Back up And Archiving suggestions

[cseas]

hi everyone,

first off, i discovered this site recently and cannot express how much i enjoy and reference to it on a daily basis. an ocean of thanks to the community.

ok, the matter at hand, i've been asked by my new employer to research some backup solutions. also, the best way to remove the backup from the premises on a daily basis. what i see that the previous employee had going was a system of backing up their Mac Server onto a Lacie drive, i believe using TimeMachine. i heard mixed reviews about using tapes and it seems there would be the amount of data size issue with using DVDs to copy that data for removal.

any and all suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

- cesar

 

[dabob]

We would need to know a little more information . . . what amount of data do you have to back up would give us a starting point if you can fit it all onto one drive since 2 terra bytes drives are cheep these days gives you some good options also using a NAS drive as a backup is also a good solution. We have two buildings connected with gigabyte ethernet and we keep our NAS backups in one building and the computers they back up are in the other - so in case of fire or other disaster it would be likely that only one building would be severely impacted.

 

[cseas]

there's over 600 GB on the Mac Server now, but i see some archive folders that could probably be moved off the server. we do have a couple of buildings on the block so that is a good option, thank you.

 

[Steve_S]

We use two solutions: a LaCie 2Big network drive, RAID configured with hot swappable 2TB drives. 1 of those can be removed from premises after a backup if so desired, and it will sync when reconnected. Our second backup is offsite, continually incremental over the net in case of catastrophic failure or disaster. Hope that helps.

 

[Tpyo]

This is a small shop, so simplicity of use and dependability are extremely important. I use a NAS (network attached storage) device; this one is a Netgear. Two 1Tb drives/hot swappable. I keep a third drive offsite for swap rotation. It can't really be used as a live server, but as an immediately accessible backup drive it hasn't been beat for usefulness and cost, IMHO. The software that came with it performs as advertised and is easy to use. The drives seem to run very cool and the unit is on 24/7; it runs a constant, almost real-time backup.

 

[cseas]

Thanks everyone!

 

[mattbeals]

If it's a server then there are options depending on what server, OS, and how it's setup. Need more info though.

IF the server is set up for hardware mirrored AND hot-swap drives then it is possible to pull one drive out and take that offsite. But if you do then the server will be in a degraded and unprotected mode while it rebuilds the mirror set.

If you can clone or shadow copy to an attached drive then you can take the copy.

Tape is still viable but anymore disc to disc is the way to do it for daily backups. The bigger goal may actually how to recover from a catastrophe using a "bare metal" scenario where it's new or "start from scratch".

Look for topics on disaster recovery and business continuity.