We currently use an old tape drive that has had a few issues recently: we have gone over the tapes capacity, it stops working (a lot) and it has swallowed a tape that we cant get out.

So off site data backup – over the tinterweb.

Seems expensive, and we want to go with one of the bigger firms for continuity of service/ scale/ data protection… but google brings up a bunch of names I have never heard of.

Any recommendations? Iron Mountain? acronis?

If you’re interested in off-site backup, seriously consider Amazon’s S3.

BackupAssist + rsync plugin (with direct S3 access) + Amazon S3.

Rsync keeps the transferred data to a minimum (only transfers whats needed)

I’ve just moved our data backup to the cloud – we already migrated from Tape to eSATA external.

Only cost for external disks was : 5 x 1.5TB Freecom disks; 1 x PCI-X eSATA adapter card, + BackupAssist software license.

Highly recommended!

http://www.backupassist.com/

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

cheers – looks like a cost effective solution. But:

you use backupassist to manage the backup to the space provided by s3?

sorry for the dumb question – what are the external disks for?

I just use a second hard disk drive and the fantastic xxclone utility to do a disk image once a day.

Any problem and a simple disk swap is all thats required.

Cheap as chips, ultra reliable, minimal downtime and no messing about with backups if it goes tits up.

Another vote for Amazon S3 here, I’ve set it up at a few companies and it seems reliable and cheap. We’ve also dealt with Safe Data Storage inn the past and had good experiences with them, although they aren’t as cheap as AS3.

cheers, I will take a look into it…

external disks on a 5-day rotation.

BackupAssist *automagically* ejects the eSATA/USB device when the backup job is finished – I walk in the server room and just power-off the old disk, connect the new one, and power it on.

At the weekend, the data gets backed up to our NAS.

The problem with most backup solutions is that there is a LOT of work to do should there be a data failure.

In my opinion you simply cannot beat a properly mirrored drive (including boot sector) and a straight swap. 2mins and back up and running.

mozy is pretty good and has the option of backing up locally to a usb drive, and then up to the cloud.

xiphon – belt and braces. I see.

elzorillo – the thing is, with a drive sitting on top of the server, serving as the back up, dosn’t account for the nuclear winter/ nuke/ biblical event.

External disks, rotated and taken off site would solve that. But that requires someone to take it… I am looking for the most reliable, cost effective and hands off solution.

A mirrored drive is NOT a backup, its a redundancy plan. The server should already have RAID in it and the backup should be a disaster recovery in case of emergencies!

External drives aren’t ideal as an off site backup solution as hard drives are prone to failure if they are transported around frequently. People tend to put them in their bags etc and their bags take a knock/they drop their bag and the hard drive is goosed.

the remaining 4 disks are locked in a fireproof safe at all times.

I’ve designed a pretty robust infrastructure to cope with the most ‘common’ incidents (deleted files/objects, knackered disks, blown motherboard taking out entire server).

One great feature of W2K8 is the bare-metal recovery!

It comes down entirely to how much the management want to spend – it’s a risk – spend £10,000 and you could get an all-singing, all-dancing offsite mirrored data structure. Spend £50 and you have one USB external disk. They need to factor in downtime (i.e. staff not operational) during recovery, and how much their data is worth (in case of complete non-recovery).

IIRC the upgrade from Tape -> eSATA disk was around £800 for everything, including software licenses (back in April 2010). Damn cheap, considering tape devices cost £1000+ these days! Plus the cost of tapes!!

Now we’ve grown as a company, and thus the management consider our IT infrastructure to be higher on the budget list.

Even building your own NAS can be very cheap these days, for nightly backups.

Any more questions, feel free to email me (in profile)

Ali

Oh and RAID is NOT backup!! It’s for redundancy, and continuity (disk failed – oh well, we’re still operational – but I need to replace it pronto)

We just replicate our backups between sites (using Data Domain appliances), not cheap though and overkill for a small business but if you do have a couple of sites you can do pretty similar with just NAS at each end and software doing the dedupe etc. (NetBackup 7.5 looks to have a lot of this functionality included, although not released until first week of March. Veeam is pretty good to but only if you’re 100% virtualised).
Cloud backups are a cheap off-siting solution but pretty painful when it comes to restoring so it depends on what RTO you have to meet and I’d still stage it to local disk first so the odd file restore is easily done from the local copy and you only need to worry about getting stuff back from the cloud in a DR situation.

Any recommendations? Iron Mountain? acronis?

I can recommend OGL, they start off at £120pm, backup daily to there T4 data centre and promise to have you up and running within 24hours of a disaster. Certainly eases the stress off of you. 😉

Another vote for Mozy Pro – I was looking for a service that didn’t need a local cache as that just meant extra hardware I didn’t want to deal with.
Despite what the marketing might tell you it’s not cheaper than running a local tape drive, but it is handy where you have a remote site you need to keep backed up ‘off site’.
Even over a 10Mb fibre connection though it does take an age to do the initial backup, around a month for c250Gb. The archiving/retention only goes back 30 days too which might not suit.

Been using Crash Plan for about a year.

http://www.crashplan.com/

I have pulled files back from the server so it does seem to work and offers unlimited storage.

I use Carbonite and have been very pleased with it. A combination of Carbonite and a local backup meant I lost nothing at all from a HDD failure. I’ve got about 190 Gb backed up, and it’s a lot cheaper than Amazon with that volume of data.

Worth noting that it’s really most useful as a final top up to your less frequent local disc backup. It’s continuous so it’s completely current, but 170 Gb would take a long time to re-download (although I believe there are more expensive versions where they will post you a HDD if you have a failure).

It very much depends on the data you want backed up, level of protection you want and how much you have to spend.

If all you want to do is backup up raw files then any online backup service should be ok. Most do a 30 day free trial so take advantage of that.

If you have a server and are looking for a recovery solution should your server die and need replaced then this is where things become a lot trickier. I’ve not found a decent online service for reasonable money that offers bare metal disaster recovery. what you might want to consider is using 2.5 inch USB disks (more durable than 3.5 inch disks) to take an image based backup and rotate these off site on a monthly basis. Then use an online service to get your daily file changes backed up. This should cover most bases.