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Backup strategy for Win 2000 servers

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7 replies

by quintar51

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Just wanted to get more points of view on this, I know technically there are no right or wrong answers.

We currently have the following backup schedule, using Tapes alone:

Mon - Diff (server1)
Tues - Full (server1)
Wed - Diff (server1)
Thurs - Full (server2)
Fri - Diff (server1)

Server1 has roughly 50 GB of data and Server2 has about 40 GB.

We recently purchased one SAN device (1 TB) and 1 USB Mass storage HDD (800 GB).

The focus is mainly on restore speed, as we need to get the server up ASAP if it goes down. I know that having one Full and one Diff is the fastest way, as there's only 2 tapes to restore.

What strategy would you use?

7 replies

by bfilmfan

Truly depends on what application is being used on the server. If that is an Exchange server, without having the full backup of the transaction logs and the information store, you are gonna be SOL.

by cg it

speed of backup or speed of recovery? speed of recover would be a full onto a NAS or SAN device [an image]

getting the server back up depends upon the hardware on the server. If speed is of the essence, I would go redundancy route having another DC around rather than relying on backup tapes or SAN/NAS. With redundancy, the network doesn't go down and give ya time to fix the one that took a header into the abyss.

by curlergirl

I think doing the full backups during the week is not really gaining you much. IMHO, it's a balancing act between spending too much time backing up your system versus the amount of time needed to recover from a disaster. Here's the method I use:

Mon through Thurs - Diff except SQL & Exchange are FULL
Fri - Full backup of everything

The only trick here is that you need to have a network-level backup software that allows you to specify a different level of backup for SQL and Exchange data. I think this way I have the best of both worlds. If a file server goes down, all I need to do after restoring the OS is restore one Full and one Diff. If an Exchange or SQL server goes down, I can use the last Full backup to restore Active Directory, the registry and program files only, and then fully restore Exchange or SQL data from the last Diff (which is actually a Full for those two programs).

Hope this helps!

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