WHS offsite backup

J

jfkriege

Weaksauce
Joined
Jun 28, 2006
Messages
91
My current storage system is a RAID 5 array which is backed up nightly on-site, and backed up off-site weekly using a large tray mounted hard drive. It works well, but I am quickly outgrowing its capacity.

I currently am transitioning to a WHS based server with about 4TB of storage space which will grow over time. About 2TB (expecting 3-4TB within 18 months) of that is going to be critical storage that needs at least weekly backing up off site.

How would you go about backing the critical data off-site? I could use multiple tray mounted drives which are rotated weekly to an offsite location (i can probably make it until they come out with 2TB drives if that is the best solution), but I thought I would ask about any better methods.

Thoughts are appreciated, and I think it would be interested to see how people deal with the off-site backup of critical data.
 
I made sure I bought a mobo with eSATA so that I could buy a eSATA HDD enclosuse with a 1.5TB drive in it.

And I use WHS's built in Server Backup to backup folders into this external drive. When I outgrow 1.5TB, I will either buy another 1.5TB drive or whatever is out by then.

Right now the only thing I consider "essential" is my wife's picture library. So I can afford to store interim backups online until once every 2 months I bring the external HDD for another backup for offsite storage.

But it looks like with your setup is somewhat more advanced than mine ;)

I think this is a great idea for a thread, and if we could get enough good entries we could possibly forward it to the WHS product manager as input for future features ;)
 
WHS is not friendly to MASSIVE backup's of itself. It never has been. Even with the new "backup tool", it isn't that great.

My recommendation is to build a second PC for the offsite backup. There is a case out there which is a bascially a very small micro ATX case with 4 hotswap bays (I can't remember it offhand). Put 4 1.5TB drives in there and get a copy of XP/vista with software that supports incremental backups. Then, at the end of the week take those 4 drives out and put in 4 different drives (same build). Take the drives home. With 4 TB of space in the main box, 4x1.5TB should be able to cover all incremental backups during the week besides the main copy. This way you keep an onsite daily backup that is incremental and you have an offsite copy for the cost of one extra PC.

This is about as simple as I can make it. Maybe i'm goofy.
 
I have seen the case you are speaking of in some of the work logs. I am a little confused about the second PC. Are you suggesting the second PC essentially do over the network backups of the WHS PC, and then I would take those drives and switch them with an off-site set of drives? If I was doing over the network backups each night would it be worth getting some of the Intel Server NICs for the computers involved? That would certainly work.

Is it possible to run something like Retrospect on WHS that could do backups at a predetermined time over eSATA or to tray drives? I guess I am a little unclear as to whether other programs can run on a WHS computer.

The reason for all of this, is that I am a wedding photographer. If I lose peoples wedding photos I am, well..... it is worth the money to make sure it is all safe.
 
Once you go beyond a few gigs of data into the terrabyte range the pricing for online backup goes through the roof because you're essentially leasing an entire server instead of only a few percent of one.
 
If it's not "Comcast Unlimited" already, once more than a handful of people start snarfing up hundreds of dollars of server resources it'll become so. NTM as a profesional photgrapher backing up work product jfkriege would have to pay at the business rate of $500/tb/month. Renting a server in a datacenter with a giant raid attached would almost certainly be cheaper, even if celeron with with 5-6x1GB RAID5/6 isn't going to be anything approaching a standard model.
 
I have looked into online backups, but have not found that to be a viable solution with the amount of data I have, and the amount that data needs to be accessed and updated.

Two Questions:
What are the drawbacks to the Backup Tool provided by WHS?
Can programs (like EMC Retrospect) be loaded on WHS like other windows installations?

Thanks
 
I am not sure what it is per day, but I would imagine it around 30GB per week minimum, maxing out around 100GB some weeks.
 
Ok, that seems reasonable. When I see offsite backup I think online backup. Paying for an online backup service is not the only way to go about it. You can certainly setup a fairly simple setup to do your own online backup to an offsite location.

The initial backup of the 2+ TB would be done locally to the offsite online backup server. Then all the subsequent backups would be done over the internet. If you have changed files it would only send the changed part of the file generally, and new files would have to be sent in full.

With that type of setup you would of course need a secondary location with a 'server' and internet connection. I think of this type of setup as much easier and more reliable than having to deal with taking 'media' offsite.
 
At this point, I do not think I will be setting up a server off-site. I am looking at taking media off-site in stead. I don't have a good place to update that kind of data throughput without it taking all week.

I would love to be able to use an eSATA enclosure or tray mounted drives, as I do now. My problem currently is I am not sure whether or not I can do that reliably with WHS, or install a program like Retrospect to do it. I have also thought about tape backups, but really don't like that idea.
 
http://www.keepvault.com/

this is what i intend on using, the freee version for my 1gb worth of important data, and if i need more ill pay for it...


the plugin look really good.


You could also use the free, Xdrive or Adrive


here is a coupon that might work still for 10% off
10FROMMSWHSCOM
 
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