Backups for Server

Question

Hi all
In work our current setup is this:
Mac os x Server 10.3.9 with RAID
Backups through Sony Tape
We're moving office and getting a new server in the process (of course sticking with the Mac!)
Our raid has 2tb of info on it. What is the best solution to keep this info backed up? are tapes the best way to do this? Ideally we would like to be able to take a backup away with us at the end of the day, whats your suggestions?

Answer 1

I prefer doing full backups as often as possible rather than doing incremental ones adding more tapes/backupdisks "indefinitly".
We often use both backup disks and tape where the disk is a recent "clone" or daliy synchronized copy of the server shared data (you can get at/restore "yesterdays" data before next synchronization and maybe use the backup disk for a staged backup even during the day).
Depending on your data, you probably can't cram 2 TB on to a single tape even if using Ultrium 5 (1,5 TB native capacity) so if using tape you'll need more than one tape to get a full backup.
Using removable disks you could synchronize server storage => external disk but it most likely will be more heavy than tape to carry.
If using tape the tapedrive can be connected to the server but if possible I would run any backup over night instead of during the day.
Using disks I would prefer to use a backup server/machine separate from the fileserver because you can hang the file server when changing disks if there is something wrong with filesystem on the ext. disk.
Tape drives (Ultrium/LTO) and interfaces cards (preferably SAS) can cost a lot and tapes aren't cheap either.
If the backup volume grow bigger than 2 TB you can add more tapes more easiliy than addding large ext. disks as an ext. disk enclosure tend to increase more in size, weight and cost.
Maybe you can split backups into different sets if some data is changing (much) less than other data and back those up separately. "Static" data data doesn't need to be backed up as often as new/changing data.
Also when talking about backups you need to think about how long you need access to old data if it is removed/erased from the server shared volumes somehow and backups are overwritten in a cyclic manner (every 2 weeks?).
Maybe removed data should be archived before it is removed?
Also ever increasing data volumes => harder demands on backup equipment "what is possible to use" and cost so "weeding out" old "unused" data can be a good thing.
A trip: check your insurance company's policy what they demand you to do to prevent data loss in case of if a "disaster recovery" will be neccessary.
(as always: RAID ≥ RAID 1 is not a backup and RAID 0 is even worse).
HTH