What to use to replace an existing (small) company backup system?

Question

My company's main file server is backed up to tape (DAT 25GB). We use several tapes for the backup:

• Daily D1=Monday, D2=Tuesday, D3=Wednesday, D4=Thursday
  
• Weekly W1=1st Friday of the month, W2=2nd, W3=3rd
  
• Monthly M1=1st month of the year, M2=2nd, M3=3rd
  

The monthly tapes are kept of site. Additionaly backups are made twice a year.
We use 12 tapes / year (a new set is bought every year).

This system works fine and files are rarely lost (unless someone forgets to ask for a restore for several months - this happens).

The trouble is that 25GB is not sufficient.
We do not want to use multiple tapes, the backup runs at night.

I have been looking into replacing the existing backup system with others:

• NAS/SAN, this becomes expensive very quickly, especially if we are trying to simulate the D, W, M tapes.
  
• Offsite backups, most of the files are confidential and even though offsite backups encrypt the files, management are not happy about giving their work to another company.
• Buy a bigger tape backup drive; then I will need two for backwards compatibility (heavy going).
• Perhaps some kind of file versioning, combined with NAS/SAN?

Your solutions are welcome.

We are a small company (20 employees) and I have a small budget (~5000€, the cheaper the better).
Thanks.

Answer 1

If you want to go for a free solution, I'd say Bacula. It's very powerful and very versatile and has a vibrant developing community around. It took me some time to get used to it, but it was the first real backup system I used, so I don't have any point of comparison. If you take your time to read the documentation and understand the different concepts (like a job, a schedule, etc) you can setup anything you want.

I had to restore files a couple of times and it was not difficult (as usual, I didn't have had time to do any drill before).

Answer 2

See if you can find a tape robot that will work with a compatible drive; then it will have a magazine of some large number of tapes that it will change for you automatically when needed. Magazine sizes range from 6 tapes to hundreds. You still have to switch out tapes to get them offsite, etc, but now it's multiple tapes instead of singles.

Answer 3

I don't think it will meet your requirements, but for others reading this thread who have slightly lower requirements Windows Home Server provides a killer backup capability.

• Automatically backs up 10 PCs with no user intervention.
• Super efficient backup system backs everything up but single instances at the cluster/block level both across time (daily) and machines (up to 10).
• Very simple restore of individual files/folders or ENTIRE PCs.

Wikipedia article does a pretty good job of explaining the product.

Answer 4

One piece of software that fits well with the NAS/SAN file versioning idea is rdiff-backup. It stores only the differences in files, so if you for example backup a logfile, or a database dump, only the difference between the last backup and the new backup is stored. This means that many days of backup are stored in a very space-efficient way.

The latest backup is always available in a filesystem tree, which makes the system easy to use even for normal users as long as they only want to retrieve the last backup of a file.

I've run rdiff-backup for a small company for several years with no hickups except for the fact that a command needs to be run if the backup was aborted for some reason (target disk full, network trouble) to restore the backup target directory into a state where new backups can be taken. This takes a while if you have many files and slow disk.

I've heard that backup ninja is a good way to manage rdiff-backup, but I haven't tested it myself.

Answer 5

I'd double down on selling off site online backup. I mean if you are getting by on 25gb, you really should be fine with that, just secure it yourself. I mean from a risk assessment view, your (likely) unencrypted backup tapes are a far bigger risk than a secure tier 1 storage facility.

Ok ok I know that the simple easy answer isn't always political, Realistically however you need to go to an LTO based sytem for forward compatibility, I mean you are going to need the old drive no matter what so why worry about it? Something like this dell thingy ought to work just peachy.

Answer 6

For backup to be effective, I think it MUST be automatic and off-site.

If it is not automatic, then there is about 100% chance (in my experience) that the ONE time that the backup failed because of a tape error/the guy who changes the tapes had to go to the hospital will be the day before your hard drive crashes. Every time.

No matter how diligent you are, if you keep your backup in the same place as the data you are backing up, you will probably be sad someday. That broken pipe in the server room will destroy your backup tapes just as quickly as your servers.

Use Mozy for automatic off-site backups.

(if you sign up from this link, the Aasha Foundation gets a donation)

It is not perfect, but it works better than any other solution I know about. And it is pretty cheap too.

You can make your own encryption key so that no one (not even you) can make sense of the backup files without the correct key.

Answer 7

You don't specify what OS your running on, but I have had good experience with Amanda when backing up U*ix servers of various brands. There is a windows client but I have not used it.

Amanda spreads the backups over tapes but its algorithm minimizes storage space.

One thing you should keep in mind when looking for backup solutions is that the backup is unimportant, the important thing is restore, so you should do regular restore tests.