Techsupportwhiz
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Your thoughts on choosing a backup strategy / things that you want to protect against, etc.
I was in a seminar yesterday and my mind drifted to something I've been mulling for a long time with no anwers, but I am realizing more and more that it's really important to resolve - data backup.
I am eager to hear your thoughts on backing up in general. Please participate - there's no really wrong answers. I'll give points if you add value!
I made a list of some things that I think need to be asnwered to come up with the appropriate backup process for small businesses. I've dabbled with backing up to:
an internal drive in another PC in the building
a set of external drives, swapped off site
tapes
thought about web based online storage
Some of the things that make you need a backup:
Fire-small (2nd machine with backup is OK)
fire-whole building (2nd machine with backups is lost)
theft-server (2nd machine with backup is OK)
theft-big (2nd machine with backups is lost)
loss of access to building (flood) (2nd machine with backups is lost)
loss of access to building & offsite storage (regional flood / disaster)
loss of data en route to remote site (confidentiality) (how critical is it to encrypt your data)
Types of backups:
full everynight (easy restores but beats up the backup media with lots of reads / writes)
Full / incremental (less wear and tear on hardware, but harder to tell at a glance if data is up to date / need 2 sources for a complete restore)
Then for recovering data, how easy / hard / fast / slow is it to:
recover select files
full data restore
In a pinch, how easy will it be to:
ability to read backup media (if it's exterenal hard drive, that's easier than finding the same tape drive as was used to make the backup)
ability to access a version x months/years old (something the client has to decide - how likely will they need to go to a snapshot that is 1 year old / cost to tie up that media - tapes would be cheaper than an external hard drive)
ability to access x previous versions (how much space are you devoting to backups / how many versions will you keep)
archive x months / years old data (rather than backup 40 gigs of data each night, maybe archive data that is x years old to (tape / hard drive) and only backup the 2 gig of data that is < 1 year old????)
Native vs. proprietary files? (I love being able to look at the backup files directly in windows explorer that I xcopy'd to an external drive. I use beyond compare (scootersoftware.com) to see that the server and backup drive have the same files.
in a proprietary file, you really don't know it's an OK file till you do the restore. I have a bunch of acronis true image files that don't seem to want to open. could they all be corrupt?! it may be operator error, but 1 bit chaniging on a 20 gig backup file could corrupt the entire file, rather than just a word doc in a native format backup... yes, native would take more space (turn on the drive's compression), but more peace of mind?!
I am eager to hear your thoughts on backing up in general. Please participate - there's no really wrong answers. I'll give points if you add value!
I made a list of some things that I think need to be asnwered to come up with the appropriate backup process for small businesses. I've dabbled with backing up to:
an internal drive in another PC in the building
a set of external drives, swapped off site
tapes
thought about web based online storage
Some of the things that make you need a backup:
Fire-small (2nd machine with backup is OK)
fire-whole building (2nd machine with backups is lost)
theft-server (2nd machine with backup is OK)
theft-big (2nd machine with backups is lost)
loss of access to building (flood) (2nd machine with backups is lost)
loss of access to building & offsite storage (regional flood / disaster)
loss of data en route to remote site (confidentiality) (how critical is it to encrypt your data)
Types of backups:
full everynight (easy restores but beats up the backup media with lots of reads / writes)
Full / incremental (less wear and tear on hardware, but harder to tell at a glance if data is up to date / need 2 sources for a complete restore)
Then for recovering data, how easy / hard / fast / slow is it to:
recover select files
full data restore
In a pinch, how easy will it be to:
ability to read backup media (if it's exterenal hard drive, that's easier than finding the same tape drive as was used to make the backup)
ability to access a version x months/years old (something the client has to decide - how likely will they need to go to a snapshot that is 1 year old / cost to tie up that media - tapes would be cheaper than an external hard drive)
ability to access x previous versions (how much space are you devoting to backups / how many versions will you keep)
archive x months / years old data (rather than backup 40 gigs of data each night, maybe archive data that is x years old to (tape / hard drive) and only backup the 2 gig of data that is < 1 year old????)
Native vs. proprietary files? (I love being able to look at the backup files directly in windows explorer that I xcopy'd to an external drive. I use beyond compare (scootersoftware.com) to see that the server and backup drive have the same files.
in a proprietary file, you really don't know it's an OK file till you do the restore. I have a bunch of acronis true image files that don't seem to want to open. could they all be corrupt?! it may be operator error, but 1 bit chaniging on a 20 gig backup file could corrupt the entire file, rather than just a word doc in a native format backup... yes, native would take more space (turn on the drive's compression), but more peace of mind?!
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In addition to tapes I also do a disk2disk backup. These are much faster to restore from and I don't have to go to the server room to insert tapes in most cases. I do disk2disk for Daily, Weekly, and Monthly.
The Dailys are overwritten once a week. The Weeklys are overwritten once a month and the Yearlys are overwritten every 2 years.
I backup all dynamic data nightly, full mailboxes of managers and directors nightly as well. The masses get their mailboxes backed up on the Weekly and the Monthly jobs.
I send the Weekly and Montly tapes offsite to another part of the city.
The Daily tapes are kept in a "fireproof" safe in a room that is sepearate from the server room.
I currently use Veritas Backup Exec 9.1 and have the Remote Agent and the Exchage Agent installed.
With this strategy in place the only things I haven't been able to recover are files where the user doesn't know their names or where they were located, or in the case of emails they don't know the subject of the missing email.
A total disaster of the building would cause us to loose at most 1 week of data once the servers were back in place.