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Recommended method to do off-site backups?

V

vortix

Senior member
A co-worker and I run a network at a semi-large school photography company (they have around 200 employees). Since they just changed over to digital photography, when the photographers come back to the studio they upload their photos to a 2.5TB server that we have set up on the network. They also store other info on the network, such as what photo packages were ordered.

For the 2003-2004 school year, we would like to implement some sort of backup system, preferably off-site in case anything happened to their office building. We were thinking about co-locating another 2.5TB (or larger) server somewhere, and using Retrospect Backup to back up only files that have changed nightly.

Is this a good idea, or is there a better solution? We're probably going to be limited to around $10,000 - $15,000 for hardware, and maybe $300/month for any service we'd have to pay for (co-locating a server, etc).
 
That sounds like a clear cut way to me. It's not cheap but its the most straight foward solution as far as I know.
 
Well currently we're running a Sun server with Linux, and an external SCSI RAID box connected to it. The data from this is backed up to an Apple Xserve that is located in the same building.

This summer, though, we are going to replace the Sun/current RAID with an Apple X-Serve and 2.52GB Apple X-Serve RAID, and need a method to back this up off-site.
 
You should consider using rsync as well.
Try to find out how much data will change on a daily basis, then calculate how much bandwidth you'll need to move it in one night, then look at the cost for that. perhaps you could just colocate a backup server in datacenter with a reasonable rate on bandwidth?
 
Rsync is incredible and IDE drives are cheap. Load a 4U box with IDE drives and colo it somewhere, then rsync away.

This solution has many limitations that some folks here I'm sure will be quick to point out. However, it's cheap, it works well, and you sidestep a ton of headaches you'd get with commercial backup solutions. (I'm very consistently impressed by how much care and feeding expensive backup systems require)
 
You should be able to use rsync over an SSH tunnel.

I'm currently building an IDE RAID server at work, and looking at current hardware, you should easily be able to put together a 4U box with 16 drives, 2 3ware 8 channel IDE RAID cards with 250GB Western Digital drives (or 300GB Maxtors in the next couple weeks) and get 2 RAID5 arrays with 1.7TB or 2TB (total 3.4TB or 4TB) for probably $5000-6000. We're doing an 8 drive, 200GB array for 1.4TB in a 3U chassis but this will be, by far the most cost effective way of getting mass storage for little money.

Restrospect or rsync would both be good for backup. Restrospect does compress the data but with digital images I'd image the compression won't get you that much extra space.
 
vortix, you might also want to look at some software called NovaNet-Web to see how it compares to Retrospect Backup. NovaNet-Web has a lot of good features such as 448-bit Blowfish data encryption, data compression, and the ability to manage multiple backup sets on the backup server.
 
yea thats why I asked what servers, with a *nix, rsync is definatly what you want.

One thing to note is, any place you colo will most likely have some bandwith limitations. But since reliability probably isn't the hugest thing in the world for you, you can probably stand to go with a cheaper colo place. After all in colo-facilities something like a full day of downtime is catastrophically bad and almost unheard of. Whereas if you went a day without backup, you'd probably be ok.

I did a quick google search and here's one where you can get 4U or a mid-tower for $99/month. Whenever a coloplace offers to host mid-towers or any non-rack unit you know they're more 'converted-gymnasium' than 'data center'.
http://www.fdcservers.net/colocation.html

check out the 'dedicated hosting' forum at webhostingtalk.com

bart
 
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