Small Company Backup Plan

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likeaB0ss

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Jul 3, 2012
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Hey,

I work for a small, 4 employee, video production company that has one office. We have about 15-20 TB worth of media from past projects that is currently spread out among 15 external HD's and 3 desktop HD's. We are looking to back up all of this media in a central location with a comprehensive file structure - in a way that it is accessible at a moment's notice. I'm new to the field of data recovery and backup, and I would appreciate any input or ideas that you guys may have to offer.

Thanks!
 
http://www.crashplan.com/

Another option is having your own server offsite some place, and setting up software to replicate/backup your data there. Note that you could do this and use Crashplan as the software. I myself have not used Crashplan (yet), but am reviewing possibly using it. Another colleague has been very happy with it.
 
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Carbonite is probably going to be the cheapest way.

As long as you aren't running a Server OS on the machine you want to back up, they are fine with you using the regular "Home\Home Office" license which is unlimited storage.

I specifically asked them about this when I setup a file server at an office.

As for the external drives, you can either pay the extra for it to support external drives, or you can map the external drives to folders on the computer(s) you are backing up. Either way works fine.

$59 a year per computer for unlimited storage is pretty sweet.

And if you setup a file server and just have Win7 setup on it, you can get away with only paying $59 a year (if you map the external drives as folders), or $99 per year for external drive support.

They also have a $149 per year plan that automatically backs up videos. The other plans, you have to manually set it up to backup videos.
 
likeaB0ss said:
Hey,

I work for a small, 4 employee, video production company that has one office. We have about 15-20 TB worth of media from past projects that is currently spread out among 15 external HD's and 3 desktop HD's. We are looking to back up all of this media in a central location with a comprehensive file structure - in a way that it is accessible at a moment's notice. I'm new to the field of data recovery and backup, and I would appreciate any input or ideas that you guys may have to offer.

Thanks!
Click to expand...

Of the ~20TB of data, how many projects is that broken up into? Assuming complete failure of your local storage, since you say you need "moments notice accessibility" how long can you wait to download a project to start working with it. What kind of internet connection do you have? Can you wait the amount of time it would take to restore the data back to your local machine(s)? What is your budget for this backup project?
 
@madcoder- Any suggestions for selecting a server?

@Relativist - Box.com said for what I'm looking for, they wouldn't be a good option

@cyclone3d - Tried Carbonite, they said for my purposes, it would be $15,000-$20,000. I'm looking to spend up to 10K total

@mwroobel - broken into many projects, maybe around 50. By readily accessible, I mean preferrably available over a network server, but download is ok; i just want to avoid the kind of offsite service where I would need to call the company up to have them bring over the data tape.

I have files over 60 GB, most cloud sites restrict file sizes to 5 GB. It seems the problem that sites like Carbonite & Box have with the media is that is spread out over different external drives. Not sure why that is an issue, but I am a total n00b at this topic, so it would be great if someone could explain that to me.
 
Well, if your budget for this is 10K, you could build out an entire backup infrastructure that could include redundant local backup, offsite tape (doesn't have to be Iron Mountain, could be your house) AND online backup. Is this truly your budget just for the backup system, or for the backup in addition to a local file server?
 
mwroobel said:
Well, if your budget for this is 10K, you could build out an entire backup infrastructure that could include redundant local backup, offsite tape (doesn't have to be Iron Mountain, could be your house) AND online backup. Is this truly your budget just for the backup system, or for the backup in addition to a local file server?
Click to expand...

Right now, 10K is my total budget. However, I am willing to take baby steps in the right direction to set myself up for completing the process when I have more money to spend. I think I've decided that the first step really is to buy a server of some sort since as of now, we have no central network
 
mwroobel said:
Well, if your budget for this is 10K, you could build out an entire backup infrastructure that could include redundant local backup, offsite tape (doesn't have to be Iron Mountain, could be your house) AND online backup. Is this truly your budget just for the backup system, or for the backup in addition to a local file server?
Click to expand...

No he couldn't...

$10k alone is the cost of a decent server especially if you want SAS drives and need 10-20T of storage space
 
MrGuvernment said:
No he couldn't...

$10k alone is the cost of a decent server especially if you want SAS drives and need 10-20T of storage space
Click to expand...

No, he said he had up to 20TB that he needed backed up in a central location (could therefore be offline but accessible backups) of, not that he needed 20TB online at all times in the office. Since he said that the 20TB is made up of ~50 projects, that means he needs significantly less space online for current projects, and then can move historical data offline. Also, since he said they keep most of the projects on external drives I would suppose they are working on the actual data on the local machines (which would be a hell of a lot faster) than working on live files from the server.
If he wants a server with 20+TB online at all times (plus backup etc), then yeah 10K is not near enough if you are looking at anything decent.
 
Check out AppAssure
It will do a snap shot ever x amount of time, and then replicate that data to an offsite location.

As for the server, you can save 1/3 to 1/2 the cost of a Dell or other name brande by building your own. OEM's over charge a ton on drives.

You can get a good Super Micro motherboard and a 24 bay Super Micro chassis with built in sas expander for around $1500. Add in CPU, Ram, Raid card and plenty of 3 or 4 tb drives and you will have a pretty good file server.
As for sas or sata it depnds on your IO. To save costs we use sata discs at work for the backup servers.
 
What the heck do I know ---

Backups kept off line:

10 2TB hard drives mounted in USB3 cases cost $1700 or less.

Active stuff kept on line:

A server for 4 people should run under $500 plus the cost of the hard drives - $2000 is more than enough to have all the data on line.

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But I would keep just active projects on line. Using a RAID only if I needed the bandwidth.

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Easy to spend to much. Easy to not have enough backups.

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It takes forever to download large files from the cloud.
 
GeorgeHR said:
What the heck do I know ---

Backups kept off line:

10 2TB hard drives mounted in USB3 cases cost $1700 or less.
Click to expand...

Hehe... if you're considering this route, then I'd choose 3TB drives. I'd say they are the sweet spot right now. Perhaps in a year that sweet spot will be 4TB drives.

I'm not sure this is what the OP was after, however.

I personally like the (relatively inexpensive) media servers (generally for HTPC use, centrally storing blu-ray rips and the like) people are running on this forum, but I'm not experienced enough to make recommendations for storing important data.

There is something to the idea of having multiple inexpensive backups, however...I'm comfortable with that because it has worked for me, but my IMPORTANT data = I have 10+ backups of this (differing dates of progression, and slightly different compositions)...and it's less than 125GB.
 
15tb / 50 project = 300 gig each.

I dont think any cloud will provide moments notice backup restoration.
How fat are pipes there?

Reminds me of this thread. Although your not 4k definition.
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1690663

You will probably find stuff from past 90 days needs to be online, and the rest can be archived.
 
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