Backup Software/Solution

[british_government]

Firstly, I hope this post is in the right place.

 

A bit of background info:

As a school we are currently investigating potential replacements for our existing online backup system, mainly down to speed but also cost. The main option we are investigating is a simple disk to disk backup solution with 2 servers as, thanks to our site layout, one of these servers can be remote from the server room (where all data is held) with no risk of fire damage IF that happens to our main servers. We have just over 1tb of data in total to backup with about 15-20% of that data changing daily.

 

The questions:

Would you personally back such a system if you were in the same situation? Or would you do something different?

What backup software do you currently use, and would you recommend it or something similar?

And, the tricky one, what kind of backup plan would you implement? Baring in mind backup server1 will be in the same physical location as all our other servers and backup server2 will be remote. We are looking at a few options for this but one that interests us is using backup exec to run a disk-disk backup to backup1 over night (incrementally) and synchronising the data from backup1 to backup2 during day time, effectively running a disk-disk-disk system.

Also as an extra measure we are looking into removable e-sata disks to take backups totally offsite, for example a yearly or termly backup just as another layer of protection.

 

Any other thoughts?

 

 

All opinions and answers are welcomed, even if it means this plan is totally wrong!

[k-strider]

if you're servers are all Microsoft DPM is cheap and very easy to use setup.

System Center 2012 - Data Protection Manager

you basically install clients on the servers you want to protect and specify how often to take backups it does differential backups so i for example often backup my sql info every fifteen minutes.

[british_government]

Thanks for the reply.

 

I hadn't really considered DPM because I thought its main purpose was backing up entire VM's through hyper-v.

I'm assuming as it says support for file servers, you can, for example, restore an individual file for a student that has deleted it?

[k-strider]

you can install the Agent on the Guest VM and just backup the File shares that would work no problem as well as or instead of protecting the whole VM

 

yes you can if you install the agent on the guest vm

[sted]

for word docs etc just tend to robocopy mirror them off to a nasbox overnight and turn on shadow copy so if someone deletes a word doc they can restore it themselves

[british_government]

Thanks Again, looks quite good.

 

Can it be multi server aware? IE in the scenario explained above where we have 2 backup servers or at least 2 file servers which can be backed up to?

[k-strider]

See pic for individual file restore