small business offsite backup

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nitrobass24

[H]ard|DCer of the Month - December 2009
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I have a small CPA Firm in Dallas, TX currently we have 1 server with 2003 SBServer for everything. For backups we used tape drives, then switched to removable hard drives that i would take home with me and have at my house in case the place burned down or flooded or something i would have a copy at another location. Well this is great until my assistant forgets to do the backup or I take the wrong one home or forget to take one home altogether. Well the reason I'm looking for something different is because we are going paperless and our data needs are going to increase, also i want to take the human error out this process as much as possible.
What I want is software/service that will make an image of my entire server, and data that will be stored on my 16tb NAS at my house. It needs to automated. Ive looked at logmein.com but thats not really what im looking for. I want it to be a complete image so that if something happens i go unplug my nas at my house, take it up to the office plug it in, put in the recovery disk and then were back on our way. Im skeptical(clearly im an accountant) about storing my image,data on someone elses server not only from a security standpoint, but more from a recovery standpoint, i mean it would take days to download all the data from someone elses datacenter. I cant be down for days.

If you have any ideas, suggestions, criticisms I want to hear your very honest opinions.
 
Sorry read it more smootly. For an image i have no idea. Would have to do a comibination of something like Acronis True Image then FTP it over to your server.

I have never restored an image to a server. I am sure the client you have isn't all htat big. If its just a few users, it really shouldn't be hard to install windows on the server migrate the files over and rejoin the computers to the domain.
 
marley1 said:
Sorry read it more smootly. For an image i have no idea. Would have to do a comibination of something like Acronis True Image then FTP it over to your server.

I have never restored an image to a server. I am sure the client you have isn't all htat big. If its just a few users, it really shouldn't be hard to install windows on the server migrate the files over and rejoin the computers to the domain.
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Sounds like he is worried about security so I would recommend using SFTP or to transfer the files over a VPN connection.
 
Sounds like you'll want imaging software installed that will automatically image the system and then SFTP incremental updates to an offsite location.

How much data does this server hold? How much changes daily? What kind of upload does your office have?
 
If you could do some sort of incremental secure backup / ftp that might work. The initial upload would take a while, but the nightly incrementals I think would be more manageable.

 
Tue Image is about the only full image thing I can think of.

The only other option is keeping a mirrored server. And most of the time, those are PITA, unless you have two IDENTICAL servers. That, and so much other stuff can go wrong, I've seen more mirrored restores go wrong than I have seen them go right. I personally stay away from it.
If you do mirroring, just need to be sure you have lots of time to monitor and test that sucker out (I'd venture to say almost one part time person could largely be doing nothing but that).


The TrueImage solution will create a TIB file. You could probably back it up directly to your NAS (or just run a scheduled FTP job).

However this will just put a TIB file on there- it isn't writing the data to your NAS... it's just the backup file.

Without mirroring, I've yet to find anything really high-availability.
Assuming you have hot spare hard drives (protecting against hard drive failure), two situations if something else dies:
#1- Restore from day-old backup (assuming you've got extra part or another server)... Lose one day's worth of data. Assuming this happens mid-day, you're already almost to 5PM by the time it's up and running.
#2- Let the server sit there, overnight a part. Install early next morning. You don't loose the previous day's data (like in #1). You'd lose (assuming mid-day and you get the part by 10AM) a few hours of work-days... But no data is lost.


I'm ready for either scenario. Really waiting to see what the magnitude of the particular failure is and whatnot to determine at that time which action to take.

I'm almost leaning to #2 myself... Nobody loses work, but the problem with that is you basically are using pen/paper the rest of the day (a big PAIN).


In short: if you have hot-spare- that's a good backup right there (assuming you are OK with #2).
Only thing that DOES NOT protect you with is some sort of corruption/attack or anything like that.
 
Did you a favor I guess and took a look at my server for you.

I have a 500GB total RAID5- distributed various ways on 3 partitions. I backup all 3 with TrueImage.
Have a 500GB external hard drive it backs up to (one for each day actually).

I have about 100 Gigs used out of that. It takes 55 minutes to back that up (at 4AM). Mind you before we started (like you) doing paperless, it took 30 minutes, but space has been growing. This is normal compression...
The end result file size is 60GB.

