Backups
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Hey everyone, Just looking for information about backing up a system. We have about 6 people in our company, 3 of whom are developers, the rest management consultants and office admins. We're looking at implementing some kind of backup system here and after a bit of thought, we've decided on buying 2 med-large HDs and a hot swappable caddy, running a backup on one harddisk, and keeping it off-site, then swapping the HDs around every couple of months
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backup on HD1, take off site,
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backup on HD2, swap with HD1
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etc
What we are after now are some backup software suggestions, specifically ones that are aimed at backing up to a seperate HD. No-one here knows anything of backup procedures so this process has just been 'on hold' since June! :wtf: /jason
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Hey everyone, Just looking for information about backing up a system. We have about 6 people in our company, 3 of whom are developers, the rest management consultants and office admins. We're looking at implementing some kind of backup system here and after a bit of thought, we've decided on buying 2 med-large HDs and a hot swappable caddy, running a backup on one harddisk, and keeping it off-site, then swapping the HDs around every couple of months
-
backup on HD1, take off site,
-
backup on HD2, swap with HD1
-
etc
What we are after now are some backup software suggestions, specifically ones that are aimed at backing up to a seperate HD. No-one here knows anything of backup procedures so this process has just been 'on hold' since June! :wtf: /jason
Handy Backup[^] is really good. It doesn't have all the features I'd like, but then no backup program I've looked at does. It has a lot of features, though, (backup to CD and FTP, and to DVD with a plugin, registry backup, Outlook data backup, file sync, good scheduler, etc) and is really solid and easy to use. :-)
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Hey everyone, Just looking for information about backing up a system. We have about 6 people in our company, 3 of whom are developers, the rest management consultants and office admins. We're looking at implementing some kind of backup system here and after a bit of thought, we've decided on buying 2 med-large HDs and a hot swappable caddy, running a backup on one harddisk, and keeping it off-site, then swapping the HDs around every couple of months
-
backup on HD1, take off site,
-
backup on HD2, swap with HD1
-
etc
What we are after now are some backup software suggestions, specifically ones that are aimed at backing up to a seperate HD. No-one here knows anything of backup procedures so this process has just been 'on hold' since June! :wtf: /jason
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Hey everyone, Just looking for information about backing up a system. We have about 6 people in our company, 3 of whom are developers, the rest management consultants and office admins. We're looking at implementing some kind of backup system here and after a bit of thought, we've decided on buying 2 med-large HDs and a hot swappable caddy, running a backup on one harddisk, and keeping it off-site, then swapping the HDs around every couple of months
-
backup on HD1, take off site,
-
backup on HD2, swap with HD1
-
etc
What we are after now are some backup software suggestions, specifically ones that are aimed at backing up to a seperate HD. No-one here knows anything of backup procedures so this process has just been 'on hold' since June! :wtf: /jason
If you have good internet connections you might consider on-line backups - basically automated ftp to an off-site server. '--8<------------------------ Ex Datis: Duncan Jones Merrion Computing Ltd
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Hey everyone, Just looking for information about backing up a system. We have about 6 people in our company, 3 of whom are developers, the rest management consultants and office admins. We're looking at implementing some kind of backup system here and after a bit of thought, we've decided on buying 2 med-large HDs and a hot swappable caddy, running a backup on one harddisk, and keeping it off-site, then swapping the HDs around every couple of months
-
backup on HD1, take off site,
-
backup on HD2, swap with HD1
-
etc
What we are after now are some backup software suggestions, specifically ones that are aimed at backing up to a seperate HD. No-one here knows anything of backup procedures so this process has just been 'on hold' since June! :wtf: /jason
A simple one would be some disk imaging software, I recently sa a copy of Acronis True Image, a low price and very simple to use. It has the ability to do incremental backups, i.e. a full backup on day 1 and increntals for the next week. You can alseo just recover a single file if you want. I am sure you will get lots of advice, but the backup MUST be taken off site or placed in a fireproof cabinet. Should it be taken off site every day? It Depends on how valuable your data is, i.e. if it your backup disk was stolen with your PCs how long would it take to recover from your old backups. Oh and whatever system you choose remember one thing, a backup is only as good as the recovery of the files, so try recovering some on a frequent basis! Ity is amazing how many people don't do that and when they need to do a recover they find the backup fialed a year ago and nobody noticed.
