[Techno-Man]

Hi,

I am looking for some advice on a backup with the current setup my company has.

There are 2 offices one is in Leeds and one is in Sheffield the link to both sites is ADSL and less than 1Mbps not good at all.
At the HQ in Leeds there are 5 servers, 1 CRM, 1 Exchange 2007, 1 WK3 DC, 1 Web Server and 1 BES Server.
In Sheffield there is only one server which is used for user profiles, home drives and F&P and has about 20Gb of data currently on there but growing everyday.
The backup in place at the moment is Leeds has Symantec Backup Exec 11d on the WK3 Server, which runs one job a full backup every night inc SQL DB to the tape drive using Ultrium tapes. Sheffield is backed up by a user who copies over the contents of the data files and folders to a usb external HD located on her desk.
The Server in Sheffield doesn’t have any backup software installed on it, and doesn’t have a tape drive internally or externally.
I tried to create a new job in Leeds last night to back up Sheff but it was too much for the link and it knocked the server off line.
I was thinking of using a 3rd party offsite online backup to do Sheffield running incremental every night and then back up the other 5 servers in Leeds separately staggering the jobs running.
What do you think, backup isn’t my strongest area and I know the current set up isn’t secure and needs sorting out ASAP.

Cheers

[office politics]

I see bandwisth being an issue. However, you didn't state how much data you're trying to transfer. You're going to want to define a backup window (how much time to backup), a restore window (how much time to restore), and a budget. These will have adverse affects on each other.

i would try to use a disk to disk solution over disk to tape as the recovery times will be faster. Also, WD Passport HDs are cheap.

Western Digital White Passport Essential 160GB 2.5" External Hard Drive - 5400, 2MB, USB 2.0 WDMEW1600TN at Global Computer

[Dr.House]

Originally Posted by Techno-Man

Hi,

I am looking for some advice on a backup with the current setup my company has.

There are 2 offices one is in Leeds and one is in Sheffield the link to both sites is ADSL and less than 1Mbps not good at all.
At the HQ in Leeds there are 5 servers, 1 CRM, 1 Exchange 2007, 1 WK3 DC, 1 Web Server and 1 BES Server.
In Sheffield there is only one server which is used for user profiles, home drives and F&P and has about 20Gb of data currently on there but growing everyday.
The backup in place at the moment is Leeds has Symantec Backup Exec 11d on the WK3 Server, which runs one job a full backup every night inc SQL DB to the tape drive using Ultrium tapes. Sheffield is backed up by a user who copies over the contents of the data files and folders to a usb external HD located on her desk.
The Server in Sheffield doesn’t have any backup software installed on it, and doesn’t have a tape drive internally or externally.
I tried to create a new job in Leeds last night to back up Sheff but it was too much for the link and it knocked the server off line.
I was thinking of using a 3rd party offsite online backup to do Sheffield running incremental every night and then back up the other 5 servers in Leeds separately staggering the jobs running.
What do you think, backup isn’t my strongest area and I know the current set up isn’t secure and needs sorting out ASAP.

Cheers

Office politics has a good point, a large external drive is good, I would usggest allotting some money in your budget to purchase a large drive (500 gig, terabyte?) and BackupExec since it supports backups to external drives (this should prove cheaper than tape backup setups if you can't afford it), I would also set email notification and if you want to be super safe, buy a second larger hard drive and once a week or month copy the main backup drive to it, the redundancy cant hurt!
If however, tape drives are in your budget that would be a less complex solution since you can just set full backups to tape every night through backup exec, but it is up to you :-)

I have experience with backing up to external (much faster restore, but less reliable compared to tape (the hard drive can die easier)) and tape drives, the tape drives are more reliable long term, but it is up to you and your budget.