Backup schedule

[Lynne Desrochers]

Does anyone care to share their current backup schedule? Rotations and things. I use to have tape and take a tape off site every night. Now I have online backup and to an external hard drive but I'm wondering about the rotation I should be using.
Thank you for sharing.

[Mark]

My opinion with that kind of setup is just how many days do you want available before you have to pull from online. Probably also depends on how your online storage is setup. If I was restoring one file or a small number of files, I'd probably pull from online regardless because that's easiest. If I was restoring the whole tam folder for example, I'd prefer to pull from something faster like the external drive.

For tape, I use a 25 tape rotation that uses alternating Monday through Thursday tapes, and individual Friday and monthly tapes. Gives me multiple points in time to select from.

[Lynne Desrochers]

For tape, I use a 25 tape rotation that uses alternating Monday through Thursday tapes, and individual Friday and monthly tapes. Gives me multiple points in time to select from.

Ok, so for tape you used 25 (we did as well), I don't have 25 external drives, so I was wondering what others were doing.

[Mark]

Right.  I always assumed it was how the backup sets were managed with the online service.  I am curious if what I said above is what others are doing, or if there is some kind of standard set somewhere (similar to the 25 tape rotation).

[Jeff Zylstra]

We do something very similar to what Mark does, only with USB hard drives.  We have an IOMega "fireproof" hard drive that connects via an eSATA connection, and then the backup software copies that night's backup file to the 4 daily drives and 5 "Friday" drives.  The Friday drives are much larger, and can hold 3 or more backups on them, so we have a greater chance of retrieving old file copies if we need to.  That has saved me once or twice.

[Lynne Desrochers]

So you have nine of these IOMega hard drives and rotate them daily?
Thanks.

[Charlie Charbonneau]

I have a grouping of Apricorn hardware encrypted USB 3.0 Drives that rotate out of the office.

but my goto for file restore is shadow copy. I <3 Shadow Copy!

[Lynne Desrochers]

How many? How often do they go offsite? Thanks.

[Jeff Zylstra]

So you have nine of these IOMega hard drives and rotate them daily?
Thanks.

No, we have 1 IOmega drive.  I think it's 3 Terrabytes or something like that, and holds like 20 daily backups.  Then we have 4 Monday-Thursday USB plug in drives that are like 250Gigabytes and hold 1 backup, since are backups are now 130 Gigs.  Then I have five, 1 and/or 2 Terrabyte USB drives for the 5 possible Fridays in a month.  These larger USB drives are the ones that hold more backups. 

We unplug the USB drives the morning after the backup and take the newest USB backup drive home every night.

If you're going with USB drives, I would recommend that you use Seagate USB hard drives.  They seem to be the most compatible drives.  I have some Toshiba USB hard drives that are finnicky and don't always allow the drives to be "locked" by the backup software which is mandatory for backups to work properly.

[Charlie Charbonneau]

I currently only have 3 drives, but will be adding more.  I rotate daily.  1 at home, 1 travels to work with me and 1 at work. 

For those that aren't using hardware encryption, are you using software encryption on your backup drives?  Or no encryption? If no encryption, is this not an E&O exposure?   Lost/stolen drives in transit?

The Apricorn drives work great with backup.  The only downside is I can't do a remote reboot in the evenings or the drive will lock and backup will fail.

[Mark]

I currently only have 3 drives, but will be adding more.  I rotate daily.  1 at home, 1 travels to work with me and 1 at work. 

For those that aren't using hardware encryption, are you using software encryption on your backup drives?  Or no encryption? If no encryption, is this not an E&O exposure?   Lost/stolen drives in transit?

The Apricorn drives work great with backup.  The only downside is I can't do a remote reboot in the evenings or the drive will lock and backup will fail.

No encryption is not only an E&O exposure, but likely a HIPAA violation as well.

[Charlie Charbonneau]

Well that was my thought, but no one was mentioning it!!!

[Jeff Zylstra]

I currently only have 3 drives, but will be adding more.  I rotate daily.  1 at home, 1 travels to work with me and 1 at work. 

For those that aren't using hardware encryption, are you using software encryption on your backup drives?  Or no encryption? If no encryption, is this not an E&O exposure?   Lost/stolen drives in transit?

The Apricorn drives work great with backup.  The only downside is I can't do a remote reboot in the evenings or the drive will lock and backup will fail.

I use Acronis Backup software, and DO use the encryption feature in it.  Supposedly, you can also boot from the USB backup drive so that all you need is the USB backup drive and it will restore Windows as well as the data.

[Jeff Golas]

Surprised nobody mentioned shadowcopy - if you haven't used it - you should! It enables you to go back to a version of a file in recent time (depends on how much space you dedicate to it) - I can honestly say I can count the number of files I actually restore from tape on one hand, almost 2 fingers...thanks to shadowcopy.

[Lynne Desrochers]

Well that was my thought, but no one was mentioning it!!!

Mention it all! Whatever you are thinking. When I switched to my latest server my tape drive was gone, so I have other stuff going on, but I am curious to what others are doing, since I used to have the M- Th weeks 1 & 2, Fridays and month end. Now for some reason with the hard drive, I don't have that many and it makes a girl ask why?
Encryption yes, that too is being done. These silly things are too easily lost.
Thank you all for your input.

[Mark]

Surprised nobody mentioned shadowcopy

Charlie did already 

[Jeff Zylstra]

When/if you purchase hard drives, make sure that the Mon-Thurs drives are large enough to hold at least a couple of backups, and the Friday drives can hold at least 4 backups.  Some things can go undetected for a while, and sometimes you need to go back farther in time. 