"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't." - Anatole France
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Hey everyone, Just looking for information about backing up a system. We have about 6 people in our company, 3 of whom are developers, the rest management consultants and office admins. We're looking at implementing some kind of backup system here and after a bit of thought, we've decided on buying 2 med-large HDs and a hot swappable caddy, running a backup on one harddisk, and keeping it off-site, then swapping the HDs around every couple of months
-
backup on HD1, take off site,
-
backup on HD2, swap with HD1
-
etc
What we are after now are some backup software suggestions, specifically ones that are aimed at backing up to a seperate HD. No-one here knows anything of backup procedures so this process has just been 'on hold' since June! :wtf: /jason
If you don't mind doing batch scripts, and if, like me, you sometimes find them to better suit what you need to do, you might want to take a look at XXCOPY[^] also - it has a number of options that are useful for advanced backups. [EDIT: Duh! I made two replies and didn't even notice that you were specifically wanting software to do a complete image of a HD! :-O I need to pay more attention!]
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A simple one would be some disk imaging software, I recently sa a copy of Acronis True Image, a low price and very simple to use. It has the ability to do incremental backups, i.e. a full backup on day 1 and increntals for the next week. You can alseo just recover a single file if you want. I am sure you will get lots of advice, but the backup MUST be taken off site or placed in a fireproof cabinet. Should it be taken off site every day? It Depends on how valuable your data is, i.e. if it your backup disk was stolen with your PCs how long would it take to recover from your old backups. Oh and whatever system you choose remember one thing, a backup is only as good as the recovery of the files, so try recovering some on a frequent basis! Ity is amazing how many people don't do that and when they need to do a recover they find the backup fialed a year ago and nobody noticed.
"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't." - Anatole France
Ted Ferenc wrote:
backup MUST be taken off site
That is the plan. The previous backup HD is to be kept at the company owner's house, while the current backup is made on the other hard disk, then next time the hard drives are swapped. This brings me to another point - how often should backups be made? The current consensus here is every two weeks... how often do you guys run a backup? /jason
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If you have good internet connections you might consider on-line backups - basically automated ftp to an off-site server. '--8<------------------------ Ex Datis: Duncan Jones Merrion Computing Ltd
I don't think this is an option for us. The last backup (from June) is about 30Gb, and while I don't exactly know what that backup contains, the list of files we want to back up now is almost that size. The thought of trying to upload that amount every couple of weeks, even on a broadband connection makes me cringe, mostly because I still only have dialup at home :-O /jason
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Ted Ferenc wrote:
backup MUST be taken off site
That is the plan. The previous backup HD is to be kept at the company owner's house, while the current backup is made on the other hard disk, then next time the hard drives are swapped. This brings me to another point - how often should backups be made? The current consensus here is every two weeks... how often do you guys run a backup? /jason
An incremental every night, a full backup a max of 1 month. This has the advantage of it you modified a file every day. but the only good version was Mondays you can restore Mondays a week or so later. You need to store more than 1 months backup, ideally. The worst scenario is that you realise you deleted an important file 4 months ago and you now want to recover it, it is just how long you want to keep backups, plus if they go back too long are they any use? as will you be able to easily find the file you want? Don't forget this is a BACKUP not an archival system, you still need to archive your projects on completion/checpoint to another media.
"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't." - Anatole France
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An incremental every night, a full backup a max of 1 month. This has the advantage of it you modified a file every day. but the only good version was Mondays you can restore Mondays a week or so later. You need to store more than 1 months backup, ideally. The worst scenario is that you realise you deleted an important file 4 months ago and you now want to recover it, it is just how long you want to keep backups, plus if they go back too long are they any use? as will you be able to easily find the file you want? Don't forget this is a BACKUP not an archival system, you still need to archive your projects on completion/checpoint to another media.
"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't." - Anatole France
We have our archival system seperate, buring project files to CD every milestone\major version release. At this point, after not having backups since June, I don't think storing backups for more than a month is really necessary, not if every 2 weeks (or so) we do a full backup to a hard disk, and then take that disk off-site. /jason
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Hey everyone, Just looking for information about backing up a system. We have about 6 people in our company, 3 of whom are developers, the rest management consultants and office admins. We're looking at implementing some kind of backup system here and after a bit of thought, we've decided on buying 2 med-large HDs and a hot swappable caddy, running a backup on one harddisk, and keeping it off-site, then swapping the HDs around every couple of months
-
backup on HD1, take off site,
-
backup on HD2, swap with HD1
-
etc
What we are after now are some backup software suggestions, specifically ones that are aimed at backing up to a seperate HD. No-one here knows anything of backup procedures so this process has just been 'on hold' since June! :wtf: /jason
Try this thread[^] from a while back.
