Backup Solutions 1

[NotSoCunning]

Hi there,

I've been searching around looking for a backup solution that is going to work within our company and network structure.

We've been using Retrospect for the last year and we hate it with a passion and it causes problem on servers from time to time causing them to crash and reboot - wonderful for a live webserver.

But anyway I'm not here to troubleshoot that. We have a weird network setup that several of the demo's I've downloaded seem to struggle with. I'm not going to mention which ones I've tried to try and keep the playing field as open as possible.

Our network consists of a single domain all contained within a single subnet. On top of this we have several DMZ subnets containing around 50 servers none of which are within a domain, all are stand alone (don't ask me why). All the servers we actually care about are Windows based, all are 2000 or 2003. There are some Linux servers but they are not important at this stage although being able to back these up is a bonus. We have lots of SQL servers and do not use exchange (although we may do in the future).

Most of the servers are Dell, and the backup device is a Dell LTO2 drive which is adequet for the amount of data required to be backed up <200gb.

The backup strategy is a mixture of differential/incremental dailies and full weekly with monthly off site tapes.

Any suggestions, or useful links?

 

[LWComputingMVP]

You seem to have a fairly good grasp on what you need to be doing so my article (that started out on another site as a comment) probably won't help you all that much,

http://www.lwcomputing.com/tips/static/backup.asp

That said, That said, have you considered a disk to disk to tape (D2D2T) solution? Using the built in tools on Windows - schedule a backup using NTBackup to backup to a file (on a network share), then backup the box where everything gets stored (all the bkf files). You can configure SQL to dump it's data as well on a schedule. Similar thinking, is to use a script to copy the data to another system. Or, best still, may be to do all three.

SQL maintenance plan that dumps the data to a file, ntbackup scheduled job that backs up the system state, and a script using rsync, XCOPY, ROBOCOPY, or NT's SCOPY to keep the data (web pages, etc) synchronized on another server. Then you run your backups during the day, but just of that server.

 

[NotSoCunning]

Thats sort of what we do atm. Retrospect grabs the data from the remote servers and dumps it locally. It then gets written to tape, it just all gets done at night.

I had a look at that link before I posted but unfortunately what I'm looking for really is anyone with specific information and experience of major backup products or those with a similar network layout.