Backup strategy for our company - What's the best solution?

[ndee]

We have a small company with about 5GB of really valuable data. My plan is it, to back it up using 20 tapes. With 20 tapes, you can go to everyday in the last month which isn't too bad I think. My boss doesn't want to pay too much, so buying more then 20 tapes will be extremly hard to get...

What are your opinions?

 

[thorin]

Why do a full backup every day? Why not do incrementals everyday and a full once or twice a week and then rotate the incemental tapes on a 2 week (10 day) schedule or something. ie: The Incremental from the first Monday or the month get over written on the 3rd Monday of the month type of thing.

Thorin

 

[ndee]

Originally posted by: thorin
Why do a full backup every day? Why not do incrementals everyday and a full once or twice a week and then rotate the incemental tapes on a 2 week (10 day) schedule or something. ie: The Incremental from the first Monday or the month get over written on the 3rd Monday of the month type of thing.

Thorin

That would be possible too. But lets say I would do an incremental backup once a week, when I want to restore a file from Thursday, can I just restore the files from Thursday? Don't I have to go the whole way thru until Thursday?(doing the restore from monday, tuesday, etc.?)

 

[thorin]

As far as I know you'd require the previous full backup tape and the relevant (Thursday) incrmental. I've only barely played with backups myself but if you like I'd be glad to bug our TS guys for more info.....just lemme know.

Thorin

 

[MarkFahey]

BACKUP! Who needs to backup with Windows?!

I would recommend the following corporate standard:
1 Monthly
4 Weekly's
1 Daily

One complete set to be kept Off-Site

 

[ndee]

Originally posted by: thorin
As far as I know you'd require the previous full backup tape and the relevant (Thursday) incrmental. I've only barely played with backups myself but if you like I'd be glad to bug our TS guys for more info.....just lemme know.

Thorin

Ahm.... yeah, that would be great actually We are currently having Travan tapes I think (8GBs, small actually but enough for our company). And in the other location we have, there are 20GB tapes (HP sure store something, HP T20 is the name of the backup tape). I personally know that DLT tapes are the way to go but yeah, we have limited funds

Thanks Thorin.

 

[ndee]

Originally posted by: MarkFahey
BACKUP! Who needs to backup with Windows?!

I would recommend the following corporate standard:
1 Monthly
4 Weekly's
1 Daily

One complete set to be kept Off-Site

Jup, incremental that is, sounds pretty reasonable. Would you do daily full backups or incremental?

 

[jose]

I'd recomend getting a 12gig scsi dat drive w/ some commercial backup software ie. Backup Edge...

And whatever number of tapes you need... You can set the software to do unattended backups at night.

Now have your boss sign off on this recomemdation (accept/reject), this way when you loose data , HE can type it all back in.

Backups are more important than your computer hardware........................................

Once the data is lost.. :0

Regards,
Jose

 

[ndee]

Originally posted by: jose
I'd recomend getting a 12gig scsi dat drive w/ some commercial backup software ie. Backup Edge...

And whatever number of tapes you need... You can set the software to do unattended backups at night.

Now have your boss sign off on this recomemdation (accept/reject), this way when you loose data , HE can type it all back in.

Backups are more important than your computer hardware........................................

Once the data is lost.. :0

Regards,
Jose

Jup I know, we will see what I can get. We already have Veritas Backup Exec 8.6 so that's not the problem. The coolest thing would be a backup roboter

 

[Czar]

Setup a seperate computer with two mirroring ide disks, use software like diskcopy 2000 to copy the files from the server to the backup computer, soooo much easier to restore mssing files like this, also have 20gb dat tapes for normal backup, incermental, switch tapes once a week

 

[Alptraum]

1 Monthly
4 Weekly's
1 Daily

This is the same strategy I use. Since your amount of data to back up is so small if your tape drive is fast enough it might be pointless to do incremental backups. Since you can easily fit the whole thing on a single small tape. Try to talk him into getting the 25 tapes for this scheme (assuming you dont do a daily on weekends, if you do up tape count to 29). Its not that many more tapse and you will be totally covered.

 

[MarkFahey]

ndee, I will have to agree with what Alptraum said

Since your amount of data to back up is so small if your tape drive is fast enough it might be pointless to do incremental backups. Since you can easily fit the whole thing on a single small tape.

Also remember to at least keep an extra monthly and possibly weekly tape off-site for catastrophic redundancy.


I have seen several businesses go belly-up due to not having a proper back-up protocol.