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We have our archival system seperate, buring project files to CD every milestone\major version release. At this point, after not having backups since June, I don't think storing backups for more than a month is really necessary, not if every 2 weeks (or so) we do a full backup to a hard disk, and then take that disk off-site. /jason
As I said a backup system is only as good as what you can recover. Allways ask the question "What if?" What if you do a full backup today, and tomorrow you delete a rarely used file In a month you do a full backup overwriting the old backup. How would you recover that data file in two months time? If you can answer that you have a good back up system! Actually years ago I configured a proper tape back up system for our mainframe, our last resort backup was hard copies of all the important files, and yes we did need to retype them when the backup media failed! The tapes were cycled yearly, one full backup set was kept 'for ever'. Don't get too paranoid, as long as it works for you!
"An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't." - Anatole France
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I don't think this is an option for us. The last backup (from June) is about 30Gb, and while I don't exactly know what that backup contains, the list of files we want to back up now is almost that size. The thought of trying to upload that amount every couple of weeks, even on a broadband connection makes me cringe, mostly because I still only have dialup at home :-O /jason
jcrussell wrote:
I don't think this is an option for us. The last backup (from June) is about 30Gb, and while I don't exactly know what that backup contains, the list of files we want to back up now is almost that size.
Have you ever heard of rsync? It's a *nix tool, and it only copies the changed parts of changed files. Tipically, on a fileset this huge, only a small part is changed. I backup a 1GB CVS repository in under 5 minutes over a 350K ADSL, because only the changed parts are transmitted. I don't see dead pixels anymore... Yes, even I am blogging now!
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Hey everyone, Just looking for information about backing up a system. We have about 6 people in our company, 3 of whom are developers, the rest management consultants and office admins. We're looking at implementing some kind of backup system here and after a bit of thought, we've decided on buying 2 med-large HDs and a hot swappable caddy, running a backup on one harddisk, and keeping it off-site, then swapping the HDs around every couple of months
-
backup on HD1, take off site,
-
backup on HD2, swap with HD1
-
etc
What we are after now are some backup software suggestions, specifically ones that are aimed at backing up to a seperate HD. No-one here knows anything of backup procedures so this process has just been 'on hold' since June! :wtf: /jason
A key issue for you to remember is that, in the case of a disk failure, you can only restore to your last good backup. That counts for the backup media as well as for the active disk. Our system is as follows: - Full backup to removable hard disk once a week (Friday) - Differential backup every worknight, to permanently-installed hard disk in another computer, subsequently copied to DVD+RW (Monday to Thursday) We have two 160GB backup hard disks, of which we're currently using about 130GB. Our caddies aren't hot-swappable so the backup hard disk is installed in a developer's computer. The disk is taken off-site on Monday - both disks are kept off-site until needed. The DVDs are also all kept off-site unless required. There are enough DVDs to keep a full two-week set. This should all mean that the most we lose is one day's work. In terms of backup software, we simply use Windows Backup (ntbackup.exe). This can back up to any file, including using UNC paths. Windows Backup cannot back up SQL Server databases directly, so we use SQL Server's built-in backup facility to back up the databases and transaction logs to files, then backup those files to the destination using Windows Backup. Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder
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Hey everyone, Just looking for information about backing up a system. We have about 6 people in our company, 3 of whom are developers, the rest management consultants and office admins. We're looking at implementing some kind of backup system here and after a bit of thought, we've decided on buying 2 med-large HDs and a hot swappable caddy, running a backup on one harddisk, and keeping it off-site, then swapping the HDs around every couple of months
-
backup on HD1, take off site,
-
backup on HD2, swap with HD1
-
etc
What we are after now are some backup software suggestions, specifically ones that are aimed at backing up to a seperate HD. No-one here knows anything of backup procedures so this process has just been 'on hold' since June! :wtf: /jason
jcrussell wrote:
then swapping the HDs around every couple of months
Make sure it is every couple of months and not a year as leaving a drive sit for a very long time you might find out that it does not spin when you need it most.
jcrussell wrote:
What we are after now are some backup software suggestions, specifically ones that are aimed at backing up to a seperate HD.
