Software

Re: RE: How much confidence do you have in your backup system?

shipley.c — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:15:28 GMT

Also, make sure you are using RAID 10, RAID 1, RAID 5 or RAID 1+0 ... RAID 0 provides absolutely no redundancy - just speed and size.

Re: RE: How much confidence do you have in your backup system?

dwelp — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:11:41 GMT

lstmate:
Now I know I should erase and reload a computer to ensure the backups are good but I am scared to do so. Some day I will bite the bullet and do it to verify the backup process.

Keep your eyes open for a hard dive sale, or look for a donated computer that you can steal the hard drive from it. Install that hard drive in your subject computer, keeping the good drive disconnected and safe during this test, now you can test your recovery process with out the fear of it not working and loosing a workstation for several days as you try to recover the machine.

$70.00 for a drive to test your recovery process is really reasonable peace of mind.

Dave

Re: RE: How much confidence do you have in your backup system?

lstmate — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 02:28:05 GMT

I recently purchased a 1 tb network harddrive backup system with a built in Raid 0 (I think) mirorred drive system to backup our computers onto. I have it located on the LST (WW II museum ship) and the computers are in the office which is located on a seprate barge. They are connected with a secured wireless network connection. I fee this meets the offsite requirements for a good backup process. Each night after we close the complete backups run on each computer to the storage system. Now I know I should erase and reload a computer to ensure the backups are good but I am scared to do so. Some day I will bite the bullet and do it to verify the backup process.

Re: RE: How much confidence do you have in your backup system?

shipley.c — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 02:22:12 GMT

If you were to go with that system for a server, you should buy more than 1 drive. Mainly because without an offsite backup, you're not truly protected in the case of an environmental disaster that will take out your building. Some will argue that bringing the backup to your home is not truly an offsite backup - but I think that doing so is better than not at all.

Re: RE: How much confidence do you have in your backup system?

bchapman@lan2wan.com — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 13:12:40 GMT

About six months ago I purchased a Maxtor One Touch 750 GB external USB drive. It comes with backup software. I run an automatic backup on my system every day and it keeps the last 10 copies of any file. I feel very confident in it. I don't know if it will work on a server but is sure worth a look. Cost for the drive was under $100.00.

RE: How much confidence do you have in your backup system?

Holdstrong — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 20:10:00 GMT

I'm fairly confident in our ability to recover from a disaster.

The 3 best pieces of advice I can give anyone in regards to this are:

1. Test your restores often. Never, for example, archive a yearly backup offsite without running several random test restores against files and directories from that backup.

2. Store full backups offsite. My yearly and monthly backups are sitting in a firebox at my home... away from the office.

3. And obviously, make sure your backup scheme is hitting all of the data you would need to recover and that you are getting the appropriate amount of historical snapshots for your needs. (nightly? weekly? monthly? snapshots etc)

For my system, I've got 4 offices with about 200GB of total "full" backup data and I run 1 tape backup server at each office with Symantec 11d in a classic GFS system.

I've never had a total disaster, but I have had lots of partial restores to do over the years. I'd say they have been about 80% successful. When they have failed, it was always human error, and not machine or system error. Ie: The user was storing the data somewhere where it wasn't getting backed up and thus wasn't available for restore, etc.

Truth be told, I'm starting to trim down my methods. I have found them to be overkill for our needs. I am also exploring alternatives to tape and have started performing my weekly and monthly full backups to portable USB drives via backupexec's backup2disk feature.

Next time a tape drive blows out I will most likely replace it with a few portable usb hard drives. And I also plan to explore online backup solutions such as those offered by Vaultlogix and Mozy in the coming year.

RE: How much confidence do you have in your backup system?

slam — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 08:37:00 GMT

i have very little confidence at this exact moment.

we have 3 macs, 1 pc, 1 mac/pc combo, and 1 mac server. we used to use retrospect remote but since it was sold off and the support moved to india it's sucked big time. then we tried various other solutions like superduper, carboncopycloner, and another one that i have blessedly forgotten the name of (intego?), and all seem to be mostly written for desktop-to-hard-drive backups, and had various minor or major issues for us.

i finally got it all up and working right several months ago and left town. i checked in on it last week, and all but one system had stopped running backups without notifying the user. i'm sure some of this is user error at my end, but i am a qualified geek and this is *still* not easy.

i'm about to rebuild the system and i'm looking at going with apple's built-in Time Machine daily backups to a remote hard drive on the server, and weekly backups from the server to an external drive for the off-site security. i like the idea of time machine; it's from apple, it's "free" on 10.5, it should "just work."

