A good backup program?

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thebaest

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 2, 2009
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Ok, this isnt really a data storage post, more of a "whats a good program to use to run an automatic backup?", but I wasnt sure what other topic to put it under. My office is wanting to do an offsite backup to our other office, for a few of our servers and Im trying to find a good (preferrably free, or at least under $100) solution. We will collectively have about 150gigs of data spread around 6 different servers, and 1 NAS. Any recommendations on a good program that will allow me to do this? Ive been told that Server 2003/2008 have a built-in ones, but I havent messed with it much and not sure if it would allow me to do a backup to a non-local IP address. Any help would be appreciated :)
 
Spend the money and do it right, you talking about 6 servers and mission critical data. Go cheap and go out of business if you have a disaster.

Sorry if this sounds brutal, but its honest
 
There is some stat that states that of the businesses that had a disaster, 50% of those than didn't recover their infrastructure in the first 7 days went out of business. Don't know if its true or its *exactly* those numbers but you get the picture.

You really need to capture the requirements of the company and against each point define how you are going to meet that imho. Read up on RPO and RTO. Is a single backup taken daily good enough (can your business afford to lose up to 24 hours of data etc) If the data is in the other office does it need to be accessed immediately? A simple DFS share in Windows can provide redundancy of data but this does not equal backup, but it does meet your requirement as stated above. Sounds like robocopy could do it to be frank :) Sorry if you have already gone through all this, just not sure :)
 
I guess a better question then would be, regardless of price, whats a good program to use? I will just have the get the higher-ups to quit being picky :p
 
haileris said:
There is some stat that states that of the businesses that had a disaster, 50% of those than didn't recover their infrastructure in the first 7 days went out of business. Don't know if its true or its *exactly* those numbers but you get the picture.
Click to expand...

That would be the Gartner group that states 90% of business that experience major data loss go out of business within 1 year.

thebaest said:
I guess a better question then would be, regardless of price, whats a good program to use? I will just have the get the higher-ups to quit being picky :p
Click to expand...


Hate to say it, but my solution would be top notch lol.
 
I really like rsync because that's what we use internally to move stuff from machines to machines and what we use externally to do the same

I picked rsync.net as our backup provider (over s3 or the more cloudy based solutions) because I could email their techs and get amazing personal support, I didn't have to do much. For our Windows POS units we installed their 'rsync.net for windows' application and they copy the db over every 5 minutes.

One thing we picked was the geo-redundant option, the extra cost of duplication to another place means an entire datacenter can experience a failure and we still have our data somewhere.

The one thing I wish they had (or something we could utilize) is replication of our local zfs snapshots (since that is kinda like an archiving feature). Our opensolaris fileservers have TimeSlider set to take snapshots every few minutes, every few hours and every few days and weeks and does auto rollover as space allows.
 
I've been using syncback pro for my disk-to-disk data, with vsftpd or filezilla server on the host. Been working well for incremental style backups.

Full backups should still be done in another manner.
 
^ SyncbackPro is good, been using it for a while but finally looking around for an alternative. Some features that should've been there about 6 years ago are still absent - like delta copying for starters. I.e. if a few bytes change in a file, say an Outlook PST file, currently SyncbackPro just re-copies the whole file instead of the changed bytes.

Since I deal in some files that are up to 1 terabyte each, and often minimal changes occur inside those files, delta copying has become a must. I've been evaluating SuperFlexible which supposedly handles delta copying.

In SyncbackPro's defense I will say I get better transfer speeds than simply dragging and dropping with windows explorer - it must do something with buffering to make transfers more efficient but I haven't investigated exactly why or what. The way it logs jobs is also pretty nice.
 
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I been using FBackup 4.5 at home myself.
Easy, Free, does exactly what i need, save and compress what directories i want and send them to a network share on a schedule that I specify.
 
k1pp3r said:
Spend the money and do it right, you talking about 6 servers and mission critical data. Go cheap and go out of business if you have a disaster.

Sorry if this sounds brutal, but its honest
Click to expand...

While I agree that you need to "do it right" and not skimp out, keep in mind the difference between paid, free and quality. Just because you paid for something doesn't mean it's good (and vice versa). Going over a disaster recovery plan and know how/when your data is backed up and just as important, how to recover with that data is more important IMO.

*could* you just set up an FTP server and do nightly full FTP backups? Sure... might be a pita that takes way longer than it needs to and be a pain to recover with, but sure.. you could do it.

Whatever you go with, be sure you know what you're doing. Nothing is worse than that moment you realize you have bad backups (or none at all) when you *really* need them.
 
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