Remote Backup Solution - - - Please help

[georgewkenny]

Dear all.

I am trying to find a REMOTE BACKUP solution.

Ie: I need to have my offices satellitte sites backing up to HQ. Is there any software that can manage this?

I have used RBS backup, but this is not very good. Please advise.

George.

 

[Mercutio]

What kind of connectivity do you have? How many machines? What operating systems? Are we talking about full backups or critical files?

It's probably a better idea to put an LTO unit on site than to slam a central machine with X number of backup jobs, over WAN links.

 

[Bozo]

Acronis True Image should work for you.

http://www.acronis.com/#

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[Mercutio]

Acronis backs up whole drives. For any reasonably new computer that's going to run into tens of gigabytes.

Over some kind of wide area link?

 

[Fushigi]

I agree with Merc. Buy an LTO drive (used is probably fine; or use whatever tape format you already have in-house) and use it locally. Do a full backup once a week and append daily incremental backups to the same tape throughout the week. Each week, swap out the tape and FedEx it to your main office for off-site storage (I'd say 'ship' instead of 'FedEx' but UPS isn't exactly the best company to ship data with.). Overall, it's something a secretary or office manager can handle and will only take a few minutes of their time each week.

If the size of the data is small enough, back it up to DVD-RW instead of tape.

The important part is for you to ensure the backups are running correctly. Check the logs for errors.

 

[Bozo]

Acronis will do single parttitions.

Symantec V2i will also make backups over a network. Don't remember if it's whole drive/partitions/or folders though.

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[Corvair]

Backing up over a WAN link is best done using disk-to-tape, not straight to tape. You need to be able to stream to tape for the highest efficiency and least wear on the tape drive.

Backup software resident on a backup server and separate workstation/server agents on the computers to be backed up would be a starting point. Such software is available from the likes of Bakbone, Veritas, Legato, etc.

For writing backup jobs to tape at Headquarters, a backup appliance with integrated disk or a backup system with the ability to use local hard drive storage or SAN storage arrays to stage backup jobs onto is by far the best choice. Once the backup job to disc is complete, the backed-up data is then written to tape. Virtual tape libraries make the job even easier, since they emulate the tape device and store the backup job as virtual tapes until they can actually be written off to tape.

 

[Splash]

Backing up over a WAN link is best done using disc-to-tape, not straight to tape...

Let me clarify what I said earlier by saying that backing up over a WAN link (or any other slow link such as a busy LAN) is best done by using disc-to-disc-to-tape, not straight to tape from the workstation's (or server's) storage disc. This way, you can stream data to tape efficiently.

Tape drives are not very good at handling sporadically-arriving blocks of data or data that dribbles in slowly. Hard drives have no such problem. Once the first stage of the backup job completes (the disc-to-disc part), the second and final part can begin (the disc-to-tape part). Of course, the part about getting the data to tape will start hours, or many hours, or even days after the first part of the backup session began.