Can any recommend (or warn against) any online backup services. We currently back up to a tape drive that is occasionally changed and placed in a fireproof safe, but I think we need to be doing something more robust. Current files come to about 300gb, but we could archive and safe store alot of this and just back up about 50gb of current work.

Any suggestions welcome.

You will struggle to backup 50gig with a standard adsl line in any realistic time, do a speed test on your uplink speed, you should be able to calculate a rough time from there. If you really want to go online for backups then consider upgrading to an sdsl line, last couple I did we recommended Zen Internet and they have been very good.

Link to speed test



http://www.broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk/


Also worth doing a couple of test at night which is when your backups will run I presume as the speed might be quicker, or slower.

HTH

I use dropbox on a daily basis but only for about 2GB - I leave it running as I leave the office and I think it takes a couple of hours or so.

50 GB as said above would seem to be impractical without an upgrade to the internet link.

I would have separate tapes for every day for the week so if one gets chewed up or dies during a backup you are never more than 24 hours out from your previous intact backup.

I too use dropbox.. it only backs up / copies the delta so depending on what you are backing up each night, the first sync may take a weekend, but after that it's real time when you save a file.

I haven't used it for database dumps only documents and spreadsheets and it's absolutely fine.

For the cost of dropbox (I think it's $25 / month for 100G) it's just not worth taking the risk with tapes and remembering to rotate your media.

What are you backing up?

quote:

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Originally posted by Barkalarr
I too use dropbox.. it only backs up / copies the delta so depending on what you are backing up each night, the first sync may take a weekend, but after that it's real time when you save a file.

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My dropbox has corrupted a lot of my data. Wouldn't trust it.

you don't need to backup it all everyday just the changed/deleted files so as long as you have a reasonable upload speed and aren't generating huge amounts of data every day it should be Ok.

We currently backup about 300gig of data using a virgin broadband which isn't particularly fast where we are.

This obviously needs a bit of work upfront to get the 300gig setup without the adsl , so we did a backup and sent it over and then ran from there.

We still do a monthly backup also but much better than the daily we were doing.

We use the company that also does our IT support as they are local to us (cambridge) and were also cheaper but they only do the service for customers whos servers they also support, so can't help with recommendations I'm afraid.


Regards Pete

Do you have 50 Gb of NEW data per day? We back up our entire system via ADSL, we took an initial backup of the entire system, then we only backup the new / changed files per day. The software does it all and we pay an IT company to manage the offsite backup. So our data sits on two raid arrays, on two sites. Backup starts around 3am and its done overnight.

What are you looking to protect against?

Restoring the odd file when somebody makes a mistake?
Or having something you can switchover to/recover from if you have a server failure or lost your office to a fire?

As mentioned, it would be an incremental backup, (just backing up whats changed over a day). And no, it wouldnt be 50gb of new information everyday, it would be a 50gb initially of current projects that wouldnt be archived. Daily changes would be no more than 1gb (at a guess).

It's possible to virtualise your existing servers and replicate the entire virtual servers' storage continuously to another server (either locally or remotely over the Internet). Your virtual servers have no idea this is happening, it's completely transparent to them, which makes it relatively straightforward to migrate your existing physical servers to something like this.

If you have two local physical servers, and one breaks, you can failover your virtual machines to the surviving physical server in the time it takes them to reboot with no loss of data.

If you have one local physical server and one remote over the Internet you can replicate your data back from the Internet copy to a replacement server to get back on your feet again. In some circumstances you can even restart your virtual server on the remote copy. You might lose a little data, but not much - only the data that hadn't made it to the Internet copy yet.

With your systems virtualised like this, you can do snapshot backups at either/both ends (local or remote) if you need to restore things back to the way they were.

This is a little OTT if you just need to restore one file a user deleted which is why I was asking what risk you're looking to protect yourself against.

Btw, you don't need really expensive kit like VMWare vSphere and SANs to do this.

iBackup

...unless i had a reliable UPS then i wouldn't kick off the backup and then go home - it just asking for problems.

Incremental backup is what you need (after your initial backup it will only backup the files that have changed since the last backup). If you have Win7 have you thought about the built in backup?

Steve