For your situation I suggest drive imaging software that makes a complete image of the hard drive and stores it as a file on the other drive. I highly recommend partimage for this as I have used it in many windows and linux systems and it works great. Yes I have done restores of windows machines without any problems and this was even to a larger disk than the original pc had. Partimage is also completly free. I do have legal copies of norton ghost but I prefer partimage because it has a network option that allows me to send the data directly to a linux box. I generaly have the program compress and send the data into 2GB chunks to my linux server that has a dvd writer where I burn DVD+R disks for every two image files. If you are at all worried about using open source software I would then suggest getting a copy of norton ghost as I have had success with that as well. John
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jcrussell wrote:
then swapping the HDs around every couple of months
Make sure it is every couple of months and not a year as leaving a drive sit for a very long time you might find out that it does not spin when you need it most.
jcrussell wrote:
What we are after now are some backup software suggestions, specifically ones that are aimed at backing up to a seperate HD.
For your situation I suggest drive imaging software that makes a complete image of the hard drive and stores it as a file on the other drive. I highly recommend partimage for this as I have used it in many windows and linux systems and it works great. Yes I have done restores of windows machines without any problems and this was even to a larger disk than the original pc had. Partimage is also completly free. I do have legal copies of norton ghost but I prefer partimage because it has a network option that allows me to send the data directly to a linux box. I generaly have the program compress and send the data into 2GB chunks to my linux server that has a dvd writer where I burn DVD+R disks for every two image files. If you are at all worried about using open source software I would then suggest getting a copy of norton ghost as I have had success with that as well. John
Out of interest, can partimage backup from / restore to RAID arrays (esp SCSI ones) ?
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Ted Ferenc wrote:
backup MUST be taken off site
That is the plan. The previous backup HD is to be kept at the company owner's house, while the current backup is made on the other hard disk, then next time the hard drives are swapped. This brings me to another point - how often should backups be made? The current consensus here is every two weeks... how often do you guys run a backup? /jason
I make daily incremental backups. I burn an offsite image to dvd+rw once a week, and keep about 2 months worth of offsite copies. I start fresh backups for the incremental about every quarter. Also, as a precaution, I alternate backup sets on the hard drive each day, so if something happens during the backup, and the backup set gets corrupted, I have the other one to recover from. I do all this with Retrospect, and it is automated. The only things I have to think about are: check to make sure the backup worked eavery day, and burn the dvd copies each week. If I had more money, I would just rotate usb hard drives rather than burn dvd copies. This system has worked well for me, and I was able to use it to recover an entire volume when my hard disk went out.
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A key issue for you to remember is that, in the case of a disk failure, you can only restore to your last good backup. That counts for the backup media as well as for the active disk. Our system is as follows: - Full backup to removable hard disk once a week (Friday) - Differential backup every worknight, to permanently-installed hard disk in another computer, subsequently copied to DVD+RW (Monday to Thursday) We have two 160GB backup hard disks, of which we're currently using about 130GB. Our caddies aren't hot-swappable so the backup hard disk is installed in a developer's computer. The disk is taken off-site on Monday - both disks are kept off-site until needed. The DVDs are also all kept off-site unless required. There are enough DVDs to keep a full two-week set. This should all mean that the most we lose is one day's work. In terms of backup software, we simply use Windows Backup (ntbackup.exe). This can back up to any file, including using UNC paths. Windows Backup cannot back up SQL Server databases directly, so we use SQL Server's built-in backup facility to back up the databases and transaction logs to files, then backup those files to the destination using Windows Backup. Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder
Mike Dimmick wrote:
including using UNC paths
Does this work in the background without being logged in to the machine being backed up? TIA! :-D 'til next we type... HAVE FUN!! -- Jesse
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Mike Dimmick wrote:
including using UNC paths
Does this work in the background without being logged in to the machine being backed up? TIA! :-D 'til next we type... HAVE FUN!! -- Jesse
I haven't explained which direction we go in. The backup operation is a scheduled task which runs on the machine which is to be backed up. It pushes the output to a UNC path (\\developerspc\Backups\.bkf for the differentials, \\developerspc\Backup Disk\Weekly.bkf for the weekly full backups). This works fine as long as the account under which the scheduled task has write access to that share. We have an Active Directory domain (Windows Server 2003) so it was pretty easy to set up the ACLs on the directories appropriately. Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder