Give me some ideas for a GOOD backup strategy.

[PlatinumGold]

What are some good backup strategies fellas?

What is the best media to use. This is for business purposes. I'm still not sold on the CD-RW, if you feel it is the best explain why you think so.

 

[Adul]

Runing HD in a mirror mode for starters. Full backs on tape, quicks ones to CD media. Those are just a few of my thoughs.

 

[Woody419]

Tape backups can go bad if the tape is not stored in optimal conditions. Use a second hdd with Drive Image for a complete backup, with cd-rw's made once in a while and stored off site.

There is a lot of info about backups at Fred Langa's site, both in the archives (check out the last couple issues) and in the current newsletter. Fred will be putting the script he uses with Drive Image in one of his next newsletters. The script enables automatic backups. If you do a search in his archives you will find alot of detailed information about backups and many, many other topics, sign up, it's free, this is the best newsletter on the web.

 

[Rellik]

Are these Backups only pure data(not installed progs,etc) or
complete installations, OS included?

If pure data:
put on physically differnt disk array then os and progs drive, use SCSI RAID 5 and do regular copies to streamer or CD-R.

Why CD-R? Not every station has a streamer, but every pc can read cd´s. And as a secondary backup solution it´s pretty save.

 

[BreakApart]

Business data...

-Drive(s) must have some sort of raid, 1 or 5 preferred. (Raid-1 minimum)

-Tape Drive!
I don't know of any company with a tape backup system, that lost ANY data while using a well maintained tape backup system.-(test the backup tapes regularly)

??Drive image to store company data on a regular basis? Nothing personal but that does not sound smart. How often would you run that cloning backup system? Just doesn't sound feasable... For a personal system i would agree then it makes sense, but a nightly/weekly/monthly business backup...no way.


EDIT: typo king! lol....
BTW: let me know what type of backup YOU are interested in, perhaps i can provide you some more detailed info.

 

[PlatinumGold]

my bad. raid 0 is striping. raid 1 is??

 

[vi edit]

I run a raid 1+0 setup with my drives for fault tolerence, and then have an pretty thorough tape back up strategy. I run a two week cycle. I've always got data going back two full weeks. I also keep a backup of every friday for a full month. At the end of the the month I do a month end backup as well and store that off site.

Some of my commonly used data, that changes on a daily basis I try and back up to disk every night. It's just a lot easier than trying to retrieve data from a tape that's stored off site. This is for stuff like word documents and misc. data files.

At the minimum I would have data files backed up to a removeable disk and store it for a week at the shortest period of time. Fault tolerence is nice, but doesn't allow you to recover data from previous versions. For that you have to have some other form of backup.

 

[BreakApart]

EDIT: PlatinumGold i see you misunderstood what Raid-1 was... its disk mirroring, exact copies of the main disk. you are correct raid-0 is ZERO fault tolerance...


PlatinumGold-(i left your old quote so my post make sense)


<< breakapart

the raid 1 seems useless for fault tolerance.

raid 5 is what i'm thinking. scsi, hmmm. >>




Actually if done creatively it can be an excellent low cost solution.

Raid-1 mirror:
Use 3 drives, 1 main drive and 2 drives will share a removable drive tray. Rotate the swap drive, weekly, bi-weekly, you get the idea. Combined with a tape backup system, you will not only have 2-backup bootable drives, but also multiple tape backups if needed for data recovery...

Raid-5
Whatever number of drives you wish to use, add 1 more to the cost as a hot spare...

(recommended way to use Raid-5, quoted from smallbiz newsgroup i read alot)
"Keep in mind, if you run a RAID5 without a spare, all you
are doing is delaying the purchase of a spare.. The reason is that when you
have a RAID 5 down a drive for any reason, you need another drive to
introduce to the RAID to rebuild the parity drive, then you can take the
down drive out, reformat or rebuild it. There's no way I would run a server
with users depending upon it without a hot spare. The cost of that drive
will be paid for in the first 10 minutes of downtime avoided."

So then the question would be over-all cost. The nicer the drives used the more cost raid-5 will add to the project. Now if this was a small business, or personal server than a nice mirror setup could be a better choice cost wise.

 

[Woody419]

<< ??Drive image to store company data on a regular basis? Nothing personal but that does not sound smart. ...Just doesn't sound feasable... For a personal system i would agree then it makes sense, but a nightly/weekly/monthly business backup...no way. >>



It all depends on what kind of business, and how long you can be without a computer after a crash. With Drive Image you can be up and running as if nothing happened in 2 hours (1/2 hour to get and install new hdd, 1 1/2 hrs to transfer image). "Company data"?, that is not even mentioned in the post. I use the computer to run my business, and I have better things to do than re-install windows, reconfigure, and transfer backup data after a hdd crash.



<< How often would you run that cloning backup system? >>


It could be done at automatically at 2:00 am every night if you wished. Here is one method that would work. Larger businesses with more data would of course require different techniques, even tape backup.