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Hi Friends,

Though I’ve been in the tech arena for about 10 years, I’m very recently new to the role of IT & Business Analysis Manager at a fairly small (<30) company. I’ve had my hand in support roles for a long time but never directly overseeing the IT department.

My predecessor didn’t leave much in the way of documentation, so I’ve been putting together everything pretty much on my own by way of reading books, Google-ing and whatever other relevant sources I can find.

So, here’s our current backup situation: we are running daily server backup using SyncBack Pro, which is scheduled to run backups to our actual server as well as to cloud storage (we’re currently using a 6TB mirrored WD My Cloud Ex 2). We also run a full weekly server backup.

Some issues I’m finding:

  1. SyncBack Pro is not entirely reliable. I frequently have to go in and delete then recreate the scheduled backups as not all files will correctly backup. I have found this mostly occurs when disk space is running low, but it’s still annoying. Suggestions for better services / applications?

  2. Our standard daily backup runs on average at about 460 GB, which as you can imagine is rapidly consuming our storage space. I am going in regularly and deleting old files and understand that I can create a Bat file to do this for me, but I have questions for veterans:

    a) Obviously this will vary from situation to situation / company to company, but what should you aim for in terms of daily backup size?
    b) How do you prioritize which files / directories to backup? Backing up all document folders for employees creates massive file sizes, and I need to start trimming the fat.
    c) How many days of backups do you keep on hand before deleting “older” stuff? What is best practice?
    d) For any Office 365 users - are you regularly creating backups of your users’ OST / PST files? Where are you storing these / what’s your backup process?
    e) Do you have regular system / restore in place for all user’s workstations? Where are you storing backup files?

  3. As for equipment reliability - I’m going to need to purchase some more storage space soon as both the server itself as well as the cloud device are getting low. What are your recommendations for a smaller size company?

Thanks a bunch, all!

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A) You don’t aim for a size. The daily change rate is what it is. You plan for target capacity based on that change rate plus room for growth.

How many servers do you have, and are they physical or virtual?

B) You should back up everything. The only exception would be if you have a temp shared space where everyone is fully aware that it’s not backed up.

C) This is completely dependent on business needs and varies not only per business but also per server. For example, I may keep 30 days of backups for shared drive files, but I may keep 6 months of backups for my accounting server.

E) We just started playing with Arcserve free workstation backup for individual workstations, especially laptop users. Laptops get stolen, their hard drives die at a higher rate due to banging around (unless SSD). It’s working well so far.

Take a look into some actual enterprise class backups. They offer features such as incremental forever. Basically take a full backup, and start doing incremental backups. When you hit your retention limit, it will merge those incremental backups back into the full to synthesize a new full backup.

If you have any type of virtual infrastructure, you can deploy something like Unitrends Free as an appliance. It can back up 1TB of local data and I believe 500GB of cloud storage.

  1. There’s no such thing as a standard for small companies. If I was going to make equipment recommendations for a company I would first be sure to understand everything they currently have, and then what their future plans are in terms of growth and designs. You may be a single server shop now but may ultimately want to branch out into multiple servers.

If you go with something like Xen for a hypervisor, you can actually load 2 instances of Windows server for every server license that you own (with the caveat that both instances of any one license have to be on the same virtual host).

We can certainly help on recommendations, but to do a good job at it, we need more info. It would be like you asking me what kind of car you should get, and I don’t know if you are hauling things, have pets, have a lot of kids, etc.

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You need to figure out what is critical to your company that would shut the doors if they lost it. Prioritize this data and which servers also fall into this category. Next figure out how long the company can be down while this data and servers are unavailable. Create your restore policy based on this. You should also consider backing up configurations for your important infrastructure like switches, firewalls, etc. and where to store them.

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I agree with Rockn, a heavy data audit is in order. Figure out what is important and what isn’t. I normally setup a secondary drive on the data server titled “Not Backed Up” and keep everything that isn’t critical there. You could look into a Datto device for onsite and offsite backup with virtualization capabilities. I don’t know what industry your company is in but that’s a lot of data for what I’m used to seeing for 30 people. Need to find out who’s itunes library is being copied to the server. :smiley:

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a - there is no aim, if its new modified or in any way business related you backup…3 copies, 2 different media, 1 offsite

b - storage is cheap, losing data is not. see point a!

c - Depends on local country laws, data involved and business need. This isn’t an IT decision its a business call. Typically in Europe we have to keep financial data for 7 years and everything else is down to the business. 3 years in my industry isn’t an uncommon gauge.

You should also re-frame the question…how long do you keep and how many revisions back do you keep. There is a difference…

d - No because I have seen the 365 setup…They are planning for outages, disasters and co-incidences that would trivialise any local backup of PST files. If you are in heavily regulated industry you will need a forensic proof archive tool so that mail is stored before it hits the user mailbox and all outbound captured. Proofpoint.com would be the tool for this but it aint cheap. If you want to backup for the hell of it why not…cloudally.com is good at that

e - absolutely not, no data on workstations ever! Yes there will be 365 mailbox cache etc but all data on servers is the rule

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I would look at an initial solution of a proper file based back solution. For your size you aren’t going to go wrong with backupassist.com

Its a low cost tool for file level backup, the massive benefit for you is the single instance store so each daily backup is a synthetic full backup. That means it will backup everything but only write the changed files to the backup destination, saves massive amounts of space

Once you have this sorted look to virtualise all your servers…normally I would say this is the priority but sounds like you need your file level backup sorted this week.

