Lets talk backups

I don't see alot here about backups and backup schemes.  In fact in my searching I have found much about backup schemes on the web. 

In my situation we are a small shop (20 machines, 15 Users, in a peer network), however we have alot of data 400+Gb.  It is somewhat critical to have at least a differential backup everynight for us.  As for servers, I have a mail server and 2 file "servers" (Server 1 is a FreeNAS server and the Server 2 is an XP machine).  The XP Machine does a full backup on Sunday, and differentials on every other day, each of these goes to a new folder by day name i.e. Sunday, Monday...etc.  Each Sunday the backups start getting overwritten, Every other week I manually pull the full backup and save it.  The Email server does its own backups to Server 1 and cycles them.  Server 1 (FreeNAS) is new to me, so I don't have a real backup running yet. 

The questions is, what are you all doing for backups?  How do you cycle your backups.  What is your reasoning for this? 

I personally am not a fan of tapes, and I have enough HDD space to maintain redundant backups on site.  Does anyone use FreeNAS?  What backup software do people use?  Does your software cycles the backups? 

One last note, I am not a fulltime IT guy(I used to do it fulltime), though I am the only IT this office has. 

Hi!  I guess my first question is why are you in a peer network when you have that many users and access to products at Tech Soup?  I know it is a little more in depth than what you were looking for but get yourself a copy of Microsoft Small Business Server throw it on a capable machine let it be your mail (exchange) server and file server.  Use "Folder Redirection" so that all of your client systems are being backed up to the server.  Then use external hard drives or your NAS to backup your server.  I have dozens of clients who utilize 3 drives.  2 onsite that are alternated weekly and swapped out monthly with the 3rd.  You are right about one thing which is STOP using tapes!  Sorry, I get a little emotional on that topic.  :)  The really cool part is that Small Business Server's built in backup "ntbackup" is very reliable and perfect for an organization of your size.

Alternately, you could drop in a Windows Home Server box and backup all of these systems with restore capability but you mis out on what SBS offers (RWW, OWA, SharePoint etc.)

Hope that helps!

Tim

Actually, TechSoup has a lot of backup threads.  I did a search and found 1923 posts (presumably in less than that many threads).  We talk about backup a lot, and have done so for years.  If you were clicking on "Advanced Search" and typing in "backup" in the search term field, then hitting the enter key (as is intuitive) then yes, you'll get no results.  But if instead of hitting enter you go down the screen and click the "Search" button you'll get your search results.

As for you backing up, keeping redundant backups onsite on your HDD is a good start, but I would take a look into some LaCie Rugged USB 2.0 HDDs for rotating some of the backups off-site as well.  You could also take a look at MozyPro (I prefer this over the other vendors, if you search for MozyPro in the advanced search you'll see a post or two on why).  LaCie sells their 500GB 5400 RPM USB 2.0 HDDs for about $159 each - you might be able to find them cheaper at a reseller.  I saw a video here that drop tests 4 external drives.  LaCie did okay for my purposes.

We use tape backups and haven't had any troubles.  Having said that, Chris' idea of you using external hard drives for rotating the backups off-site is a great idea.  If your backups are kept on-site and your building burns down or floods, all your data would be lost.  Remember, backups aren't always about restoring corrupted data. 

Thpwt you raise a good point about the peer network, unfortunatly we are a public non-profit but we do not have 501c3 status and thus we are not elegible for techsoup discounts, though we have the tiny budget most nonprofits suffer from.  Also, we don't have a fulltime IT staff. Although I have worked as an IT person in a large environment, I am all we have.  I am only allowed to dedicate approx 10% of my time to IT and we do not have a budget to outsource.  All this said, my approach to such constraints is keep everything as simple as possible (in the event I leave my position a person with no IT experience would need to take over the IT duties).  

I am not a fan of tape for exactly the same reason as you, I have seen more businesses try to restore an empty tape to realize it hasn't worked in years.  You suggest ntbackup, isn't that the same as the build in backup in XP?  If so that is what I have been using for all this time. 

Chris, glad to know there are threads out there.  I like to think I am message board saavy, though I guess this goes to show my searches were not very complete.  Needless to say I am not a big fan of this board format, but I will adjust.  I will look at the offsite options.  For now I have a SATA/IDE->USB adapter and some regular harddrives.

 When I refer to cycling (probably mis-using the term) I was referring to what scheme you all use for retaining backups.  i.e. I have a backup for each of the past 7 days.  I have a backup that was 2 weeks ago, 1 that was 1 quarter ago, and one for each year. 

I hear your pain b74bubba - this is a new format for us here at TechSoup, and even us moderators are still adjusting to it.  Turns out that we (as users) do have a say in how the features of this board are implemented and used!  Make your voice heard on the Site Improvements forum.  In fact, I posted a link (click here) about the search feature that you were having issues with.  Honestly, I have issues with it, too.  I prefer to type search term and hit enter - didn't think I'd have to scroll down to click on Search in order to get the results.

As for rotation, cycling, etc...  for my business I only rotate backups off location on a weekly basis.  I have 2 external HDDs that I swap, usually on Friday.  But I am using MozyPro to backup my data files 5 times a day - so I can restore from that if I need to in a disaster that hits both my external HDD and my server.  As for historical snapshots of data... well I'm actually using rsync to keep a backup of my data files for 30 days on my server (and this is copied to my External HDD), but I back them up every business hour of every day.  I used this article as a guide on how to set it up.  *nix file systems allow you to make hard links to files... do a little reading about these and you might get excited.

I guess I can't really get a file beyond 30 days old if it had changed or deleted.  But we do keep a yearly snapshot of our data on DVDs as well.  This only represents our data at the end of a year, so anything lost between that snapshot and the 30-day backup is gone forever.  I'm okay with this.

Thank you so much for your input.  We often have requests for file recovery often (mainly from my boss), so I try to oblige that for now, some day I will put an end to it (Maybe after my next raise :-)) Our needs are odd for sure.  For a small office we have alot of data and it changes fairly often (GIS Data). 

I wasn't trying to be critical about the forums, they do elude me a touch.  I am a big fan of the Invision Power boards myself.   I have been playing around here at Techsoup for a few years, so this new forum is strange and odd to me still. I am sure in time I will settle in.

Rsync is the way I was leaning, FreeNAS has it built in.  I was looking for the best way to set it up to cycle.  Thanks for all the help and tips.