Moo

Thanks. I'll add these to the growing list of things I need to look in to. Yeah, convincing them that they're going to need to invest is one of the hurdles I'm facing, especially with the current state of finances. But I figure it's likely to cost them more in the event of a total loss than it is to get a solid solution in place, so hopefully it'll be fairly straightforward to convince them. I'm working on getting an idea of exactly what they need but so far they seem less interested in really getting involved in the process and just want it sorting. Mildly frustrating to say the least! Thanks to everyone who has replied so far, I really appreciate the assistance.

Currently it's a really old version of Cobian Backup. We back up to disk, to a NAS unit in a separate building, with the exception of SIMS which is a cloud backup. How long do you keep the full backups for? Four weeks or something?

Hello all. I'm looking for a little advice on backup solutions. I've recently inherited a system and one of the many issues is the backup system currently in-place. Each night, a full backup for each the student areas, staff areas and shares is scheduled, however these are taking quite a significant time to complete - looking at the logs, they're sitting at 9.5, 22 and 23 hours each, on average (there's a lot of data - currently everything is being backed up and as there are no quotas in place, some of these areas are massive, so another problem to sort...). All of this is backed up to a 16TB NAS box in a separate building. "Rotation" is a case of manually removing old backup directories when no longer needed. Only two of the virtual servers are being backed up, using the free version of Altaro, however there are five VMs on the box. The current server setup is like this: Physical DC Physical DC/file server (._.) Physical SIMS server Virtual host with DC, print/application server, WDS/WSUS server, web server and Sophos Out of all of this, only the files on the file server, as well as the web and print server VMs, and the SIMS database are backed up. The SIMS stuff is backed up off-site (Redstor), but everything else is on-site only. The NAS box is set up as an iSCSI target and connected to the file server. None of the other servers were being backed up in any way. It looks like there is no backup of AD, Group Policy etc. either. To get this going in the mean time, can I just use the built-in Windows Server Backup to have something in-place? I'm guessing the system state backup covers AD, but does this also include GPOs or do I need to add those separately? Unfortunately I've never actually really been involved in dealing with backups before, short of being responsible for changing over the tapes at my first job. What I'm looking for is an idea of what kind of backup software I should be looking in to, what sort of backup types and schedules are ideal to use, how long it's good to retain backups for and so on. Is there an all-in-one piece of software which can handle all of this? What kind of things should I be looking in to? I'd also like to look into getting more of the data backed up off-site. I realise this might be a bit tricky, as we have 3.5TB of data just in terms of the file server, and a fairly limited budget to work on, but if I can start getting some of the more crucial data off-site then that would be great. Presumably Redstor is again an option here, but I'm open to suggestions of alternatives as well. I need all the advice I can get, I think. I have been made aware of Amazon Glacier, which seems pretty cheap to store data, but it also looks expensive to get it back. Seems like it might be a good option as a storage option for total disaster recovery, but perhaps not for the day-to-day? Perhaps someone with more experience of these things can shed some more light on the potential options. I'd be very grateful if someone can point me in the direction of some suitable software/service providers, give any tips and advice on getting things set up in a robust manner, or any links to essential reading to get a better grasp of the situation. Cheers.