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Hey All,

Long time lurker here, in need of a little community guidance for a new backup system.

Currently with a data heavy design SMB/SME with large working sets and lousy internet connections, so sadly cloud backup is out.

A bit of history,

30 Windows 7/10 desktops, a number of linux/bsd servers and vm’s, zero windows servers.

Sadly the current storage split is more 3, 1 1/5 and 1 offsite and not 3-2-1.

Approximately 4TB of a rolling 12 month working set needs to be offsite to ensure we can recover the business, this is done weekly.

Currently data from two different NAS units (Freenas [zfs raid10] and Thecus [raid5 - yes I know, boo hiss, it’s being retired]) is partially mirrored (the important office/finance/ etc data) between themselves and then all the needed data is sent offsite via Yosemite backup and tape.

These NAS units act as file servers to desktops and backup targets for a collection of linux servers.

The LTO-3 superloader3 that for some years have been dutifully managed by Yosemite is on its way out, considering its LVD SCSI its time to look at the whole backup/storage arrangement.

The question,

What would people recommend?

I’m reaching my refresh cycle on most of my core equipment, so options like hyper converged solutions are on the table.

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You have 4TB of working data so what happens on month 13? Does it get trashed? Go into an archive? What is the process currently?

What is the goal recovery time in the event of disaster? Backups are taken offsite weekly but where to and who takes them off site?

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Seriously, I’d recommend keeping with tape, it’s proven technology and contrary to popular opinion (myth) tape is not dead yet… upgrade to at least LTO-6 (I run HP MSL-2024 and 4048 libraries) and use a dedicated backup server (physical, not virtual) with a 6Gbps SAS controller in it. We run NetVault (now owned by Quest again) as our backup software at three different physical locations linked by multi-gigabit fiber and it works well for us (city govt).

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Hey Matt- wanted to recommend you check out Veritas Backup Exec 16 for your environment. While it is compatible with the cloud, I know you’re not looking for that… but it’s still designed to support physical and virtual environments, including tape, so if you ever did need cloud backup in the future, you’d be all set as BE 16 is truly an all in one solution for any environment.

I’m linking here for more details: Backup Exec | Veritas

And if you wanted to trial our product, you can sign up here: https://www.veritas.com/trial/en/us/backup-exec-16.html

Let me know if you have any questions!

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Hi Matt,

There are a lot of things to take into consideration when you are evaluating your backup infrastructure and how best to approach backup’s and disaster recovery. Have you defined RTO/RPO for your critical applications and software? Are there regulatory requirements that affect how long you must retain certain types of data? How long do you really need to retain the data (hint - forever is a rarity). Do you really need to back up every desktop and laptop or can these users save their data to storage on the network which you can more effectively protect?

Without knowing what your needs and requirements are you cannot formulate an effective DR policy let alone how best to address them. Backup Exec is a great product for small and even mid size companies and if your requirements are fairly straight forward it might be your best solution. Personally I like BUE very much for small to mid-size companies that have modest backup requirements but I wouldn’t consider it a good fit as an enterprise class backup solution where you need to protect hundreds, if not thoughsands, of systems.

I agree with Rubyneal that tape is not dead but for a primary backup I would not recommend it. Tape is best suited to secondary copies of your backups, traditional archiving, and active archiving. When you are looking at backup solutions be sure to look at those that include de-duplication. There are a number of backup applications that perform de-duplication which will reduce the amount storage needed to maintain your backups and could reduce your backup window significantly. De-duplication may even allow you to use the cloud as your offsite copy even with a bad ineternet connection. De-duplication is really designed to use disk but I am aware of one application that will de-duplicate to tape but they do not recommend it and neither would I. .

You also mention 3-2-1 which I am assuming is a reference to the 3-2-1/grandfather - father - son backup methodology. There is another backup methodology that you may want to use known as Incremental forever. This methodology eliminates, or drastically reduces, the need to take periodic full backups. This reduces your backup window and the amount of storage required to meet your retention requirements.

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The 4TB is a rolling set, it varies a little depending on the size of projects, but it’s generally any open projects and those up to 12 months old after they are closed.

Older data after around 12 months of the project being closed is moved to a none replicated archive share on the freenas unit and then archived to tape off site for longer term storage.

Recovery time is flexible, we are a single site. If we ever suffer the type of incident requiring the off site data I suspect I can have it ready before it can be used. They current head home between staff on a 3 week rotation.

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After some research I’m not seeing a better option then tape for us. Yes I could replicate the smaller finance data offsite via the cloud but I would still have to sneakernet the design data off site and having dropped the tapes more than once, I’m not sure how I feel about doing that on platters. Yosemite has been a rock for us, it seems to just keep ticking and has yet to fail a recovery test.

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I would not discount hybrid backup solutions. It really depends on actual data change based on what can be handled by the bandwidth over 24hrs (or however often you would want to send data offsite). It is often discounted without doing some math first to see what can be done.

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We do have some RTO/RPO times setout, we can meet almost all of them as it stands but it needs work. Our longest retention period is 10 years, but the dataset for that is under 10GB. We don’t backup desktops generally bar a few admin desktops that have applications that don’t play well with network shares.

Completely agree, we started to move away from tape as the primary backup for most of our data some years ago to improve the recovery window and ease of use for end users. We now currently rely on ZFS snapshots exposed to windows and scheduled rsync copies with an additional copy on tape. Sadly for us deduplication is not as useful as it is for some, we have experimented with it by analysing our current stored data and compression give us better bang for buck consistently.

I was referring to three copies on two different mediums and one offsite. Incremental forever worries me a little for this setup, one missing tape and things could go south. Monthly incremental may be an option though.

