Backup for Primary schools

[uffy2000]

so I have recently taken a position as the IT Technician in a Primary School and on first impression after spending a day getting information off the previous guy I thought I was ok (sigh) how wrong I was.

 

So on my first day I find I have no details and after 3 painstaking hours i finally get on. 2 weeks on I find that there is no documentation of any kind, they have an antivirus subscription they aren’t using (in fact they have no antivirus on machines at all) that there is no asset register, no backups of any kind, that’s the teachers laptops and desktops are more powerful than the DC and BDC, that there are 3 accounts for teachers when there are 40+ teachers. They have a 100MB LAN and are trying to push applications out via GP; they have 7 APs with no controller all with different SSIDs.

 

The Shares are off a 2TB drive where everything is stored.

 

I have just been given 3 Sunfire X2200 M2, 500GB store in each and 2 of them have 8GB RAM and the other has 12GB so at least I have something to work with.

 

They have a 26 Ipads that I am going to use Meraki to manage (if I can get my 3rd Party to open some ports) around 100-150 netbooks, around 60-100 laptops including teachers laptops, around 20-40 desktops.

 

Rant over!

 

So what I need is a backup solution for a primary school, this has also has to encompass disaster recovery

 

I must admit I’ve never setup a backup solution before, so i dont know what would be best, ive looked at cloud backup but i got a quote for £750 per year for 300GB of space and im going to need more than that just for the data and for backup of the system state, also this would have a high impact on the speed of the internet if i needed to get a large amount of data off.

 

Any help welcome!

 

Thanks!

 

uffy2000

Edited December 13, 2012 by uffy2000

[Tsonga]

Woah, that sounds like quite a project you have on your hands!

 

Backup-exec or DPM

 

I find Backup-exec easier, but I have had some issues backing up VM's in a cluster...not sure if your school will be that advanced. That is the only thing that has fueled my move to DPM.

[jamin100]

backup assist and a old server with lots of disks running freeNas.

[jtoland]

hi

i have recently just got a job at a primary school and i have had some of the same problems except the backup we currently use Online Backup Service for Business

but i am thinking of moving to my own servers and manage my own backups as i run webhosting aswell if you wish to manage your own backup then i could offer you a solution that would be realy good to your school

[Ryan233]

Personally you could go for a Tape Solution or a NAS. Personally i use a NAS in all of my primary schools. You can get some good NAS for like 250 pound these days and there are more popular then the tape Solution.

[jamin100]

Or a Microserver populated with drives. That should be cheap enough and give you some flexibility

[uffy2000]

Yeah lot to do, whats more frustrating is that im not getting time to sort these out. im getting told to focus on resolving the issues with IPads because they paid a lot of money with them and they arent getting used.

 

they are all physical hosts, no virtualisation (yet) but maybe in the future.

 

im new to the backup scene, i know that backup exec is a solution from symantec but unsure exactly what i need physcially to do this. i havent heard of Backup assist or DPM? Part of disaster recovery would be that the disks/tapes are getting taken off site.

 

i am aware of redstors solution as i have looked at this already, but it relies heavly on the LAN and internet connection.

 

Thanks guys.

[uffy2000]

It seems more and more likely that i am going to have to get all my switches upgraded and get to Gbit LAN and then sort a solution to backup the data over night to a hot swap NAS and then take drives off site. While keeping a copy onsite.

[zag]

All you need to run backupexec is a computer with a hard disk. I just put a couple of 2tb disks in a normal desktop.

[uffy2000]

All you need to run backupexec is a computer with a hard disk. I just put a couple of 2tb disks in a normal desktop.

 

Wouldent this mean that i have a backup of the Data in school so i can restore anything in case it gets deleted but how do i go about getting a copy off site,

[jamin100]

I have a USB > Sata docking station and 3 x 2TB Disks.

I use backup assist to do a full backup to one of these disks once a month and take it off site. So I have 3 months worth of full backups off site.

Backup assist encrypts them with truecrypt as well

 

I usually run the full backup manually on a friday night and its finished by the Monday morning where i take the disk home.

 

by no means is this the most fancy and elegant solution but its cheap and it works here for us.

[LeMarchand]

On the (hopefully) slightly useful front, all of my primaries use backup exec daily backups and take the most recent tape off site.

 

On the no use at all front (but of interest to me), how on earth do you persuade your school to actually spend money upgrading infrastructure?

[edutech4schools]

Call you LA. They might have off site backup they can sort out.

[zag]

Wouldent this mean that i have a backup of the Data in school so i can restore anything in case it gets deleted but how do i go about getting a copy off site,

 

I don't bother, I just put the backup machine in a different location in the school.

 

Obviously take 3 month backups offsite.

[uffy2000]

On the (hopefully) slightly useful front, all of my primaries use backup exec daily backups and take the most recent tape off site.

 

On the no use at all front (but of interest to me), how on earth do you persuade your school to actually spend money upgrading infrastructure?

 

I would need to purchase a tape server/drive to backup onto. I have heard of this been used in primary schools a lot but to get it here it seems that it would cost between 2-10 grand to get this working.

 

Like i have said im new to this school so my initial findings carry some weight also the fact that 80% of the school is wireless ive advised that they get a wireless controller, all of the work on the infrastucture benefits the school, teachers and especially the children. The fact the teachers are complaining just re-enforces the stuff i tell them so they are willing to spend some money. ultimatly though its the School governors who have the last say in the funding situation.

