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Hi.

We are going for a new backup solution, but we are uncertain what to choose. We are currently using a few old versions of symantec backup exec and tape. We have 26 locations to backup. 24 of these locations are sending their data to location B, and location A only runs backup in-house. Location A is our main site where we backup our main servers and shared files, location B only backup data from all the other sites.

We are considering the following: Location A

We think we want to start using Veeam, NAS and tape. Where veeam runs backup 2-3 times daily to NAS1 of all our data. NAS2 is powered off every day except monday - where we run full backup (servers, databases and normal data) to NAS2. After the backup is finished, NAS2 is powered off again. So that we always have our data offline in case of virus attacks. Once a month we will run full backup from NAS2 to tape. The monthly tape will be stored at an offsite location in case of fire. We will keep the tapes for 2 years so that we have a good backup history.

Location B:

We will send all the data from location B to location A once a week to NAS2. So the data from all the locations are stored at two different locations in case of fire. We will also need a NAS box here, we will probably dump the existing tape system at location B.

This sounded good in my head, but when I write it down it sounds like alot of work and probably very overkill. But we need to be as safe as possible in case of virus and fire. Do you have other suggestions?

What we need is:

Daily online backup, offline backup, remote backup storage. We have considered could backup, but it is very expensive since we have alot of data, and it’s not 100% safe anyways.

I need tips!

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Hello,

Welcome to Spiceworks, I know the pain of using backupexec with tape, so know what you’re going through. What problems are you currently facing? Have you got good links between your sites ? How much data have you got? How much does it grow by and what’s your retention period?

The reason for all the questions , if you have good links between sites then it might be easier to centralise all you data in one location and back it up there as it is easier to manage and control especially if your sites are all over the place. This will require a redesign of your current set up.

An other consideration is you old backups , is there going to be a requirement to access them once you transition to a new system? If you do then you will need to maintain that hardware or ingest those legacy backups into your new system.

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Thank you for your reply.

The problems we are facing are many. Our current tapes are not big enough to store all the data, so the backup fails often. We don’t have enough experience with backup exec, we use another consultant for the backups atm. We want to do everything by ourselves, and it’s not so easy to learn 4 different versions of backup exec when we don’t even know how it’s setup in the first place, and the consultant we have been using for things like that for years - he doesn’t really want to show us either.

The links between the sites is fair enough, some places worse than others. We don’t send that much data from the offsite sites, just files from their home folder, shared files and for some of the sites we send kitchen drawings. We don’t backup the offsite servers, because they have little configuration and it will be quick to reinstall them if something happens. I don’t think it’s very much data from the offsite sites.

But here at the main site, we have arround 3TB to backup. Not sure if that’s just the server data, or if we have 6TB in total. We have a SQL server that’s creating new files the size of 300GB each day, but we don’t keep that data for more than a few days. So the growth is mainly mail, personal home folders and shared folders. Not sure how much that is on a daily basis, but shouldn’t be too much.

I think my boss still wants to to the office backup at location B, for safety’s sake in case of fire.

We are planning to purchase a new tape system, not sure if the new system are able to read the old tapes, but i’d think so. If not, we’ll just keep the old system somewhere in case.

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Any solution should be simple to use and not require a herculean effort to manage it and you are on the right lines trying to standardise all your backups so they are the same at each site. It sounds like it is not in your consultant’s best interest to help you especially if you bring this in house.

If you are using LTO tapes then they are compatible with the previous generation. We have two main sites which can act as DR site for the other.

We use Veeam here to back up our VMs and SAN to SAN replication , so we have copies of all of our data on both of our main site we also have a backup that goes to our global DC in Germany.

How quickly do you need to bring things back if there is an issue? This will determine your backup solution. Your plan sounds good, you don’t have to use tape as there are many good disk based backup systems out there.

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If there is an issue, we want to get the system back as fast as possible. Or else we will loose costumers.

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I think you’re looking at it backwards. Rather than define the backup structure and then try and make it fit your RTO & RPO, why not define the outcome you require, and only then identify the tools to deliver it? If rapid recovery is key then NAS & tape at the other end of a WAN link is probably the wrong technology. What are the RPO & RTO requirements in Site A and the remote offices?

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What’s the SLA on that on ? If you’re running shadow copies with your files then you can get deleted files or changed files back quickly without going to your backs ups. I would definitely opt for backing up to disk i.e. NAS then replicating A to B and B to A , so you will always have a copy off site.

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What would you suggest Gary3621?

