Best Backup Practices

[bealzz]

On our network of about 15 servers we are about to start regular backups.
I was wondering if any of you had any suggestions on the best way to back up our system state data.

Our user files and whatnot are fine (raid 5), its just all our AD, registry etc data we want to store.

The backups ive done so far are roughly 500mb using windows built in app. is this what i have to deal with or is there a way to make this a bit smaller so that our server where we store all our backups isnt going to get pounded every week.

Thanks
-Bryan

 

[UnderLoK]

RAID5 does not keep you from loosing data man. You have to think about user error, a virus, dual drive failures, cache corruption, and alike.

As far as your AD and such.. You can use 3rd party applications (or even a winzip batch on the simple side) to break the file into pieces and or increase compression. That is however one more step that could cause failure. In all honesty man there is no excuse for a lack of space now days.. Not to sound like a salesman but there should be no compromises made when making backups. Unfortunately it usually takes one catastrophic failure to knock the sense into people.

 

[Deleted member 19858]

I agree that RAID5 is not the way to go. I would suggest you invest the money and get BackupExec 9.1 small business edition as well as a nice SDLT tape drive to back everything up. Keep it offsite and make sure you setup a schedule to get all the data you need. If you cant afford Backup Exec you can use NT backup to backup the Exchange information store as well as data. If you are running SQL 2000 just have it run a backup before the NT backup and backup those files

 

[oakfan52]

Backup is not an "after" network implimintation thought. You should have been thinking backup solution before an OS was ever installed on a single server. With that being said most of the stuff i deal with is SMB with 1-3 servers. You probably looking at a lot of data. what we do alot is get an auto loader tape drive. and backup software with server agent for each of the other servers. RAID is not a backup solution. it merly help protect against data loss on a hardware failure on the disk subsystem.

 

[da sponge]

Indeed, every company needs a robust backup solution. A SMB with 15 servers most definately should have a solid backup solution.

As others have said, BackupExec 9.1 works nicely and depending on the amount of data on your network, you could cram everything onto a SDLT or LTO drive. Better yet is to get a nice robotic library (www.overlanddata.com).

What would your company do in case of fire? flood? lose everything??

I usually do 1 restore a week, and all of them are caused by user errors (overwrote/deleted a file, can't find the file anymore / file is corrupt). The amount of time they save by having an easily accessible backup more than covers the cost of implementation. If you can't sell the system on DR (because of short sighted management), then at least sell it on productivity.

 

[Nybbles]

Agreed. Raid 5 is the first line of defense, however, I personally have lost 2 disks in a RAID 5 and it sucked. Basically, we lost a disk and while a replacement was on order, in the 48 hours it took to come in, we lost another. Needless to say, we keep a spare disk on hand now.

However, we were lucky in the fact that we had backups on DLT tapes. Depending on how much data you have, DLT might not be the best. We currently have an Exabyte Autopak, which is a 10 Tape autoloader, and at a 2:1 compression level, it can back up 1.6 Terabytes (160 GB x 10).

On top of that, you want a good tape rotation system. Currently, we have 1 tape for each day Monday through Thursday, and then we have 5 different Friday tapes. Say for example that Thursday night's backup fails half way, I can always resort to Wednesday's tape if all else. Also, another reason for keeping tapes so long is because there have been times were users have deleted whole directories (and therefore, all files and sub-directories) and not noticed the files were gone for a week or 2, and those 2-3 week old tapes have come in handy at those times!

Then make sure that tapes are taken off-site. There are companies that will do this for you, but personally, I just take it home at the end of the day. It's only 1 small tape, not like I take home a 50-tape library each night. So in the event that, for some reason, the building burns down, the company still has the data.

This layered approach is common in IT, so get used to it. It makes itself visible in a good data-protection strategy, as well as in a security scheme. Sure it seems like over kill, and you hope you never need to go past your first line of defense, but if the worst happens, you'll be glad you did!

Edit: As far as software goes, another vote for Veritas Backup Exec 9.1. It works great and can be very small or very large, depending on you're needs and the backup agents you purchase and install. These agents let you do things like back up data on remote servers or workstations, backup Exchange data, or Microsoft SQL, etc.