Also, hard drives degrade and become less reliable over time as well.  Although I think they're more reliable than tapes, they do go bad on occasion too.

[Ric]

We use AIS Technology's CloudVigil and they take care of backing up the backup.

Plus we still have a tape drive so we leave the same tape in for weeks and still have it run nightly backups ON site.  It's helped a couple of times.

[DebAmstutz]

We are using Acronis backup with portable hard drives.  I have been selected to change the backup drive daily (except weekends-someone who lives closer to the office is doing that so I don't have to drive an hour, change the backup, and drive an hour home on a Saturday or Sunday).  I am not sure how many of the drives we have, but should there ever be more than one in the building (or the one connected to the server plus the "oldest" one)?  The owner had all except the one being transported here, and I don't agree since they'll all burn up if the place catches fire (or else they'll all drown in the water used to fight a fire-the server is in the basement with me...not on the floor, though-up on a table).  He wants them all available in case someone deletes a file and it needs to be recovered.  Having them at my house means a 2-hour delay in recovery of a file.  How heat/cold tolerant are those things?  Can I keep them in my car?  What is the best thing to do?  This is our ONLY backup.  He's not having an outside service do that anymore.  We used to, but not now.

[Hans Manhave]

As far as heat, I have had those hard drive based SATA units in my fully closed vehicle in the Texas summer, July thru September, without any perceived degradation.  Yes, I do test them, in real scenarios.  The units get up in temperature while they are connected/plugged in/used also, but I have not measured their temp.   Maybe I should.  As far as cold, I have no reference points below 21 degrees F.  No problem surfaced so far after over four years of cycling devices.  You probably would want several off site, probably don't need to have all of them off site.  Having a site farther away then next door is good, but I'm not sure it is necessary to have them an hour away.  Other backup systems, on line, may be a better solution for that.

[Bob]

Your Server should have Shadow Copy enabled.  That will resolve any accidental deletions on the spot and instantly.

Shadow copy is much like Windows Restoration Points.

You simple right click on a mapped drive/share/folder or even file, properties, click tab that says previous versions, browse to the share/folder or file you want and restore it.

This is built into most all Windows Server products just have to enable it.   That's your 1st line of defense.

Next would be your backups as you speak of, and last we have a cloud back up as well.  You should have more than one backup plan.   Make sure you are testing those backups too.   Don't want to assume then when you need it something failed or missing and no other options.

[Jeff Zylstra]

We are using Acronis backup with portable hard drives.  I have been selected to change the backup drive daily (except weekends-someone who lives closer to the office is doing that so I don't have to drive an hour, change the backup, and drive an hour home on a Saturday or Sunday).  I am not sure how many of the drives we have, but should there ever be more than one in the building (or the one connected to the server plus the "oldest" one)?  The owner had all except the one being transported here, and I don't agree since they'll all burn up if the place catches fire (or else they'll all drown in the water used to fight a fire-the server is in the basement with me...not on the floor, though-up on a table).  He wants them all available in case someone deletes a file and it needs to be recovered.  Having them at my house means a 2-hour delay in recovery of a file.  How heat/cold tolerant are those things?  Can I keep them in my car?  What is the best thing to do?  This is our ONLY backup.  He's not having an outside service do that anymore.  We used to, but not now.

Being an Acronis user as well, I would be very careful using only USB drives.  Acronis seems to be very sensitive to which USB drives you use, and about once every 2 weeks or so, will not write to the USB drive properly so you have no backup whatsoever.  I do a couple of things to make sure that does not happen to me.

First, I have the fireproof/waterproof IOSafe drive that is my primary backup drive and connects to the system with an eSATA connection which is much faster and more reliable than than USB drives.  USB drives don't always get the same drive letter assigned, which can also thwart a successful backup.  Second, around 11:00 AM every morning, I have a small program that runs automatically to write a file to the USB hard drive.  If it does not write the file correctly, an email is sent to me automatically.

In answer to keeping the drives on site, if those are you only copies, NO I would not do it.  They also are somewhat sensitive to freezing and high temperatures.  Keep them in a climate (temperature and humidity) controlled environment if at all possible.  Better yet, turn on shadow copy on the server to retain copies of files on the server.  That is the fastest way to restore files, but if the hard drives on the server die, you've got nothing. 

The second thing is to add an IOSafe or other on-site drive that is not part a primary drive that is used every day.  I think you can get a good size drive with both eSATA connection and USB connections for $500 or so.  Have your boss check out the IOSafe videos on YouTube where they burn the drives and then drop them in a pool and then read data from them.  I don't trust USB drives completely because I've had compatibility issues between them and Acronis in the past.  HTH.

[Mark]

As far as how many to keep off-site and on-site, here is what I do with our tapes (yes, tapes!); we have 5 Friday tapes which I keep off-site and bring the needed one in on Friday morning.  We have a month-end tape for each month that is kept off-site at an undisclosed location (sounds fancy!  ). We have two sets of Monday through Thursday tapes which I keep on-site except for the previous night's backup.  So, last night's backup will come home with me today and I will bring it back tomorrow.

In the event of a fire, we want the latest data, so it's last night's backup we want.  In the event of a deleted file that we cannot locate in Shadow Copy, we have the weekly and monthly tapes to refer to as needed.  We have year-end tapes too, that we keep either indefinitely or per records retention policy - whichever it is.

[DebAmstutz]

Thanks, I appreciate all the replies!

[Gene Foraker]

Here is another vote for iosafe.   I have been using mine as primary for around 2 years now.   The tape backup failed as a secondary last year and I haven't decided if I need a secondary method.   I'll probably add removable drives for that later this year.