I’ve never touched backup systems before so i’m pretty new to it. This is just what i’ve been recommended. We just want safe backup that we can quickly restore from. How we do that, we haven’t figured out yet… That’s why i’m asking here, so we don’t buy something that will not cover our needs

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I’d suggest that instead of thinking about a backup solution, you think about a restore solution. The idea of a backup used to be “We’ll make a copy that we can put away and if something happens, rebuild our systems.” The problem is, the “rebuilds” we used to do are impractical today. Reinstalling OSes and SQL and a 100TB database can take far longer than we want to be out of production. You need a new model.

Point to each item in your infrastructure and ask yourself, “How long could we be without that (RTO) and how much already-entered data could we lose (RPO)?” If your restore system can’t provide that, it’s useless.

I use a system that makes restorable copies of my production VMs on off-machine local storage (a different server), for example. In a restore situation, I can put a VM back in operation from that copy in < 30 minutes. I move copies of those VMs each day to a storage server that spools them to tape. Those are my “archive” copies. If I had to reach back in time beyond my on-disk storage, I can pull those out. We also use cross-site backups to ensure that we can continue running if we lose an entire site.

So, I’m saying, backup is all about the continuity of running and the restore. Archive is another task entirely.

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We are planning to backup VM’s with Veeam to NAS. Maybe we could have them on another server too, have not thought of that. That would make them easy to restore. Our mail concern is files, databases etc. We need to make sure that our users never loses any data. My boss wants to buy 3 NAS, an entire new tape system for long-term backup and veeam. But do we actually need all that? Isn’t there any other way to store long-term backup? With the NAS ex.?

He want to take a full backup once a week and store all full backups for 3 years. That’s shitloads of data… Any other ideas to how we can get the backup we need without saving thousands of TB with data?

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Not really a technical answer but How much is expensive,in your eyes? and approx how much data are you looking to store?

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Tape is the best option for long term OFFLINE storage, so if you want offline storage, I’d use that instead of a NAS. Veeam lets you put backups on multiple tapes and works well with tape storage formats as well (I’ve heard, don’t use tapes here).

I’d agree with Robert though, How quickly do you need to have a server back up and running if it fails? The downside of using NAS for storage is that it’s harder to spin up a VM for failover. If you need to have a server back up in less than 15 minutes, I’d have it replicated to another server so that can be run as soon as you can.

Are your sites backing up desktop/endpoint data? or servers? because that changes things as well.

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Hey Henriette- I see you’ve been using an older version of Backup Exec from Symantec, but have you looked at Backup Exec 16 from Veritas. We’ve made some changes since it came back under our umbrella. BE 16 is a true all in one solution that syncs with virtual, physical and cloud environments, with compatibility with the most popular solutions in each realm.

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

And you can also trial BE 16 for free, to see if it’ll be a good fit for you: https://www.veritas.com/trial/en/us/backup-exec-16.html

Let me know if you have any questions!

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We recommend adding offsite backups to your infrastructrure to execute 3-2-1 rule. Since you are planning on using Veeam, you can check our product StarWind Cloud VTL, which will offload your data to Amazon and will allow you configuring retention policies between local storage, S3 and Glacier.

Worth mentioning that Cloud VTL will add ransomware protected backup format to the backup infrastructure. I’ll just add a link for more info:

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Have you considered HPE StoreOnce? You can do local backups, backups to Azure, virtual storage backups and it even works with tape environments to create a better backup environment. Below is a link to some information:

HPE StoreOnce

Thanks

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If you have simple needs go Veeam if you have complicated needs, ie very specific RTOs, RPOs, and applications go commvault. Commvault will be more expensive, and there is a steeper leaving curve but you more or less have total control of every aspect.

@Veeam_Software

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Have you looked into Zerto? I use that where I am and it works flawlessly for backup images of my environments.

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I won’t be providing much additional information, just parroting what has been mentioned already however it is working for us. We use Veeam (no tapes) and we have our backups and archives, however we also replicate to other servers in another DC. This is what provides us with the ability to be back online after a disaster, we can just remote into the other DC and start powering on VM’s from the last replication point. This was an issue at one time as the pipe we have wasn’t large enough to replicate properly so make sure that you have the bandwidth required if you go that route. Also, we use Windows deduplication to remedy the large disk issues. During replication you are still moving the entire restore point however once it arrives on the other host dedup kicks in and will reduce the overall footprint.

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3tb doesn’t seem like a huge amount of data, have you looked into a cloud solution instead of tape? I know we looked into tape and it looked like too much effort. If you have a decent Internet connection you could just set the backups to go atnight/ over the weekend depending on the industry you are in.

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HPE offers a free 1TB StoreOnce VSA that you can download.