Comments on: Server Backup

By: cgarcia26c

cgarcia26c — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:32:50 +0000

Thank you all for your great insite on this subject

CG._

By: britinga

britinga — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 17:43:29 +0000

I have found that removable external hard drives are a part of the solution. We back up about 100 gig a night; a bank of seven 150 gig hard drives allows me to take the previous night’s backup off site. I still back up a few things to tape, but only because it’s there, and I hope never to have to rely on it. Accounting data and other essentials are saved to DVD before being overwritten. I would like to add off-site backups to the mix but my budget precludes that for now.

By: bchapman

bchapman — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 02:06:32 +0000

I’ve found that utilizing an off site backup service works best for us. We used to backup our data onto tape media, and soon out grew the tape drive, we also ran into issues with failed tape drives, failed backups and retention periods of only 10 days.

We currently use an off site backup service from EMA, http://www.ema-data.com who provide us with a retention period of 30 days, and we have the option of keeping incremental backups for up to 999 years. Our backups are scheduled each night, and we don’t have to worry about taking tapes off site, bad media or failed backups.

As stated by one of the other responders, data recovery is the crucial part; and we’ve been able to restore single email messages, files, and complete databases, with out any incident.

So in short, I’d say look for a good company that can provide you with off site backups.

By: cosmoc

cosmoc — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 15:28:54 +0000

The NTBackup (built into Windows) works very well for files which are not open. Scheduling is easy and uses Windows Scheduled tasks. It will keep a log of the last 10 backup jobs. Setup of tapes is initially a little more time consuming to prepare but otherwise, it’s a great (free) solution for a file server. I have seen it “forget” tape names under specific circumstances like power failure’s (while writing to tapes).

Symantec/Veritas Backup Exec isn’t cheap but handles open files very well along with database files (extra $$$ license needed). Well worth the money if you ask me.

Backup solutions depend a lot on what you WANT to backup and how much you NEED to backup. Are you looking to backup Exchange or SQL or just Data Files? How long can you afford to be down (restore time) if you have a complete failure? Disk based solutions are great but bandwidth is a concern. Are you required to take/store backup media off-site (Best practice)?

There are many options to choose from but the best option (for you) will depend on your budget, the backup window, the size of your backups and how you store the backups.

By: labnuke99

labnuke99 — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:13:41 +0000

The ones I hear most are: BackupExec Arcserve I have used both in my past and both have their quirks but both seem to do the job. You are absolutely correct that recovery is the main issue. That's why you should invest in good gear and media. Your backups will really be only as good as your destination device & media.

By: cgarcia26c

cgarcia26c — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:01:37 +0000

Thanks Labnuke99, I will work with this service, but can you tell from from experience how reliable this is, usually built in services like this are not the best when it comes to recovering lost or corrupt data, is there a better 3rd party solution that you or anyone else would recommend.

Thanks again

Carlos._