Backup strategy for novice.

[Novexx]

Until recently, I have had no real backup strategy in place, and am trying to get this sorted out.

While looking at the various backup methods, such as differential, incremental - so on and so forth I have come to the conclusion thta they are a bit "heavy duty" for my requiremnts.

The only really important things that I have are data files for specific apps (payroll, accounts, sales, and some word/excel files, in total about 175Mb.

I was thinking that rather than messing about with a more complex strategy, that I could simpy copy (straight copy without compression) the 175Mb of crucial files onto Zip disk(250Mb), and rotate a set of two disks (one every other day). I would hold copies of my applications and OS off site.

I realise that if things hit the fan, such as an HDD failure or theft of the PCs, that I would have the more time consuming task of re-installing the OSs, apps and data, but I dont have a problem with this.

Is this a wise plan?


Any Advice appreciated.

 

[FredUG]

It's not the best plan I've ever heard but if you can live with the longer recovery times then it's acceptable. It *is* your data after all. I'd suggest 5 disks to rotate daily and keeping a month-end disk for a year as well as a year-end disk. That'd be 18 disks per year. (5+12+1) Also remember disks, liek tapes, wear out so plan on replacing your disks occaisionally to ensure proper operation and test one of your backup disks, randomly, every week or so to ensure that you can restore (to a temp folder) from them.

Hope that helps,

FredUG

 

[clonny2]

I think it is best to have a combination of both near-line storage and off-line storage. What I mean is that for maybe daily backups are to some disk based system either using something like a copy or backup-to-disk function in a backup package. Then you have some weekly, every other day (what ever increment you want) you then backup to off-line storage like tape.
The near-line storage could be as simple as a backup, or if you are using a windows based OS, use the native backup application. This will create a remote file on a disk based system, ie another server (file server, nas server, etc).

Then you backup every so often to tape, incase something happens to the disk based solution.

Here might be a scenario you can use.

Hardware
1: Client OS System (Windows version doesn't matter)
2: File server / Nas Server ( some sort of file server or nas server like a Snap Sever)

Setup
1. You setup the windows backup program, which is an early version of Veritas Backup Exec, to create daily backups to the remote server, the dailys can be either incremental or full.

2. Create a weekly full backup to the remote server.

3: Backup the remote server to tape at least once per week. Prefer after the weekly full backup. You should also have some routine to take tapes off-site for protection.

This will give you the ability to quickly recover your system (file,folder,os, etc) using remote disk first. Then if you need to get earlier data you can use the tapes.


If you do not have a remote server, you can use backup directly to CD or tape if you want.

>---------------------------------------Lawrence Feldman
SR. QA. Engineer SNAP Appliance
lfeldman@snapappliance.com