Back-up software

jamieh

Hey all,

I'm installing a new server on a network and I got quotes for the server today. I was plannin on getting a tape drive so I could use it for backups every night. The tape drive + scsi card works out at about 1000 bucks!!

I'm wondering is it possible to use an external hdd to send the backup's to? eg. buying a 300gb usb hdd and instead of putting the backup to a tape put it on a hard-drive??

Also.....whats the best back-up software out there??

Ponster

External HDD is fine.

I use Veritas for software backups.

mr_disc

i use Veritas also, very good, easy to manage and ' user friendly ' interface

jamieh

Cheers lads.....I just went to veritas.com but it seems that Symantec have taken them over.....can the software be bought in any computer shop or is there a recomended vendor in ireland?

mr_disc

Computer shops should have it but if not any decent IT company will easily be able to get their hands on it.

You will need to look into what extra agents u will need to get included with it ( Exchange agent, SQL agent , and open file agent etc ), these options may prove to be a bit costly to add on but u gotta have a good solid back up !!

DublinWriter

jamieh wrote:

I'm installing a new server on a network and I got quotes for the server today. I was plannin on getting a tape drive so I could use it for backups every night. The tape drive + scsi card works out at about 1000 bucks!!

The server should already have an SCSI interface, so you mightn't need another SCSI card.

Avoid any DLT tape technology. It's given me nothing but grief for years due to the 'fragile' nature of the transport mechanism. Unless you're putting your server in a dust-free climate controlled server-room, avoid DLT. I think the latest Sony SDAT format is pretty robust.

Removable HDD is pretty good, fast, and cheap.

You could get away with using NT's own internal backup software if you're backing up to HD, but it get's very fussy when using tape media.

Capt'n Midnight

DublinWriter wrote:

The server should already have an SCSI interface, so you mightn't need another SCSI card.

fine as long as there is NOTHING else on the same scsi controller. And using the spare channel on a RAID controller is not recommended.

DublinWriter wrote:

Removable HDD is pretty good, fast, and cheap.

and you won't have

IDE drives are a lot more expensive than tapes, but you get a lot of them for the price of a TBU and as long as you treat them like eggs are a lot easier to recover data from. Tapes are painful to restore from on another server or different brand of software or different brand of tape drive.

DublinWriter wrote:

You could get away with using NT's own internal backup software if you're backing up to HD, but it get's very fussy when using tape media.

NtBackup in NT3.5-4 would only backup to tape, but wasn't too bad if all you could fit everything on one tape. With NtBackup in 2000 or later Microsoft seem to have gone out of their way to find a barely automable tape backup program. (find because like MOST of the backup software supplied since DOS 5 it's a rebaged/stripped down version of another vendors product. It's damn difficult to get it to do a scheduled backup to tape and while you can get autoloader drivers it's worse. However NtBackup in 2000 and later is fine for backing up to file, especially things like the system state and Microsoft Exchange (one large file) use Exmerge to export mailboxes to PST's. for SQL you can do data dumps to files.

Veritas like most backup programs is overpriced and overly complicated for an organisation that thinks €1,000 is a large price to pay for backups. I really resent the way they forced people to use the IE interface by not allowing you to use older version with a new license. The number of times' I've had to reboot servers because it won't pickup the TBU when you restart the crashed services. :mad:

veritas can be a pain when restoring and setting up and frequent server restarts (it's supposed to be mission critical software) but Arcserve takes the buscuit (maybe it's better now I haven't used it in a long while) any excuse to NOT run a backup and the log file could not be shrinked and if you deleted the log file it could take 8 hours to re-catalog a tape

and they charges for the agents :mad:

Seriously if you can in any way figure out a backup scheme that avoids tape it's worth thinking about - one big problem with removable drives is that employees could leak data and you have to be sure drives aren't going to be misshandled , not many of them would have SDLT or LTO drives at home. Until SATA drives came out it would have been possible to put ANY IDE/ATA drive in ANY pc that had an IDE controller and you only needed an OS that could bypass handle the drive size and format.

