Best Backup Method

[hennessy1]

I current have 2 WD2003FYYS. I was going to do raid-0 because I am going to be using these drives as my VM storage. I am unsure wheather I should do raid-1 instead or just do a image of the raid-0 ever now and then to keep it up to date.

I am not to concerned about the physical well being of the drives I have tested them thoroughly. I know that they can still fail but since this is just a VM storage and not irreplaceable data I figured an image would be ok will reaping the benefits of raid-0.

I just wanted to get your opinions about this idea.

 

[Emulex]

raid-0 and do a bare metal backup to more than 1 external drive, take 1 copy off-site in case of disaster.


two backups in case of disaster during the backup event.

imo skip incrementals and do full bare metal. there are freeware and commercial tools.

my favorite is BESR 2010 - it is extremely solid in large environment - good security (AES-256) - good compression - just seems to keep on rockin' without any help. server or desktop. great VSS support.

best part is the system will roll a PE boot cd for you with your drivers - so you can pop that in. and then you can network restore (or usb or whatever) with a small pc-anywhere setup.

moron tech can put new drive and start up disk in - you can control the rest remotely - it plays extremely well with sql server as well.

acronis is good but i couldn't get 99% reliability over smb - perhaps that has changed now.

anything server related i just not virtualize and use Veeam - its far cheaper than any other solution

 

[hennessy1]

I was going to use acronis and do a full disk image. I have two other 2TB drives in raid-1 for storing my images. I can then share that over the internet if I need and pull it down to another location for safe storage.