Edited December 13, 2012 by uffy2000

[uffy2000]

Call you LA. They might have off site backup they can sort out.

 

My pevious positon was in the LA, (i know big mistake) so i know the solution they advertise and provide. its a cloud based solution which i dont want to use.

[uffy2000]

I have a USB > Sata docking station and 3 x 2TB Disks.

I use backup assist to do a full backup to one of these disks once a month and take it off site. So I have 3 months worth of full backups off site.

Backup assist encrypts them with truecrypt as well

 

I usually run the full backup manually on a friday night and its finished by the Monday morning where i take the disk home.

 

by no means is this the most fancy and elegant solution but its cheap and it works here for us.

 

this may be the solution for me, its simple, easy. when i get time i will be ripping everything out transfering the Data to my 3 (used) Sun Fire X2200 M2 rack servers and starting fresh.

[witch]

You could get an external RDX and backup exec. This wouldnt cost so much?

[Tsonga]

Based on what I suggested initially, just buy a decent computer, fill it up with HDD's (WD now doing a 4TB bad boy!) get a RAID card and install backup exec and put it in a different location in the school.

 

We are thinking of hosting another schools backups in exchange with them hosting ours (DPM). This is actually quite a nice solution but it relies on both of us having decent upload speeds.

[uffy2000]

Based on what I suggested initially, just buy a decent computer, fill it up with HDD's (WD now doing a 4TB bad boy!) get a RAID card and install backup exec and put it in a different location in the school.

 

We are thinking of hosting another schools backups in exchange with them hosting ours (DPM). This is actually quite a nice solution but it relies on both of us having decent upload speeds.

 

as my internet, firewall and webfiltering is all managed by a 3rd party and i have to argue with them anytime i want to do something the upload solution is a no go! the RDX backup with sounds good. im still going to look into the external Dock with 3 HDD's. they only have under 500GB of data at the moment not including server config backup.

[jmak]

We use Back-up exec running on the (only) server, with storage on Seagate Go-Flex HDDs for daily backup. I'm not convinced it's perfect, but we bought the optional USB dock and they are hot-swappable, so I just swap them every day and put the back-ups in a fire-safe in a different building on site. The advantage is that anyone (well almost anyone) can make the swap on days when I'm not here.

 

Could be worth looking at Crash Plan. I'm going to play with that at home. The main offerings are to use their cloud storage, but you can also back up to another computer on a different site. You can set it up to just take incremental backups, so shouldn't be massive volumes of data in a primary.

[dhicks]

So what I need is a backup solution for a primary school, this has also has to encompass disaster recovery

 

For backup of files and virtual machine images, I'm sorting us out a server that will take snapshots of VM harddrives and copy the contents of Windows shares, then sync them with a remote server which I plan to place in another school (we'll swap backups with them, basically). That should take care of disater recovery (there's some diasaster, you need to restore servers) and individual file restoration (someone accidently deletes a file). With both files and virtual machine images you only have to transmit the changes between versions, there's no need to transmit the whole systemk every time, so this should (hopefully) be okay over an Internet link to another school. For file restoration, you can deduplicate the files you store, too, so you should be able to store versions going back a number of days (or weeks, months, depending on storage sizes). You'd still need BackupExec or similar to be able to do granual restoration of things like SQL Server or Exchange (restore the mailbox you deleted from 3 weeks ago, etc), and I can't figure out how you'd get those offsite without having to transmit the whole lot or take them out on disk / tape.

[sparkeh]

I believe that virtualising servers is great for DR.

I use Acronis to backup our virtual servers to a local USB, these are then replicated to a NAS in another building. Every holiday the VMs are copied onto a USB hard drive and taken off site.

 

Local USB holds short term back up for quick file recovery, the NAS has longer term storage and can be used if local device fails. If the entire site is destroyed by a meteor I can whip up a new virtual host, attach the VMs held off site and we are back in business.

[uffy2000]

For backup of files and virtual machine images, I'm sorting us out a server that will take snapshots of VM harddrives and copy the contents of Windows shares, then sync them with a remote server which I plan to place in another school (we'll swap backups with them, basically). That should take care of disater recovery (there's some diasaster, you need to restore servers) and individual file restoration (someone accidently deletes a file). With both files and virtual machine images you only have to transmit the changes between versions, there's no need to transmit the whole systemk every time, so this should (hopefully) be okay over an Internet link to another school. For file restoration, you can deduplicate the files you store, too, so you should be able to store versions going back a number of days (or weeks, months, depending on storage sizes). You'd still need BackupExec or similar to be able to do granual restoration of things like SQL Server or Exchange (restore the mailbox you deleted from 3 weeks ago, etc), and I can't figure out how you'd get those offsite without having to transmit the whole lot or take them out on disk / tape.

 

Wouldent this still make me reliant on my 3rd party who manages my web filtering,internet connection and firewall. To be honest i dont want to laise with them at all, ive asked them to open up around 10 ports on the firewall and im still waiting after 10 days.

[dhicks]

Wouldent this still make me reliant on my 3rd party who manages my web filtering,internet connection and firewall.

 

I was planning to do the external file transfer via HTTP, just using plain port 80. I guess the problem is if at least one site doesn't accept incoming connections on port 80 then you need some kind of Skype-like connection broker somewhere in the middle.