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Good Afternoon All, I have been asked to create a disaster recovery plan for the school regarding anything to do with IT, Downtime, Back-ups etc. Have anyone else made one of these? where do you start? Would anyone be willing to share theirs, i understand you would need to remove any personal details from the plan but it would be a big help :)Thanks in advance

Hello all, this is my first ever newly created posts so please go easy on me if I ...... You know what I mean. Anyway, we are a Staffordshire High School with 2 X CC3 servers and 1 Admin Server and have sacked off all support this coming year from RM and SICT and are going it alone with only an RM software support only contract (which only really gives us Tech articles for our CC3 system and the ability to hotfix the servers to keep them up to date). We still have MIS support for the Admin network from SICT but that's it. We are using Backup Exec to zig zag all backups on CC3 and Admin at the moment to 2 X 12TB NAS boxes located in secure outbuildings which are fibre linked to the gigabit network. This will leave us without a Bare Metal Disaster Recovery soultion for the CC3 servers that I am comfortable with in case of a full meltdown. As such, I was hoping to get some of your advice on CA ARCserve® D2D as this is the way I am leaning at the moment but need to make a decision and get it all sorted before April 1 when we loose our support contracts. Any of you using this. It looks and sounds good and for about £198.00 per server I am about to push the button, but.... What do you think? .

Hey all, Multiple points in this message. First, I have been working on an Ubuntu / Postfix / SpamAssassin / Amavis box as a mail gateway, and feel like it's functional. I'm just waiting for our DNS MX record to update. If anyone would like any tips, I'd be glad to help (granted, there are a million tutorials out there, but this has still taken me days to do). Which brings me to my question: I have this mail gateway configured as I want it, running on a low-end test box. I want to convert it over to a RAID setup, and possibly to 2 separate boxes for redundant mail gateways. What's the best way to do this? I can, of course, set up raid on ubuntu (new PC) and reinstall everything. Is there a better way? Next: once I have a production box up - what's the best way to backup this server? I can take an image of the drive for starters, but would also want to copy all the config files out of /etc/postfix, amavis, spamassassin...right? Finally, does anyone recommend - or say to avoid - doing general updates on Ubuntu server boxes as needed? As you can tell, I'm pretty new to Linux, but I'm learning quickly. Any help is appreciated! Thanks! Damian

Hey again, My network guy is having issues coming up with a backup plan for a couple RAID 5 servers. Is this possible aside from going out and buying an expensive backup software? I figure if it can be done, someone else in the education field has done it Basically we have 2 of our primary student information system servers running RAID 5, so if a drive dies we're OK - however we'd love an image of the entire server for worst-case scenario issues. Any thoughts? ..thanks as always!

Yea, I know, questions like this get asked periodically, but I am not looking for software solutions as much as I am interested in hearing strategies. Have improvements in cloud storage changed your thinking? Do you go directly from server to cloud? Use a periodic VM snapshot as a backup? Copy snapshots to the cloud? Anyone still using tape in the process? Does cloud take the place of other types of offsite storage? Hopefully this thread will be OK here. Looking for a good place to start this conversation. Hoping for some input on establishing some "best practices" guidelines for our organization. Trying to come up with an orderly (and documented) process of who gets the tapes out of the drive in server room, who sends them offsite, how tapes are maintained stored onsite. Currently have an ongoing (nightly) incremental backup to disk, will a full backup to disk, dupe to tape, done every weekend. Anyone have any systems or procedures they use to manage tapes? -- Rotation to offsite storage, how long to retain tapes, what to ship off, what to retain.

I’m the network and sys admin for a small to mid-size school district in California. We have outgrown our DLT tape backup solution and I’m unhappy with the performance of Backup Exec. We are in the process of expanding our storage and our Windows & Netware server environment. I really don’t want to have to use a tape library solution to meet my requirements of having automated, complete file backups and system wide data protection. I need a very cost effective solution to our extremely tight budget. Does anyone have some good recommendations for me? Thanks