I’ve decided I want a better/automated way of backing up. Currently things are done via USB sticks and drives and isn’t very quick or automated.

My ideal solution would be go into work on a Friday, take a drive out/replace with another. Take the drive home I replaced. Can I do this with a decent NAS?

Unable to backup to the cloud due to the amount of data that is changed on a daily basis… Well really its our shitty internet connection, if that was good, Cloud would be the option, but it isn’t.

What’s your budget?
Maybe a ReadyNAS backing up to external USB3 drive which could be disconnected and taken offsite?
Simple backup procedure and gives you guard against disk failure on your day to day storage.

How much data are we talking about.?

Jeff

Probably 500gb in total
Daily changing data is probably 500mb
Weekly is about 3-5Gb

I thought of getting a 2 disk RAID NAS to do weekly backups, hot swappable.
USB stick to do daily backups, which no doubt I will forget about doing

We have BackupAssist in the office – automatically mounts and dismounts the USB drives when finished (ready for off site)

For large amounts of data, we have a DIY NAS system – old server, multiple disks, and NAS4Free software on top.

Its the best I can do with my.. er… *budget* (read: none)

Thought about tape backup? For that amount of incremental change it could be a winner…

If its for your business even its small dont mess around make sure the solution is robust.
Without knowing the full requirements I would go for a 4 bay NAS. Something like QNAP or Synology
Mirror at least 2 of the drives you do your day to day work on. that way you will survive disk failure. For backups you can use disk like you say as an option but I would back up the cloud with something like CrashPlan for yearly subscription. Safe and secure.

We use Microsoft DPM – long term backup to tape, short term to disk. Storage is split between on board disk storage on the dedicated backup server and a QNAP NAS connected via iSCSI.

The disk based backups work really well but the tapes are a bit of a headache if I’m honest. I’d ditch it in an instant if we had the bandwidth to support cloud based backups.

For small businesses something like Livedrive may be sufficient- 2tb of storage as standard etc.

For larger businesses Barracuda and the like may be an option.

As per stabilizers suggestion we use a Synology NAS but as we don’t work directly on it it is RAID 0 to get max storage. All the machines back up on to it using the software that comes with it. If you are using a domain then it nicely creates individual spaces for each user. We then back all of that up to a big USB drive that we take offsite.

My ideal solution would be go into work on a Friday, take a drive out/replace with another. Take the drive home I replaced. Can I do this with a decent NAS?

That kinda implies that you aren’t backing up daily, so if you had a fire on Thursday and lost all your server data – would that be ok?

And you could utilise your internet connection to backup when the line is quiet, overnight?

Cheers guys, gone with a Synology NAS, 4 drives, will be in RAID 1. Also bought different makes so if there is a hardware failure it shouldn’t be on all of them!

I’ve been keeping an eye on the data changing day to day and it is anywhere from 150-600mb, with a 10mb/h connection it would take 15-60 hours a day to upload so thats a no go!

Now have a USB stick for the daily data, it’s not the end of the world if we loose a couple of days. I’ll write a script to zip up the folders/drives, run a check and encrypt. Is there a program that will automatically copy the files to the USB stick when I put it in the server or nas?

Now do I hotswap the hard drives weekly, so I can keep a backup off site, or do I use an external drive that I take in weekly? Not sure if it’s too much hotswapping?

Is there a program that will automatically copy the files to the USB stick when I put it in the server or nas?

If it’s anything like my ReadyNas you can plug it into the front USB port and hit the ‘backup’ button on it which will automatically run the backup.

Now do I hotswap the hard drives weekly, so I can keep a backup off site, or do I use an external drive that I take in weekly? Not sure if it’s too much hotswapping?

Each time you take a drive out (I’d imagine this is the same on a Synology as on my ReadyNAS) the unit will automatically check the data integrity of every drive, and then proceed the rebuild the RAID stack to make sure they’re all up to date. Depending on how much data has changed and the size of the drives this can take anything from a few hours, to days.

Personally, I’d take the external drive option, just because it would be easier and you could easily maintain a couple of different external drives.

i just use iomega usb drives and backup assist, great little programme

Just one other thought. Not sure from your description, but think your suggesting that drive A is at work while drive B is off site. Then on Friday you take in drive B, swap it with drive A and take A off site.

This method is really not good enough for a backup. For the whole of Friday you have both backup disks in the building. If there was a fire you would lose both!

Much better to have 3 disks. A, B and C. A in work, backing up things on a daily basis, waiting to be changed on the next Friday. On Friday bring in B swap it for A, take A off site. On the next Friday bring in C swap it for B. Etc etc. This is far more robust, at least one backup is off site all the time, and most of the time you have 2 backups off site which is good for redundancy. If everything goes tits up at work, worst case is you’ll lose 1 weeks data.

Daily backups should also really be done. Everywhere I’ve worked the insurance was only valid if off site backups were carried out on a 24hr rolling basis for working days.

Oh, 1 last thought just to complicate things. In an ideal world backups should be archived at set intervals too. So every now and again you take a snapshot of the backups and archive it out of the system. This covers problems that may creep in and aren’t noticed for a period of time. I think the classic is a virus infection that corrupts files, but is not spotted for a number of months. You can then refer to the archived copies, pre virus.

@urbanhiker I like your approach.