Backup schedule

[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.