RE: How much confidence do you have in your backup system?

jointer — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 07:59:00 GMT

This is correct but the article puts a slightly overly negative twist on it. I personally haven't experienced any problems saving files to the Shared Folders. It also seems that people don't actually understand what MSFT did with putting WHS togethor. The Linux fanatics will always say that can do the same standing on one leg but they totally fail to realize the very limited capabilities of the typical consumer user who has to support themselves. This is not an anti Linux comment it is simple fact. The people who engage in "technical banter" (polite version) are light years above the typical consumer and therefore cannot put themselves in that place. It is indeed unfortunate that this problem has arisen but it is entirely because MSFT wanted to create a product with a new backup system with redundancy that the consumer takes home, plugs in like an appliance and forget about. The challenges behind that are much greater than the nay sayers appreciate. WHS is not file based backup. When the corruption issue is fixed there will be nothing out there that achieves the same ease of use as WHS with the features that it provides. Will there ever be competition from the "other side"? Very probably. I am not here to sell or praise MSFT. I just happen to work in that environment and think that WHS will be a good product. I just don't get my "knickers in a twist" trying to debate Darth Vader MSFT versus the Linux Jedi Knights at nauseating length. It's a total waste of time.

RE: How much confidence do you have in your backup system?

EvilNetworkOverlord — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 17:33:00 GMT

jointer,

Thanks for the input.

I've been hearing mixed reviews on WHS but it seems to have a lot of potential, for exactly the reasons you've mentioned.

I think I'll wait awhile though. The initial release still seems to have a few bugs.

-ENO

RE: How much confidence do you have in your backup system?

jointer — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 16:42:00 GMT

At first sight my suggestion for small non-pofits (<=10 people) might seem a little odd. However, here goes. Microsoft's recent new product Windows Home Server (www.homeserver.com) has some unique backup features, including redundant storage which is not based upon RAID. The word "home" makes you feel that it might not be up to the task but I would like to suggest that you check out its useful features, which incidentally go way beyond backup. It is already attracting a lot of attention in the small business space beause you basically set it up and forget about it. Small organizations often don't have much IT expertize and don't want to spend valuable time "playing" with computers. I have been running WHS now as part of the beta program and since RTM (end of last year) without ever once doing any kind of manual backup for my 4 PC's at home- it's all automatic right out of the box and at $160 for the software you won't find a better bargain. In the event of a drive failure in a PC I can do a bare metal restore in 15 - 20 mins! Equally I can restore individual folders or files at my choice.

RE: How much confidence do you have in your backup system?

linromano — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 19:51:00 GMT

Hi-
This seems like an affordable and easy solution. I looked at their website, and wonder how you know if they are "legitimate" (not stealing data, etc.). Thanks for any info you can offer!

RE: How much confidence do you have in your backup system?

EvilNetworkOverlord — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 17:57:00 GMT

I've been at this for so long and seen so many kinds of failures that I no longer have any confidence in anything.

So I deploy redundent backup strategies for all my clients and frequently check to confirm that restoration procedures actually work.

-ENO

RE: How much confidence do you have in your backup system?

st.roseyfc — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 15:15:00 GMT

We are using Carbonite.com to backup our server and it has been working great for only $50.00 a year and it is off-site.

We have tested revocery and worked great for our firm.

RE: How much confidence do you have in your backup system?

shipley.c — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 07:34:00 GMT

Aha, now I get it Scoop0901/Dave! That's pretty neat. :)

RE: How much confidence do you have in your backup system?

Scoop0901 — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 03:47:00 GMT

Shipley.c, I didn't say, nor did I intend for anyone to interpret anything that I wrote that Ghost was based on DriveImage.

Norton used parts of DriveImage to enhance Ghost 10, then kick it a little more with Ghost 11, including the "feature" of allowing an encrypted password in the GUI version of Ghost. I can't remember if the command line version of Ghost allowed for a passphrase, let alone an encrypted one, but I don't believe so.

Then again, many companies buy out other products to improve one of their existing products or to get a new product in its line, and Symantec is one of them, as is Apple, Microsoft, and so on.

The licensing, though, is where things always get crummy. Blech.