server and therefore carrying more tapes home every night.

 

How about a replication server or NAS? Im not sure what route to go down? HP offer alot of services with Windows Storage Server etc but thats like $31k !!1 Im looking for a £6k max for 1 server and really good solution for the backup or 2 servers and more load going to each of them...

 

Cheers

[greenfieldsupport]

Make an agreement with another school perhaps, to place NAS in there school, and they put one in yours... depends how your ISP works.. if you have unlimited bandwith, i mean you might be able to make a deal with them, as if you put your NAS at your ISP's office it dosent take up there gateway traffic, just the link between your school and them...

 

on there side, it makes your school less likely to move providers...

however you might have to pay for the service... :\

but it would be cheaper then getting some company to do it or housing a server in a server farm...

 

 

You'd need at least 10MBPS uplink, at a VERY minimum...

[mudcow007]

we have two buildings with an optical link between the two an all the data is copied an dumped onto a raided xp box you cant get much cheaper than that!

 

seems to work to

[Joedetic]

If you're on a SHUK line (or have they renamed it to LES 10 or something) then you'd probably both be linked to the LEA's upstream proxies so i would have thought you might be able to get a relatively fast line between the two schools.