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Hello SpiceWorks!

I need some help understanding how things work. Currently my company has 5-6 different locations, in different states. We have external hard drives that we ship on our trucks to the different locations every week. We back things up, then repeat. The problem with this, is that sometimes things get mixed up in the transfer, rendering our efforts null.

We would like to have stationary backups at each location. Then weekly backup to a designated location.

Our conundrum is that some of our locations are still on T-1 while some are on fiber. We are afraid going forward with this plan would clog our network.

I know people do this for their backups, I just don’t remember how they do it.

  • Do people have a dedicated connections installed for backups?
  • Do they backup over their existing lines, and I’m just having a panic attack for no reason?
  • Do people just use physical drives like we do?

If you can, can you walk me through best practices?

Thanks for your help!

EDIT: We are dealing with Terabytes from each location. Our “external hard drives” are actually portable NASes. We would like to keep offsite backups. We are pretty much in operation day and night.

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I’d be weary of shipping harddrives on trucks on a consistent basis - I’d look at tape for that as it’s much more rugged and guaranteed to last longer.

As for your data you can do the following (again I am unsure of your data size) if a lot of data, you can setup a NAS and back up all your data there, and then setup backups of just incrementals for daily stuff. If connections are fast enough and data set isn’t large enough, you could utilize something like CrashPlanPro or Carbonite to back it up to the cloud, and do your incrementals/dailies at night when users don’t use it.

As for monthly back ups, I usually prefer to do tapes, and take those tapes offline, offsite at the end of the month. Where they stay there for a while (unless needed) and tapes can take a good beating before breaking.

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When it comes to backup, there are a lot of options available and it depends on your situation.

I don’t know anyone doing backup the way you describe, it sounds pretty messy for 8 locations.

How much data are you talking about, is it huge volumes from each site? If it’s not huge volumes, then an online backup solution may be a good option for you - it can run out of office hours so it doesn’t chew up bandwidth when users need it.

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How much data does your company need to back up? How much new data is added each week?

George’s idea of backing up to a NAS onsite is a great one - to cut down on the backup transportation issues, you could always back up the NAS devices to the cloud. A hybrid approach ensures that you’re able to restore quickly (from the local copy) but you are protected against something happening to the physical business location with a cloud copy.

I understand being weary of using cloud for backup because of the network congestion issues - but is there a time of day when people generally aren’t using the network? For example, a lot of our customers schedule their server backup windows between midnight and 8am. Data compression and bandwidth allocation will also help keep the impact on your network minimal. We offer all of these features in our server backup solution.

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Cody,

I can certainly relate to you grappling with the downsides of physical media and offsite rotations. This is why cloud/WAN backup has clear advantages. I got into this business because of all my past experiences with customers struggling to rotate media offsite as they should.

Keep in mind most remote backup solutions are “incremental forever” so after the first full it’s only backing up the deltas. Don’t worry though, if you had 1 year of backups you don’t have to restore 365 incrementals - the software handles the restoring of the data to the point in time you need based on retention policies you control.

In my experience, we generally recommend a T1 (1.55Mbps) for each 1TB to backup. Sometimes we can do more, sometimes less - it just really depends on daily change rate. We have good tools to understand daily rate of change to determine if your T1 will suffice. We can also provide bandwidth throttling by time of day and day of week, but it sounds like you might have a 24x7 operation so we’d have to talk further if you can lower or raise the throttle at different points in the day/week. We perform this analysis at no charge, and can be very useful regardless of what backup solution you eventually choose.

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From a setup perspective, cloud would be great for your situation - you could have a designated backup storage at each site and back up both locally to the onsite storage and offsite to the cloud, without having to move anything physical around. If you go the SaaS route, it’s just a matter of installing software agents on the servers in question.

The bandwidth issue is definitely something to think about, but isn’t necessarily insurmountable. As others have suggested, if particular offices have off-hours (or at least “less-on hours”) then you could schedule the server backups for those times to minimize bandwidth disruption. Online backup services also generally use compression, etc for efficiency, and after the initial backup the subsequent ones probably won’t be nearly as big.

Pretty much all online backup vendors offer free trials (ours is here ), so you could always take a few out for a test drive to see if the cloud route is viable.

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Hey Cody,

Are you looking for a new backup solution specifically? Or rather a way to implement a better strategy going forward with your current software?

If it’s the latter, here’s an article about how to schedule an offsite rotation strategy that I think you’ll find pretty helpful. Also, implementing a solution that allows for media labeling (meaning that the software will label each device for you according to its use, and will prevent you from backing up to it out of schedule) will be the best way to avoid getting your destinations muddled up, like you said you’ve been having troubles with currently. Otherwise, Cloud is always an option as others have pointed out above. However, despite the hype there are some considerable downsides to Cloud as well.

If it’s the former and you’re looking for a new backup solution, I’d strongly recommend you check out @BackupAssist . We’re a comprehensive solution that balances advanced performance with user-friendly ease, and we’re significantly more cost effective than almost any other solution you’ll find. Have a read over our core features here .

Using BA, you’ll be able to back up to your NAS’s directly or remotely via iSCSI or Rsync, as well as a wealth of other backup destinations , including Cloud ( using Rsync with Amazon s3 ) - if you’re interested in going that way. I mentioned media labeling above, well BA will do that for you, as well as automate your backups and provide detailed reports and alerts via email. It’s as close to set & forget as you’re going to find.

Here’s an all inclusive free 30 day trial . Fire it up within your environment, sit back and see for yourself how much simpler it makes your job. It’s not only cost free, it’s risk free too.

Since you’re backing up multiple sites, I’d also recommend taking our new MultiSite Manager product for a spin. It will allow you to manage backups and restores; plus view reports, alerts and notifications; PLUS handle licensing and updates for all of your sites from one central location. MM is in beta right now, but will be released in full within the coming weeks. So take the beta for a whirl with your 30 day BA trial and by the time you’re done you’ll be able to upgrade to production versions of both.

Wow, didn’t mean to go in for such a hard sell when I’m not even sure you’re looking for a new backup solution. Apologies if I’ve got carried away here, I’m just pretty darned confident BA is going to be exactly what you’re looking for.

Any questions I can answer or anything I can do to help out, don’t be a stranger :slight_smile:

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Hi Cody,

As all mentioned above, Cloud backup solution would be a better option for you to get your backup process organized. I’d suggest you take a look at Zoolz Business.

You can ofcourse schedule your backups to run at anytime you prefer.

Another thing that I would like to point out , that if you have some data that it is not frequently accessed you can always cut cost by backing it up to our Cold Storage which is built on top of Amazon Glacier Cloud.

For more information you can read more on our website , or just let me know I’d be more than happy to help.

Cheers!