I have no idea how big your actual data usage is (I know you have 16TB NAS, have no idea how much you actually have though), but sending a file that large to an offsite folder would need some quick connections on both ends.
I'm also not sure how'd you manage broken uploads...
 
Ok well these are all great suggestions, I guess I need to just start trying some things. Ill give trueimage a go. And I will try logmein as well just because so many people are talking about it on these threads.

Is there a way for me to transfer it to my NAS at my home without using FTP/SFTP its just not secure who are we kidding its all cleartext any lil script kiddie could just grab my data.
 
nitrobass24 said:
Ok well these are all great suggestions, I guess I need to just start trying some things. Ill give trueimage a go. And I will try logmein as well just because so many people are talking about it on these threads.

Is there a way for me to transfer it to my NAS at my home without using FTP/SFTP its just not secure who are we kidding its all cleartext any lil script kiddie could just grab my data.
Click to expand...


Probably a VPN would be the best way...
Logmein has a solution for that too (Hamaci or whatever it's called). I generally dislike it, but I could definitely see myself using it if all you had to do is do it between two machines.
Windows has some built-in VPN tools as well but they are generally a bit more complex to implement.

Maybe someone else has another suggestion though.

One possibility is (And I don't know how to do this and it would differ on how you go about it) is configure both end routers to only accept connections from each other's IP address. That'd kick everyone else off other than what is on each end (and if someone is on the other end on the server you've got other issues)



I'd seriously look at your transfer speeds though. Try copying a directory (if you have one) that doesn't matter so much, and see how long it takes one evening (have a batch file print the time to a text file, run the job, and when it is done print the time again, and you can figure the length it took there).

The problem is you may have one heck of a connection at your HQ but your house is lacking...

And if we're talking 16TB of data in one night, that'd be insane.
 
no more realistically were talking about 50gb a night max i really cant see our changes being more than that but im not really sure as i currently have no way to measure that. 16tb is just my storage cap at my house.
 
nitrobass24 said:
Ok well these are all great suggestions, I guess I need to just start trying some things. Ill give trueimage a go. And I will try logmein as well just because so many people are talking about it on these threads.

Is there a way for me to transfer it to my NAS at my home without using FTP/SFTP its just not secure who are we kidding its all cleartext any lil script kiddie could just grab my data.
Click to expand...

SFTP would be a secure option, just setup a SSH server one one side and use a SSH client or winscp or something like that to transfer the data.
 
set up DFS-R between work on that server and a server somewhere else? possibly at your house? If server blows up at work, you go home, grab the server and bring it to work. Plug it in, were back in business baby!

genius!
 
I like the DFS-R idea as well although i know nothing about DSF and namespaces, just never deal with it before. What if I set up my NAS at my house as an iSCSI target and used the initiator on the server at work and used it as a iscsi SAN and did DFS to it? Would this work?
 
i wonder how well dfs-r would work without your server being on the domain. i have set it up but both servers were on the same domain, plus i just dont know if its the right application for this as you want to do something with imaging and not just increase the availabilty of name space and file replication.

wouldn't having a site to site vpn using some kind of firewall system (maybe one of those linux builds) and then just use a sync program be the easiest thing? site to site vpn would be secure, then you can just image the server with acronis say every friday and copy the image over, then you could do incremental daily backups, using the same sync program. could even grab an external harddrive and do a sync locally from their server to the external drive, transfer files back at your server, and then you wouldn't have the lengthy first initial backup. would be easy on the connection.
 
ive decided to not go with imaging, im just going to do the data partitions, if some thing happens i can reinstall server 2003 relatively easy.
 
so then my choice would be logmein backup or i think some people have recommended rbackup.
 
nitrobass24 said:
ive decided to not go with imaging, im just going to do the data partitions, if some thing happens i can reinstall server 2003 relatively easy.
Click to expand...

Only thing to think about there....

All your settings you've saved. DHCP Scopes, DNS, Active Directory (And the SIDs), all gone.
That, and most every server develops some quircks that you make little changes here and there (in the registry or whatnot) to fix... Those would be all gone too.

That's the only reason why I do not prefer just data backup.
 
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