Terrifying work backup issue

[slackerinabox]

Let me preface this by stating that I know this question will make me seem stupid and unqualified for my job I started working here as a web manager (qualified for that!) and a lot of extra responsibility was thrown my way when our IT guy left on short notice. I've always been clear that I don't have formal training and my lack of a pay raise for more work hasn't inspired me to pay for the training required, to be blunt.

Anyways, the former guy left a bit of a mess - we have 1.2 tb of active storage and his brilliant back up plan was to selectively backup mission critical stuff (exchange server, some sql files) to an undersized 800 gb amazon storage gateway. This leaves a ton of documents, photo library, etc. unprotected - which is awful and scary. What little I understand about amazon's storage gateway is that it can't be dynamically resized, and that the costs to upgrade our storage needs will include a hardware investment that's steep.

Jump to the chase - until we figure out what we're doing in the cloud, I'm thinking about just getting a 2 tb nas to backup our main file server. Is this an awful idea? Any NAS suggestions for a small (less than 60 employees) business? Do I have to go with an enterprise nas or are their any affordable prosumer options?

Thanks for any help!

 

[Essence_of_War]

It sounds like what you really need to start is a basic back-up plan that includes something like regular/daily incremental/versioned back-ups, and weekly images of the server.

And figure out some sort of plan for rotating back-ups to a secure, off-site, location as insurance against fire/flood/theft.

If you're using a linux type server, I'd start with reading this:
http://webgnuru.com/linux/rsync_incremental.php
which explains how to set up rsync to do incremental, versioned, back-ups, and how to schedule them with cron. If you've only got about 1TB or so of active storage, something as simple as a 2nd large (3-4 TB) internal drive for the file server plus that rsync tutorial should get your daily incremental back-ups up and running. You could also do this with a network mapped NAS.

I would get at least one external drive as well, and do weekly full images of the server and when not in use, keep that external unplugged. Even better would be to get two externals, and rotate them week-by-week into a secure off-site location.

You need resilience to both drive failures, as well as theft/fire/flood/malware/malicious users.

 

[Evadman]

Better than my strategy for DR.

Awesome spam blocker :/

 

[VirtualLarry]

You need resilience to both drive failures, as well as theft/fire/flood/malware/malicious users.

And cryptolocker!

 

[Essence_of_War]

Truth. Can't forget cryptolocker.

 

[mfenn]

I don't think that your previous IT guy's strategy was that bad actually, the data just outgrew the available storage. You should definitely be able to create new volumes on the existing gateway with more capacity. Tell us a little more about how the AWS Gateway is configured (hypervisor type, Gateway-Cached vs Gateway-Stored, available storage resources) and we should be able to work out a plan to move forward.

 

[krnmastersgt]

Can't quite comment on the higher level data back-up and recovery options when dealing with business level storage/information. But as far as a quick fix is concerned I don't think the NAS is a bad idea at all, depending on the user load though. You say ~60 employees, but if they're all constantly accessing the information a run of the mill NAS is going to have issues in terms of read/write speed. Could look into quad+ bay enclosures that will give you the option of running a RAID 5 or 10 configuration to get a bit of speed out of your quick-fix/last second option box.