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Multiple Small Site Backup Design

B

baxr6

n00b
Joined
Mar 14, 2010
Messages
33
Hi All,

We have 6 small offices which are in need of a better backup solution.Each site consists of one main computer (reception) which runs a specialised surgery software and 2 or 3 other computers (surgery pc's) connect to the software (Like MYOB for e.g.). We currently run 2 x external drives on each main computer and use acronis backup and recovery for backups.Acronis does full backups on Tuesdays and Fridays and diff backups on the other days.It is then replicated to the second hard drive which is taken off site each afternoon.The main computers at each site are the only one's that need backing up.I would like a better solution as the the external drives often playup.

I'm after some ideas on alternative solutions that you could recommend.I'm open to all ideas, And can use other software if acronis is not considered the best setup.The computers at all sites are a simple workgroup setup.

I should mention that all sites are kept separate as they are completely independent.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
What is it you are looking to achieve? You say 'better' but better how? What kind of disaster are you trying to protect from? What kind of downtime can each office endure in the event one of the computers died? Since you are using Acronis, I assume you are looking at an image restore, so you don't want to waste time reinstalling the OS and apps, is that correct?

You could look at cloud backups the only problem is, doing an image restore from the cloud would take awhile. Does each office have reasonably fast internet?

I think you have it pretty well covered off, I can't think of a more elegant way to do it.
 
as I stated the externals often playup.I guess I was thinking their maybe a better option (like NAS for e.g.) although i'm not sure if NAS would have cloud for offsite storage, or maybe I could plug an external hard drive into the NAS if that would work for the replication....but then I may have the same issue as now.Im trying to protect against all disaster hence the offsite.Acronis is good because I can use universal restore to get things back online in a minimal amount of time.
 
Could you backup the computers to a NAS, and backup the NAS to a cloud storage provider. If a computer failed you'd have the NAS. If a computer and the NAS failed you'd have the cloud storage (but could take up to a week to get that data, but that's generally only going happen in a fire/ flood, so 1 week might be acceptable).
 
But yes most commercial NAS have the option to backup the data to offsite / cloud storage providers such as amazon glacier. Most people swear by synology. If your able to budget 1k upfront and $10-50 a month (depending how much data you need to send to cloud ) plus have the internet bandwidth than this is probably the easiest way to get this done.

You could also make your own NAS with freenas, or windows server.
 
being medical if in the US don't forget hipaa!
Your backups have to be encrypted and that also limits your cloud options to hipaa compliant systems.
 
Frankly I just use tape drives for my medical clients.
Set the backup software to encrypt the backups and make sure and back up the key!
 
thanks for the responses I appreciate it, What are your thoughts on raid 5 for NAS or drobo? maybe that and an external hard drive plugged into the NAS is enough.Just thinking out loud here but the other thing I may be forgetting is the cost for the 6 sites.Although I doubt there is another other options and any remote server would use a lot of bandwidth I suppose.
 
If your backing up the same system each day, a lot of the data could be redundant, and better backup software will realize that and avoid retransferring the unchanged data. Adding encryption to the problem makes it more complicated and beyond my knowledge. But if your database of client records is only 100mb vs the 20gb you backup each day including windows , office, and software that tracks the records / patients, then you have a lot of room to optimize your backup strategy.

What if you make a single image of a main computer that allows you to restore a main pc in 30 minutes. Then just backup the 1 database the program uses and maybe a documents folder if they are doing other things on the PC?
 
What internet speeds do you have at your offices?
What are your upload speeds?
How much money can you spend?

If upload speeds are good I would probably go with a single FreeNAS server with RAID10 or RAID6(RAID5 is too scary). I would then check if Acronis can use FTP/rsync/ssh/... to upload images to the main server.
On the main server, I would be doing daily snapshots and probably additional backup to tape or encryption and Amazon Glacier.

Matej
 
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