For destination storage at small scale a Synology or Netgear NAS will be fine, I tend to lean towards Synology as Netgear have a near criminal pricing structure for their ‘branded’ drives. Stick some WD RED Pro in RAID 10 in a Synology and you have a fast reliable target.For bigger targets a Supermicro server, LSI Card and Open SuSe is hard to beat

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Backupassist also has an rsync bolt on for getting the data elsewhere…

NAS units usually support this as well plus have USB ports to write a replica of the backups to an external drive which you can stick in a bag and rotate offsite

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Lots of good points already mentioned.

“You” won’t do this. Rather, consult witht he various data owners and generators in the company for perspective. Take those views to senior management for prioritization, budget, funding, and periodic review. Periodic review ought not be less than once per year.
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aka, Risk Analysis.

Consider actual document files; servers going down; data on the servers (AD, GPOs, etc); VIP laptops becoming inaccessible; and, workstation breakage.
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…and testing the backups!

Going back to the above types of data backed up, each has it challenges. One of the worse things is going to a backup file to find it is unusable…as is all of its predecessors.
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Scary that.

It is a consumer level device. Misses features required, such as UPS backup, logging, alerting, and high quality hard drives.
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Get these two books. Read them cover-to-cover. Keep them on your work bookshelf to review and peruse, as needed—

Limoncelli_cover_Flyer_ver4-small-thumb-500xauto-91.png

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Actually, he will do this. Management won’t have a clue as to any of that. The only input Management will have is how long do things need to be retained for legal or compliance reasons. After that it becomes a matter of what’s your budget for it and how much can you squeeze into that budget.

Seldom do the data generators have any clue as to how much storage they have, how much they have in use, and how much it changes. The rare exception to this group? People in graphics industries.

Administrative assistants generating work docs? Not a chance. Accouting? Zero clues whatsoever. This often also applies to budget and funding as in many places there isn’t any. It’s more like, Hey mom, dad, can I get this? No. How about this? No. This? ok.

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Hey Jayme,

There’s a lot of good advice already, but I figured I’d toss in my two cents too. RoguePacket expanded on some very key pieces, specifically where he mentioned Risk Analysis, Backup Testing, and Proper equipment.

With regards to Risk Analysis, I urge you to stop looking at Disaster Recovery and instead look at Business Continuity. A business continuity solution, like Datto for instance, will allow you to simplify everything by offering an image-based backup giving you access to full OS level as well as granular file level data as well as being able to quickly virtualize and use the device as a replacement to a physical server in case of failure.

Backup Testing is another area that Datto could help simplify. Our products offer screenshot verification where we spin up a vm to boot screen using the most recent image and send you a screenshot via email to show that the backups not only were successful, but also that the data is useable.

Finally, it’s very important to make sure that the equipment you are using to backup your critical data to is up to the task and can scale as needed. With Datto, not only do you have a device built for the sole purpose of business continuity, but you have a full support team available 24x7x365 to make sure that any issues are quickly and properly handled and that you don’t have to worry about subpar hardware being the reason for your backup data to be lost.

We have a number of solutions that fit a multitude of different user and data size needs and I would be happy to connect you with a member of the team here to go a bit more in depth and get you in front of the tech.

Let me know if you have any questions.

-Joe

@Datto_Inc

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for 2 d) about Office 365 most of our customers who use O365 like having a backup of their Exchange 365 data locally or in another cloud. Not that Microsoft doesn’t do a great job of protecting your most important data but it’s nice to have a second copy that you have control over in case of a user error or if you wanted to move to another cloud platform for email/productivity.

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Thanks for the mention Patrick :slight_smile:

Jamye - I see a lot of good recommendations here and when it comes to backup I always start with RPO/RTO. How far back can I afford to recover from and how long can that recovery process take. Retention will also need to be considered incase you have any type of governance that says you need to retain your data for a certain amount of time. With that info then you can begin to build a plan a choose products that help you meet those goals. Here’s what Arcserve UDP offers…

Disk based backup which can allow you to take infinite incremental backups - faster backups avoiding full backups after the first full.
Source-side global deduplication to reduce bandwidth needs as well as over all storage needs on disk.
Support for not only disk but also tape and cloud (public,private, and Arcserve’s own) remember the 3-2-1 rule.
Support for both physical and virtual with the same interface. ( I didn’t see where you mentioned if you had virtual or not)
Available as an appliance or software depending on what makes the most since for.

Please let me know if I can provide any more detailed info on the UDP product or if you would like to see a demo.

And don’t forget no matter what direction you take test your restores because IMHO that is the most important step.

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Hi Jamye, you’ve got lots of great advice already on this thread. Identifying your critical data is key. Also,attached is an incremental backup best practices tech brief to provide faster backups that requires less storage you may find helpful.

If you’re looking for an enterprise-class cloud backup & DR solution that also has a DRaaS option to backup files, databases & server images, you may also want to consider evaluating Zetta.net. Good luck!

Incremental_Backup_Tech_Brief.pdf (848 KB)