Which backup to disk solution?

[PaulGillespie]

Hi Guys!
I have a client who are an architects firm and backups have always been an issue. Their data grows at about 5 gig a week meaning that any solution implemented needs to be big enought to cope for a few years hopefully.

Currently we do a differential on Mon to Thurs and a full on Friday which runs onto 3 tapes. A full backup is approx 500gig and comprises mostly of DWG, JPGs and an exchange database.

I've been recenty looking at backup to disk and the Idealstor system advertised on this site looks quite good. I'd have a 1TB disk for the diffs and 1 TB disk for the full and then have 2 more disks for the next week etc etc.

Does anyone have any other suggestions/pointers/pitfalls etc that i should be considering?

I like the idealstor solution as it uses removable disks. Does anyone use a NAS/DAS system as these seem to be a bit cheaper, like the Buffalo ones. If you do, how do you manage your offsite backups.

Thanks!

Paul

 

[willjwill]

Paul - we have been using their product for a few years and so far so good. We have a little more stringent requirements for a backup scheme so we keep two weeks of full backups. We have been using their backup software of late and it has helped us out.

The initial backups took a while but once there is a full on a disk, it runs an incremental backup but merges that into the last full. End result is a full and time is of an incremental backup.

jwill

 

[PaulGillespie]

Thanks JWill, we'll be running at least 2 weeks worth of backups too. Did you use veritas before? we're using BE9.0, just wondering how it will integrate, i've heard from Idealstor that it will be fine but nioce to hear from real people.

Thanks

Paul

 

[willjwill]

When we bought the system we were using Backup Exec. I think we had 9.1 at the time but is very hard to keep track with all the different versions that come out. It was pretty easy to set up and manage the removable disk devices within BE.

jwill

 

[PaulGillespie]

Thanks again! sounds ideal.