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Hey everyone,

I’m in the middle of setting up the free edition of Unitrends and if you haven’t noticed it now supports up to 8 virtual machines, which is just awesome!

Anyways the place where I work has only ever done file level backups, which of course is why I’m trying to install Unitrends. I plan on setting up our fileserver to do a incremental backup nightly, maybe every few hours but that may be overkill. The question I have is we have 2 virtual domain controllers and I’m not sure if I should be doing an incremental backup every night, every few hours or every week?

I’m hoping someone might have some suggestions on what to do.

Thanks

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Every few minutes would be good on your file server if you want to be able to recover from a user ‘oops’ move. otherwise its dependent on how much time lost is acceptable when recovering. If your users can stand to loose everything they have done that day then once a day is fine. if an hour is too much to loose then every 30min.

I would only backup the AD on a daily basis unless your using it for something else or have exchange. I say that only because ive had issues restoring exchange servers with out the AD server that matched within a few minutes. In normal situations the only thing that changes on the AD is logs and user passwords. maybe a computer security key every now and then but its not really an active player in the data changing realm when compared to your file server.

so long as these are all incremental backups the strain on the server storing them shouldn’t be too bad regardless of how often you backup.

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Although I’m not familiar with Unitrends, I must say that backing up every few hours sounds crazy to me :slight_smile:

We’re living in the stone age over here with mostly Win2k3 production servers (AD/print/file/terminal services), so virtualization doesn’t come into play. We run full backups of our servers every night to tape. That tape is in rotation, so we have the data until that tape comes back in rotation the following month and is overwritten. We also do a full server backup to disk once a month, then put that on a tape and lock it up in the office in case we need to go back to it later.

Nightly backups are a good compromise for those who want to backup all the time, keep in mind it eats up a lot of bandwidth and resources, so try to keep it to a minimum, while still having a plan if something crashes. I’m sorry this is more of a rant than an answer, but you should keep it to once a night or once a week.

Do you have users on a terminal server? Hosting your own mail? What kind of data do you anticipate having to recover?

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The more frequent your incrementals, the faster they will complete. There is a sweet spot between frequency, RPO and time it takes to run the incremental.You will have to play with Unitrends to see what you can live with.

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with the backups file servers does depend on how much the data changes if you do ERP type stuff data changes all the time if it is changing some file daily then i would say daily backups are fine . you also might see that network issues are a problem with backups running while data is tryin gto get accessed. the term critical data is relitive for your organization

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Josh - Thanks for using Unitrends Enterprise Backup! As Christopher has so eloquently put, your RPO & RTO can help you figure out how frequently you will want to run your incremental backups. The best part is that you can choose different scheduled for each VM, so while it may be important to backup your accounting departments’ files hourly, you don’t have to back up other less active files.

Please let me know what questions I can answer for you about Unitrends specifically.

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Thanks for the responses everyone.

To give a little more information. I’m part of a school school that has about 110ish employees. We use Google apps for email, docs, calendar, etc. We don’t have any terminal servers and for our SQL database we do backups another way since its a physical server. We really don’t have much data that is changed frequently on our fileserver. Mostly its people who still prefer using Office and accounting/financial information that we keep on campus so its a very small amount of data. I don’t think setting up our fileserver to backup more frequently would really hurt performance, but something of course I need to test.

As for our DC it sounds like daily is reasonable amount of time to backup?

Thanks again

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If you can figure out how much time it will take, and therefore how much it will cost, to recreate any lost data lost, then you should be able to determine how often you need to schedule backups.

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Josh -

I was looking around to find some information on the software package you are using. Would this be it?

http://www.unitrends.com/products/features

You’ll find “Continuous Data Protection & Point-in-Time Protection” listed.

I defer to Katie for an official answer here, but wouldn’t this provide a series of snapshots that you can use in concert with a daily overnight backup to provide a reliable overall backup scheme? Perhaps the free version doesn’t support this. Unfortunately, I can’t find an online manual for the free version of the software. We’ve used Acronis in the past and they have a similar feature.

At the least perhaps this is something you might investigate.

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Hey Phil,

Thanks for the reply that’s something I’ll definitely have to look into. I haven’t seen that feature before and hopefully its something they offer in the free verion

Thanks

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Unitrends’ ‘Near-Continuous Data Protection’ simply refers to the frequency that you run your backup jobs. The Free version works identically to the paid version and the physical appliances – the schedule you pick simply depends on what you have determined your RPO and RTO to be, as Katie mentioned. You can back up nightly, hourly, or as often as every 60 seconds if absolutely necessary (or any increment in between these options). It simply depends on how much you can afford to lose in the case that a restore is necessary, keeping in mind that you’ll require additional disk space the more frequently you back up and the longer you need to keep the backups.

I run daily backups and have sized my Unitrends appliance so that I can keep at least 2 weeks’ worth of daily backups on our appliance, and I also archive off to disk, weekly for 2 months, and monthly indefinitely.

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Thanks for posting this response Gabrielle! I’m at Spiceworld so my ability to respond to posts has been seriously impacted.

Josh - We do offer our incremental forever scheduling in every version of our software, including our free version. Please let me know what other questions you may have.

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