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I haven’t completely ruled them out yet.

Our sustained upload capacity is just under 13Mbps, over the weekend I’m free to max that out, but in the week I need to prioritise user traffic.

We write somewhere around 500gb of changes to disk weekly, a lot of these changes luckily are discarded after a few weeks by users and automatically.

If I could seed an off site solution, it may prove an option for a lot of the administrative data.

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Do you really need any on-site storage? I’d say keep as small as possible, your existing server (ZFS?) with some offload to public cloud (x2 for them?) would be an ideal choice. Local tapes are pain to manage but don’t worry: if you’d select cheap storage option your data will end up on tapes in cloud either way.

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With the data we work with yes, the average working file set can be 500mb-1gb easily. Its all CAD data and large PSD’s. Projects are quite regularly over 50gb in size with the majority of data in them being active and concurrently accessed by multiple users.

To give you an idea, the average weekly traffic for the last month has been 471GB in writes (data + network overheads) and 2.7TB in reads (data + network overheads), that’s just against the ZFS backed NAS.

I’m stuck on 200Mbps down and 13Mbps up until I get some budget to dig up the road for a better connection.

As for archival work, that could be primarily stored outside the building. Its generally only kept for reference and legal requirements, so retrieval times can be on the slow side.

Indeed, multiple tapes isn’t the most fun. I have yet to find a better solution to off site such a large amount of new data each week.

The goal of the offsite copy is business continuation. If the building burns to the ground, given a a credit card and some new office space could we recover enough of the last 12 months worth of data to keep going.

I suspect I’m stuck with tape for the bulk of my off site requirements, however the starwind product line has piqued my interest for a converged solution.

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I suspect I’m stuck with tape for the bulk of my off site requirements, however the starwind product line has piqued my interest for a converged solution.

I would recommend looking at our Backup Appliance , it is a simple easy to use solution that comes fully preconfigured and pretested by our engineers. Keeping in mind your requirements we will be able to tailor the configuration of the system to perfectly fit your needs. Our solution is also covered by a professional “support umbrella” that provide end-to-end case management avoiding hands-off and finger-pointing from vendor to vendor in a support case.

When someday in future you will get the budget to dig up the road for a better connection, with our solution you will get direct cloud gateway. Using it you will be able to offload cold/archive data to Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure :slight_smile:

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Hey Matt - given your bandwidth situation, you may find ioSafe’s solutions to be a good fit. We make fire- and waterproof storages solutions - hard drives, NAS and BDR - that are designed to protect on-premises data and deliver as-good-as-it-gets RPO/RTO. The NAS run Synology’s OS while the BDR run StorageCraft. Both can optionally be configured to replicate data to a second location, a third-party cloud service or, in the case of the BDR, our cloud. While replication may be a slow process, it wouldn’t be overly problematic as your backups would be physically protected. You can read more here:

Let me know if you have any questions.

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I’ll add a +1 for ioSafe. We use their products in some of our bandwidth-poor branch offices. They’re an excellent option in this scenario.

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Hey All,

Thank you all for your input.

I have been doing a bit of digging and it looks like to replace my current setup like for like but with updated components I’m looking like £7.5k capex + whatever I decide for the online component.

So I’m going to have a dig through the product documentation from Datto, Starwind and ioSafe and reach out to them for more information.

I shall keep this thread updated and post the solution I end up deciding on.

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PM me if you have any questions, I would be happy to help.

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I’m late to this; we’re a datto partner and we have customers with about your same dataset and rate of change with no issues (and only 5mbps up! wish we could get more in this area). Of course you can seed at first to get off-site quicker. The nice part about the datto service is that, for one monthly fee, you’re getting device and service support from datto, 24/7 without extra fees, support from your partner, warranty and support for the hardware itself, all the licensing you need to backup everything (no add-on modules or extras for cores or number of hosts or data).

As far as retention goes, most of our customers are on one year unlimited retention, so no way to get overage charges. You can also get just unlimited retention forever and not have to worry about how long you want to keep your off-site data. As far as incrementals forever go (you mentioned above), there’s no problem with a datto and a bad incremental (or an incremental with data you don’t want, like ransomware.) You can remove that incremental and it instantly builds around it, it doesn’t break anything. The latest devices have ransomware detection, come with datto drive for your mobile users, and all of that is synced offsite. It also makes a great P2V device, and i sometimes use it to shuttle devices between hosts or boxes.

It really is a great solution-in-a-box that covers all your needs in one solution, with one fee. Since you were worried about sync, here’s a live snapshot from one of our devices with a decent chunk of data, showing it’s offsite sync status. I have it using 2.2mbps out of 5mbps up. After hours, i let it go to 4mbps. You can see this device is sending almost 700gb off-site weekly on not near the amount of bandwidth you have. You can also see from status that the backups are successfully offsite the next day (ignore the 1/23 server, decommissioned but not removed from the device yet just in case.)

Their interface and dashboard is top notch. PM for questions any time or for a demo, I love talking about them.

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Get this guy a beer!

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Hi Matt - Apologies for jumping in a tad late here, but if you’re still digging for the right solution, I wanted to put Commvault on your radar as well.

The ETERNUS CS200c backup appliance seems like it would be a great fit here. It combines Fujistu Storage with Commvault’s backup and recovery software (with built-in deduplication) to help you manage the complete data lifecycle more efficiently and reduce your network requirements.

You can find all of Commvault’s documentation for their latest software and data platform releases here: https://documentation.commvault.com/commvault/v11/article . Feel free to reach out if you have any questions!

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