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Hamish Edwards

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What is the general best-practise when it comes to implementing off-site backup?

Hi all,

We're looking at adjusting our off-site backup to be something more dynamic like VEEAM, is there a general best-practice around what sort of implementation is best?

We're shifting around 6TB, daily incremental backups, fortnightly full backups.

Up until now, we've been using tape; but was considering VEEAM using a NAS at each site (we have two sites). Would a cloud backup be helpful as well?

Let me know if I can provide more detailed information to help the process.

Thanks in advance,

Hamish
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Dr. Klahn

There is no general best practice.  Each situation is unique and backup plans must be tailored to fit the individual situation.

What works for a small business with one server where an overnight outage is tolerable would not be suitable for a corporation with a hall full of servers where a 10 minute outage might mean the loss of a million dollars.

I personally strongly discourage "cloud" backup.  If the internet is down, if a hobo decided to build a fire under a bridge and melted the main fibers serving your city (this has happened), if a competitor decides that it's worth breaking into your "cloud" backup to steal your company's trade secrets ... the list goes on and on; and in any case, why pay to rent storage that is not under your control, when buying your own backup media pays for itself in four years?
Cloud backup can be encrypted now.  I think it's necessary to have one copy in the cloud as one off-site option.  However, you should have your own separate offsite disks.  6TB of data fits on a single disk.  You should have a weekly disk swap and take one disk off-line and off-site manually,  There are services that will come pick up your disks at pre-arranged schedules.
We're looking at adjusting our off-site backup to be something more dynamic like VEEAM, is there a general best-practice around what sort of implementation is best?
I would think this is not the question you should focus on. You should ask and probably answer yourself: Does tool/solution/on-premises/cloud fullfil my companies backup and restore plans, does it fit into the disaster recovery plan?

Here you need to start with your goals. From recovery time objective (RTO, how long may the restore take) and recovery point objective (RPO, how much data loss is allowed) to data security issues, single point of failures and physical zone separation.

Up until now, we've been using tape; but was considering VEEAM using a NAS at each site (we have two sites). Would a cloud backup be helpful as well?
A NAS can be part of a backup strategy, but it does only protect against a small scenario, in most cases it is useful for the kind of "oops I've deleted an important file scenario".
"Cloud" backup is an offsite copy of your data. It can be useful in partial restore scenarios when you have a fast enough, reliable internet connection.
For full restore/backup scenarios: What is faster pusing 6TB to tape or over the net? How big must be the necessary time window.
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madunix

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Hi,

agree with some comments : rights questions to start are RTO and RPO

But more straight thinking and classical policy with Veeam could be, dayly :
1.backup job on site1, production site
2. backup copy jobs to another site
 
With retention on both sites depending on your storage space on your hardware