Draggon

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Ok, so here is the story.
We have onsite backup here at the office (Tape) which is fine, as I take the tapes home with me so that we can be sure to have something stored off site. The issue is that we have had troubles with the tapes lasting, and are into a volume where we need to either get larger tapes, or a new tape drive that has hardware compression.
We also don't have an archiving system at the moment, so all of our old projects remain active.
I think that offsite storage would be a great idea, and am happy to have it at my house (We're really small and don't want to pay for someone to host) but would like some suggestions as to how to do it.
I was thinking of a network HD that I could plug into my system at home, and then just set up an FTP server to backup the information daily, and have a separate archive on the drive that we can send projects to as we see fit.

Suggestions? Options?
Recommendations on hardware and/or software?

Thank You.

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Jackie-0

That's a good idea actually. How big is your bandwidth and how much data will you need to upload? This is the only caveat.

Because external hard drives are really cheap, I have some customers buy two and swap them out and take one off site. The backup software sees the drives as the same drive letter when they do the backup because they are the same model etc.

Feel free to PM me if you want to get into this further.

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tboltman

Draggon

Thanks, to both of you.

Tboltman - I think I'll hold off until I have researched local options a little more. Getting tech support across international boarders gets to be a hassle come tax time. If nothing else works well I will be sure to call them though.

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Ryan

I currently do the whole take-the-tapes-home-with-me-every-night thing.

What type of tapes are you using? What capacity (native/compressed)? What software are you currently using?

How business critical is the data? (usually it is 100% business critical, but this is a valid question sometimes)

I recently upgraded all of my tape drives (I have 4) to LTO2 for the higher capacity. I also have RAID 5 running on all of my servers, and I have each server backup nightly to another server on the network. This is absolutely free to do, and I'm shocked that more people don't do it. It makes restoring files a breeze (just copy from the other server), and it offers yet another level of redundancy (you can never have too much, eh?)

It all depends on the size of the business, budget, and amount of data. What are we talking about, here?

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Draggon

We are currently running Certance 10/20GB tapes, as well as backing up the data onto a different partition of the server (I say server, but it's basically just a computer running windows server 2000 acting as a DHCP server to other desktop computers.
The tape drive itself is a Seagate....no idea the model number at the moment.
We're backing up about 10.5 GB right now, but with a proper archiving system, we can vastly reduce that number.
Everything that is current is vital to business, but the older files are just for company records. These Archived files would still need to be accessible at all times in case they are needed. They just don't need to be backed up or on the main list all the time, as they never change and are very rarely looked at.
We are using the Veritas backup exec.

Please note that I can understand half of most tech talk, and if I wasn't actually needing to do the work myself, could fake the rest, but I am self taught and am still learning what the hell everything means, so go slowly.
Thank You.

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Ryan

LTO-2 tapes are way too big for you- they are 200gb native (400gb compressed). I have an imaging system to backup (all my receipts, forms, expense checks, etc are all imaged and stored as PDF's) so I need a ton of backup space.

Doesn't sound like you are quite to that point yet.

I assume you are open M-F, so you do backups 5 times a week.

You can get away with 5 tapes on a rotation and they will usually last at least 2-3 years (if not more). Make sure you store the tapes at room temperature, and clean the tape drive once a week with a cleaning tape (I do it every friday, for example).

I show this on Dell.com:

PowerVault 100T
$642.94

This is a 32gb native tape backup device which would be plenty of room for your data (and growth in the near term).

A 5-pack of tapes is only $45, so you can get the tape drive and tapes for under $700 for the complete solution. Bear in mind that you'll need a SCSI controller card to plug this into, and your "fake" server probably doesn't have one (not a HUGE cost, but an additional cost nevertheless).

Knowing what little I know about your business, this is what I would recommend if I was a consultant on your IT expenditures. Your budget may be much lower than this if you are a very small company (again I have no idea), or this may fit into what you were expecting.

For the record, I don't recommend the FTP server/network drive at home. Depending on your ISP, you may very well hit the monthly bandwidth cap. More importantly, your information is not easily accessible for restoration without driving home (ever try to UPLOAD from a DSL or cable connection?) To restore 100megs, for example, could take hours at the normal DSL/cable upload speed of around 40k/second.

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Oh my god, I have a blog

Ryan

I should also mention that I'd advise you invest in a cheap 40gb drive and add it as a second physical drive in your "server." Say it is your "F" drive. Write a batch file and schedule it to run every night at like 2am. The batch file would look something like this:

xcopy c:\*.* f:\*.* /F /E /C /K /Y
exit

This would copy the entire contents of the C drive to the F drive, retaining permissions and file information (recursive and hidden files, too).

That way if your C drive ever bites the dust, you can just map everyone over to the F drive and life goes on.

40 gb hard drives are so cheap that you'd be a fool to not do it at this point.

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Oh my god, I have a blog

CWB

yeppers ...

external hard drives are a cheap form of insurance . you can easily afford a couple of them ... make your full backups to both ... you take one and someone else takes one .

a friend of mine had me look at his business comp ... the hd was crapping out ... i asked him where his backups were ... he said "huh ?" . i found the backup ... on the same drive that was going wacky-doo .
i managed to retrieve a lot of the data ... his secretary put in 3 twelve hour days digging thru old paperwork to replace the missing data .
oh yeah , his payroll/state/irs data suffered some damage ... he was sweating bullets for a while .

elfoozo

I'll add a recommendation for you to check out robocopy. It will reduce file backup/copy speeds significantly if you use the command switches to only transfer changed data.

Basically it's a much enhanced version of xcopy, has logging, etc., and it's freely available on Microsoft's website.

Draggon

Thanks to everyone.
I don't make the final call, but I will pass on all of your ideas.
We do want the nightly backup to be offsite as well as tape, and the archiving to be here and out of the office, so that if we get out equipment stolen or there is a fire we don't lose any information.

Also, I was wrong about the nightly backup.
We do the tape backup Mon/Wed/Fri and also backup nightly to a different HD (A slave drive) within the server.

Very small company (3 total people, one who knows as much about computers as I do quantum physics).
I'm pretty sure the tape drive we have now has a SCSI port in it. We did get it as a server, it's just on the low end of the server scale. Basically a desktop with a few changes.

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