Explore tape backup options

Remember to have backup and restore procedures in writeing, and exercise the restore with intervals like weekly or monthly. This often adds the request for restore systems - who'd like to restore on "production" systems ..
This often adds changes to the procedures - it was not that easy or something changes like storage size or other environment parameters.

I use an easy to use online backup service called Data Deposit Box at http://www.datadepositbox.com/. I use it on all the client PCs in my office and then I also have it back up the server. It runs continuously in the background when machines are idle (so it doesn't chew up machine resources or bandwidth). It costs $5.49 (US) a month for 250mb which is pretty well the size of the data storage I have on my server (we're a small office). For small offices it's great because it is so simple to use, especially since we don't have technical support staff.

Regardless of the size of an enterprise, the choice of backup device should be near to last. The job at hand is to recover, not to backup. I've worked with large and small IT shops that focus on backup and they fall into the "Gotta make the doughnuts" syndrome. It is a mindless pursuit of completing a backup without regard for recovering the necessary business data. If you start with the idea that you must recover when a problem happens, then the business need will determine the recovery method, which , in turn, will dictate the backup methodology. Now, you're ready to identify hardware and software.

We consider tape backup to be just a fading bad dream. Tape has to be one of the least survivable backup media around. Not only do you have all the disadvantages of magnetic media, but you have all the disadvantages of tape which can stretch, break, or jam at any moment.

The only reasonable backup media have to be otical storage in the form of CD-R/RW or DVD-R/RW. Cost per gigabyte is much lower and backups (if you pay attention to the quality of the blanks) can be significantly longer without any liklihood of data loss. Not only that, but restoring a backup takes a fraction of the time.

We are a small organisation providing support to the educational community.
Our method of data storage and protection is relatively basic,
1. We archive 3 sets of each (date stamped)system backup. This follows the old son, father - grandfather system. Son is kept in the office and is available, father is kept in the fire safe elsewhere in the building and grandfather is lodged with our bank.
2. Due to the low cost of hard disks we back up to free standing firewire interfaced HDD's.
These are cheap and quick. The principal disadvantage is the number of them (one set of 3 per workstation) the advantage is that we use Drive Magic 7 which automates the whole thing so that none of us can forget.
3. We have tried all the removable media approaches but having had 1 big problem (not my wife) we now have decide on a belt and braces/modular approach simply for damage limitation in the first palce and rapid restoration in the second.
4. It won't suit everyone - but it works for us.
5. Our customer base especially likes this approach as we could relocate and set up within days, while being only hours out of date on the HDD's - modified data is backed up on CD-RW's as we go.
6. We have acquired contracts using our disaster recovery ideas as seeling points.

Means at least ten minutes before it broke. Anything longer just costs far too much.

Col

What's a backup?

I pray over my servers each night before I go home, isn't that enough?

:D

We us D2D2T.

It is only when you accept that there is nothing that is fully secure but at best the data can only be got at when it is no longer of any use IE far too old to be of any importance to anyone.

But then again you don't have to make it easy for them either do you?

Several years ago over 75% of all security breaches where internal now it is down to just below 50% and the other 50% + is now from an external source {Industry Figures from Symantec not mine} so if you are keeping CDR/RW or DVDR/RW's as you're main backup storage off site they are really easy for someone to read not to mention that with CDR & DVDR's they are semi permanent and can easily be destroyed. I can still remember a company who I consulted for backing up all their critical data to CDR and then instead of using the marking pen that I gave them they used a ball point pen to write on the backs of the CD's.

That wasn't a very clever idea and you have to remember that all these disks even the very best ones are little more than a blank piece of plastic that has ben painted with the recording material {granted it is a bit more complicated than that} but effectively that is all that a blank CD/DVD is and I have seen quite a few loose their coatings.

Col

Our backup solution at the moment anyhow (we are looking into improvments and changes, possibly a NAS solution to augment our storage needs) is traditional tape backup. We have a Dell Powervault (autoloader) and our software is Veritas Backup Exec 9.1. our backup volume is very low compared to some of the companies you guys probably work for...but we have about 85 GB that is currently backed up from 2 servers.

Once we got the initial config settings out of the way, we can't be more please with the solution (except our autoloader isn't the fastest)..its pretty much a hands free operation. We have it email us any problems/errors/alerts even at home we get the alerts. Which I like.

We do an incremental during the week/ full backup on weekends strategy. We rotate copies of course, of which a copy is stored in our secured server room (with fire supression system, temperature controlled, etc.) this copy is in a fire safe. Then myself and the other engineer that works with me share responsibilities on taking an emergency copy (we label it the 911 copy) home with us.

A little bit of time consumed in making two copies of the masters , yeah I know..but it makes us feel warm and fuzzy with regards to security of our data.