distributed data backup strategy?

[bulkwinkle]

Hi everyone, please share your input into this. If I have data across a couple of Windows 2003 servers and a NAS or two, and each has 50+ GB of data each, how would you go about backing up the data under such scenario. Keep in mind the budget of the solution needs to in a small business environment and all data are located in one local subnet.

I guess the general idea is the somehow replicate those distributed data onto one machine or NAS and then perform your full backup from there? If yes, what product or s/w and / or h/w combination do you recommend?

 

[dberg35]

First you would be better putting all data in one location and then sharing to the users. As for backing up right now use Symantec Backup Exec it might be a little costly but it will give you the options you need. Also purchase a 2 NAS Drives and backup to those nightly one drive a night, this way you rotate them out by taking one home nightly.

 

[bulkwinkle]

I appreciate your comment, but I am looking for suggestions to the specific scenarios I've described. Just take it that the data are spread out over 2 of servers and couple of NAS for some specific business reasons. Under my scenario, if I setup Symantec Backup to pull the data from each of the 4 data sources during a full backup, it just takes long to grab all of that data over the LAN. I was looking for some kind of strategy using some s/w and h/w to replicate the data from the 4 data sources onto one source where then the backup can take place.

 

[grantjb]

I would recommend running a backup system like commvault.

You can then setup the backups to do diffrential and incremental backups. This really helped me backup remote sites and I recon it would be perfect for your situation.

Only issue maybe Licensing costs....



Grant Bradford

IT Infrastructure Analyst

HMLLP