I need some suggestions on a good company-wide back-up solution.
Background:
- Windows Server 2003 EE running BackupExec 10 (Certance CDL432 DAT72 autoloader) - Daily backups
- 3 additional servers (2 - 2003 SE, 1 - 2000)
- 45 workstations (mostly XP but a few 2000) spread between 8 cities
- All offices have some sort of broadband Internet connection (wireless, DSL, and/or cable)
- Only 2 of the servers are backed up. The other two are very low priority units.
- A couple of the main office workstations are backed up to our primary server via Microsoft's SyncToy utility.
Goal:
- Back up all servers
- Back up all workstations (Desktop, My Documents, and .PST files)
- Redundancy for tape system (NAS, ext. USB drives, DVD archiving, etc.)
- Disaster recovery for servers
- Off-site storage of backups
My biggest question is how to handle the workstations at the remote locations. There's no VPN at the moment and I don't trust the reliabilty of the Internet connections at all but two of the locations. Most of our offices are in remote locations so the connections can be a bit flaky at times.
I'm considering putting in some kind of network attached storage device at each remote office. There wouldn't be much redundancy at those places but at least there would be something. If I can figure out some reasonably secure and efficient method to back them up from the main office, I'll definitely be doing that.
For backup server redundancy, I'm considering buying 3 or so external USB drives that would be rotated daily (1 production/1 fireproof cabinet/1 offsite storage). The autoloader cartridge (5 tapes + 1 cleaning tape) would be rotated weekly to offsite storage as well.
For disaster recovery on the servers, I'd like to be able to do some kind of drive/partition imaging. I've only used Ghost on workstations. Would it work ok on a server that's using a combination RAID setup? Anyone have experience with some of the other solutions by Acronis, Paragon, PowerQuest, etc.? Ideally, I would do an automated image dump each night to an external USB drive.
Even though we're using BackupExec, I'm open to other suggestions. A friend recommended BrightStor. How does it compare to BE? Any other recommendations/suggestions?
Background:
- Windows Server 2003 EE running BackupExec 10 (Certance CDL432 DAT72 autoloader) - Daily backups
- 3 additional servers (2 - 2003 SE, 1 - 2000)
- 45 workstations (mostly XP but a few 2000) spread between 8 cities
- All offices have some sort of broadband Internet connection (wireless, DSL, and/or cable)
- Only 2 of the servers are backed up. The other two are very low priority units.
- A couple of the main office workstations are backed up to our primary server via Microsoft's SyncToy utility.
Goal:
- Back up all servers
- Back up all workstations (Desktop, My Documents, and .PST files)
- Redundancy for tape system (NAS, ext. USB drives, DVD archiving, etc.)
- Disaster recovery for servers
- Off-site storage of backups
My biggest question is how to handle the workstations at the remote locations. There's no VPN at the moment and I don't trust the reliabilty of the Internet connections at all but two of the locations. Most of our offices are in remote locations so the connections can be a bit flaky at times.
I'm considering putting in some kind of network attached storage device at each remote office. There wouldn't be much redundancy at those places but at least there would be something. If I can figure out some reasonably secure and efficient method to back them up from the main office, I'll definitely be doing that.
For backup server redundancy, I'm considering buying 3 or so external USB drives that would be rotated daily (1 production/1 fireproof cabinet/1 offsite storage). The autoloader cartridge (5 tapes + 1 cleaning tape) would be rotated weekly to offsite storage as well.
For disaster recovery on the servers, I'd like to be able to do some kind of drive/partition imaging. I've only used Ghost on workstations. Would it work ok on a server that's using a combination RAID setup? Anyone have experience with some of the other solutions by Acronis, Paragon, PowerQuest, etc.? Ideally, I would do an automated image dump each night to an external USB drive.
Even though we're using BackupExec, I'm open to other suggestions. A friend recommended BrightStor. How does it compare to BE? Any other recommendations/suggestions?
