I´m looking over my backup strategy, that I installed a couple of years ago...and I´m wondering, how do other perform their backups? Can I do different/better/safer/more economic?
Edit The main reason for this question is to gather experiences about how others do their backup and how they keep their data redundant and safe.
I store my backups to a USB disk...using BackupExec (We are a small company), how do you do your backup (does it work?)?
Lots of suggestions on this question:
Best practices to keep your computer(s) backed up efficiently?
I think we need to know a little more about your situation to give you a great answer. Things like the following would help:
I'm very "old fashioned" in my backup strategies, but I've yet to have any failure to restore. Tape and conservative off-site rotation stategies have served us very well.
My smaller business Customers are receiving full daily backups to tape, which are rotated off-site daily. Most have at least two (2) weeks of daily rotation, and may have additional monthly or quarterly rotations. To expedite restores without requiring someone to go off-site to get media, we're usually using a disk-to-disk-to-tape backup strategy. This works well with the Customers who have under 100GB of data. We've used a combination of LTO, VXA, and SDLT tape technologies in single element drives managed by Backup Exec. The cost of the drive and tapes is higher, initially, than other "lower tech" solutions, but we get rock solid backups and restores (and perform periodic test restores just to be sure).
For larger installations, we usually move to single element autoloaders (LTO) and typically perform daily differential and weekly full backups.
I'll probably be critisized by not being "trendy" and using things like removable hard disk drives, but quality tape technologies have served us very well and have been utterly reliable. LTO, in particular, has been rock solid. We've had a flaky VXA drive now and again, and flaky SDLT tapes, but they've worked well too.
Steps 4 and 5 are very important. A backup isn't really a backup unless you have tested it, and a time when you find you need to restore files (or everything) is not a good first time to test! Testing backups is something that people often leave until it is too late to do anything if it hasn't been working.
Steps 2 and 3 may seem overkill, but add a little security. As the local servers can not talk directly to the backup servers or vice-versa, someone who manages to hack into one can not easily get from there to the other (just to the intermediate machine which, while the live and backup machines can authenticate against it, can not itself authenticate against either the live or backup machines). This avoids risk of the hassle that hit WHT recently (see http://ask.slashdot.org/story/09/03/25/0036211/How-To-Prevent-Being-Hacked-Via-Backups for discussion).
Live Evan I'm old-fashioned with regard to media - tape has been tried and trusted for decades, and is a great way of providing ultra-cheap and ultra-reliable off-line storage. The current prices of LTO4 are so low that the dollar/pound/euro per gig ratio just cannot be beaten.
Lesson 1 with backups is always to keep them as simple as possible; as soon as you start implementing fancy things, you're courting disaster. Simple and boring is the way to go.
Lesson 2 is to keep a daily manual element in the jobs. Automation is fine, but with backups it pays divident to get people into the habit of at least popping out old tapes daily. This way, there's less risk of them forgetting that once-a-month additional manual task.
Lesson 3 is to back up everything. You can try to be clever and only backup your data partition, but you'll only get away with that on the most basic of file servers. In any other type of restore job, getting the application server config back the way it was is where the hardest work is. For sure there are cases where it's easier, but I prefer not to take chances.
I've used Backup Exec before (v7 through 9), but more recently have started using hot-swappable SATA cages for the small-scale servers I work with in conjunction with Acronis True Image.
As some have emphasized, the backup process doesn't mean much unless you've gone through and tried a restore, preferably a full-blown "bare metal" restore from your backup media to ensure you can get everything back up and running as quickly as necessary for your setup.
Horror story, one site I worked with had been using USB drives in conjunction with Backup Exec's backup-to-disk option. They wanted a full-time IT service provider rather than a single contractor for their stuff, but in the process of handing over the documentation, some important details about the backups got lost in the shuffle. Months passed, and a drive in their one file server's RAID array failed, which was exacerbated by the server vendor's tech coming in apparently high on something and supposedly removing then reinserting the drives in something other than their previous order.
Anyway they ended up losing about two weeks worth of data because the last couple of full backups had failed and no one was keeping an eye on the logs.
Our workstations (and other servers) backup to a specified server with a ton of HD space, that server then has a local backup (1 week worth) on an external (FireWire) hard drive, then 3 times a week (Mon, Wed, Fri) that data is taken and uploaded off-site, off-site there is 3 months of data.
Before the data is moved to the external drive it is encrypted with a local salt which is known only to 2 people (it's also in the "doomsday" book) and a "salt" that is provided by the user to whom the data belongs to. When the data is moved off-site it is again encrypted (management requires it to be encrypted here, ffs) with a simple blowfish algorithm that is provided by the off-site service provider with our own key.
I've been using this system for about 3 years (the local software I wrote myself) with various off-site providers (I've yet to find one I really like) and it has never once failed me.
Some rules may change from place to place, for example the financial company I did backed up form the workstations hourly and the server sent it off-site ever 3 hours.
This system is nice because it is cheap and (so far) scales seamlessly.
There are many, many types of backup schemes. Their use really depends on your site and on your available technology.
Fulls, incremental, and differentials.
Usually daily differential/incremental with weekly fulls. Trying to keep 2-4 weeks of complete backups.
I really need to ask you one thing. You disconnect the USB drive after the backups are completed, right? If you don't I really wouldn't call it a backup.
Technically it IS backed up, but you are just asking for trouble if your disk gets corrupted, or you get hacked.
Backups should be kept for the worst case scenario.
For my personal situation we use BackupExec to take a daily full backup of everything on the following schedule:
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday : Kept for 7 days 1st, 2nd, 4th and 5th Thursday of the month : Kept for 1 month 3rd Thursday of the month on a 3 month schedule : Kept for 3 months Once a year: Kept forever
Currently we are using LTO3 tapes, which are sent off site for one day thus at any one time the last sucessful backup is off site.
Tape backups are only used for full system restores of file servers, individual files can be restored with Previous Versions which is available to Administrators and users alike.
SQL Server, IIS Metabase and MySQL are dumped to a file each night and kept for one week, this is on top of the hot-backup that BackupExec takes.
There is already a lot of good information here, so I'm going to add two critical points: 1. Redundancy. You say you're backing up to "a" USB hard drive. Make sure you're backing up to more than one disk on different days. You need to account for the possibility that one or more of your backup drives might go bad. Also, if you've got all your USB hard drives in one box, consider the possibility that you might have a really bad day and drop that box. 2. Off-site backups. Buildings burn down, flood, are burglarized, etc. Make sure you take your backup media off site and leave multiple copies of your media off-site at all times.
I use duplicity on our production servers. I chose it mainly because it can do differential backups to ftp server and the backups are encrypted with GnuPG key.
The differential backups are done every night and full backups are performed once/2 weeks.
Works great!
We have our servers running on Hyper-V, and have a nightly export of the Virtual Machines, which we copy to USB HDDs next day, which are stored off-location.
So far we had no problems restoring: just fetch or set up any machine with Hyper-V, copy the VM files onto it, import them, and off we go.
