Backup Solutions

[hardanst]

Hi All,

 

Quick bit of background:I am currently using a QNAP TS-459U which has 4x1TB HDD that are configured as Raid 5, this stores the whole schools backup. As everyone who works in a secondary school/medium sized buisness knows this isnt alot to backup everyones personal areas and shared areas even if you have scheduled incremental backups.

 

I am looking at either using another NAS unit with larger disk space or even open to another solution as long as its cost effective.

 

Whats everyones thoughts?

 

Thanks

 

Dan

[AngryTechnician]

We blew through a system of that size in my first year, and we're a prep school. I would agree the data requirements for a secondary would be considerably higher if you are making comprehensive backups.

 

If the only issue you're having with backups is storage space, I see no reason why a higher-capacity NAS wouldn't do the job just fine. We simply replaced the disks in our existing NAS for 2TB ones, and our data storage needs haven't grown to exhaust them yet.

[hardanst]

My first thought was to upgrade the HDD's. I was just thinking if anyone is using another method of backing up thier data which I have over looked.

 

Thankyou for your quick response

[tmcd35]

We're a secondary of about 850 pupils and 100 staff. We use a 4Tb (OK, 3Tb RAID-5) NAS for our backups. We do 1 master backup each year which is kept for 2 years. And then daily incremental backups for the rest of the year (term time only). We have a separate 4Tb NAS that takes a full system snapshot once every term that I take off site.

[dhicks]

I am looking at either using another NAS unit with larger disk space or even open to another solution as long as its cost effective.

 

Buy a decent bit of hardware to act as the main NAS for your network, spending whatever money you feel appropriate to get whatever performance you need (15,000RPM SAS drives, a dedicated hardware RAID card, lots of RAM to support deduplication, etc). Install FreeNAS on it, have it act as the main file store for all your live files, turn on snapshots and have it take daily (or even hourly) snapshots so people can have access to previous versions of files. Have FreeNAS clone your storage offsite, probably another school, to a cheaper server that doesn't need the same performance as your live server.

[ict_support]

Advantages of a good SAN / Dedupe /Snapshot every hour and constant replication across the site. The days of 3 days to do a full back are long gone. I can honestly say Backup Exec/ Veeam / Large NAS and Tape loaders are bloody awful!

 

You can then do Full offsite with something like crash plan if your DR plan asks for it

[mdench]

Bought a Super Micro chassis with lots of HDDs installed Linux and installed BackupPC on top of that. I think we are currently running it with 20TB ish? works well for running incr and weekly full backups

[john]

and to be the awkward one I scrapped the crappy NAS boxes and put in an LTO5 Autoloader and stuffed it full of tapes and voilla full backups weekly of everything done to tape and we fit onto 2 tapes if you squished them all up or do it my way which is specify a set number of tapes per backup job so we have a few months of some items such as finance, SQL DBs and email and then few weeks for other less critical things that don't change day to day such as DNS / DHCP servers, Print Servers etc.., We do daily snapshots of all home areas as part of our SANs so those do the short term items as we just are not closed long enough to do full backups daily to a NAS or Tape as people now work until 10pm at night at the earliest given how education is changing.

[plexer]

6tb intel storage server using 4.5tb 120 day cdp backup available for each server.

 

Ben

[synaesthesia]

We find that by the time you've bought a (decent) NAS and filled it with drives, you could build your own server with a decent RAID card and selection of drives. We're lucky having two sites so they also work as off-sites (and bearing in mind the stupidly unnecessary and overinflated costs of proper backup devices these days it's also very cost effective)