DLT - yeah I'm annoyed over this. 15/30 DLT III drives were great - no trouble at all. DLT IV drives seemed to have lots more problems with the tape leader - then selling Vs80 / DLT1 on the basis they could use DLT IV tapes , except they could not REUSE them - so you had to buy new tapes. Then SDLT drives claimed to read DLT IV tapes, but with a 1 in 10 chance of the tape getting stuck in the drive (and so you loose any data on the DLT IV) :mad:


NtBackup to file is fine - use NTFS compression on the backup drive as ntbackup don't compress. if you install a second copy of windows in a second folder it makes life easier when restoring the file when the first copy keels over. You could also invest in a copy of GHOST to backup the system drive and then just restore from a DVD or something to get to the point where you can boot up and access the backup drive

DublinWriter

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

DLT - yeah I'm annoyed over this. 15/30 DLT III drives were great - no trouble at all. DLT IV drives seemed to have lots more problems with the tape leader - then selling Vs80 / DLT1 on the basis they could use DLT IV tapes , except they could not REUSE them - so you had to buy new tapes. Then SDLT drives claimed to read DLT IV tapes, but with a 1 in 10 chance of the tape getting stuck in the drive (and so you loose any data on the DLT IV) :mad:

I gave up on the whole DLT thing at DLT IV. DLT = poo.

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

NtBackup to file is fine

Indeed. And free.

jamieh

Thanks for all the replies lads.

I'll defo stay away from tapes so........does anyone know is it possible to set up a backup to an external usb drive using veritas??

I have a copy of Ghost but as far as I know u have to reboot everytime you want to do a backup and I don't want the server to do a reboot every night!!

aidan_walsh

jamieh wrote:

I have a copy of Ghost but as far as I know u have to reboot everytime you want to do a backup and I don't want the server to do a reboot every night!!

What version do you have? Ghost 9 and 10 allow you to image from in Windows.

SwampThing

Are you just backing up data or the whole OS etc. every time? How many revisons of the backup will you need to keep? If you put all your backups on one external HDD and it goes poop, you're done for.

Depending on how much data you need to backup at each run, a REV drive might do the trick. Up to 90GB per disk (highly skeptical about this figure though).

You could take an initial Ghost image of the OS in case of system disk failure and then backup nightly/weekly/whatever to the REV drive. Of course, depends on the amount of data...

petes

SwampThing wrote:

Are you just backing up data or the whole OS etc. every time? How many revisons of the backup will you need to keep? If you put all your backups on one external HDD and it goes poop, you're done for.

Depending on how much data you need to backup at each run, a REV drive might do the trick. Up to 90GB per disk (highly skeptical about this figure though).

You could take an initial Ghost image of the OS in case of system disk failure and then backup nightly/weekly/whatever to the REV drive. Of course, depends on the amount of data...

Reading this thread, and before I came to your post I was going to suggest a REV drive. I too am fed up with tapes. I was looking into REV drives. Anybody have any experience with them?

I was looking at this one.

http://www.iomega-europe.com/eu/products.aspx?productId=rev_loader_280&language=en&StaticPage=1


/edit just looked at the link I had posted which was obviously wrong.

overstand

Hi guys,

I've been following this thread and i was hoping to offer a useful tip and also ask some advice.

Firstly, I schedule backups to a zip 250 drive using an application called Zipbackup. It is very cheap and archives the information into a zip file, thus fitting a lot more data onto a disc. Plus, i understand there is less chance of data corruption when archiving is used.

With zipback backup, you can also schedule backup to ext. HD, CD-RW, DVD-RW, other machines on the network, etc.

Ok, my question is this:

I look after a 5 computer 100MBit network where ther is a central database on a server which is then accessed by all clients simultaneausly.

Server runs win2k and clients run win2k and xp.

Daily backup are scheduled as follows:
1 backup to local zip drive on server
4 individual cross server backups to each client machine.

My question is if anyone thinks this could be too much strain on the drive in the server. The server is also used by staff as a workstation. It has two 7200 IDE hard drives, one with the OS and on with the database (that is being backed up).

Finally, as i am aware that the server is not a 'real server' in that it is not running win2k server i should mention that 3 of the 5 machines is all that is being used at any one time.

Does this seem like an effecient means of backup or impending hard drive failure on the server?

Thanks in advance - any help or advice welcome.
Backups take place outside of office hours.

mr_disc

overstand wrote:

The server is also used by staff as a workstation. /QUOTE]

Whatever about the rest , using the server as a workstation is a bad idea, u should have it dedicated to its server functions, users logging on to it and working from it is a recipe for disaster.

DublinWriter

mr_disc wrote:

Whatever about the rest , using the server as a workstation is a bad idea, u should have it dedicated to its server functions, users logging on to it and working from it is a recipe for disaster.

I totally agree. It's a perfect receipe for disaster, i.e. cup of coffee spills all over it, etc.

Hardware is relatively cheap...there's no excuse!

SwampThing

petes wrote:

Reading this thread, and before I came to your post I was going to suggest a REV drive. I too am fed up with tapes. I was looking into REV drives. Anybody have any experience with them?

I've used one for a while now - mostly for clone images of servers/PC's and dropping files onto a disk before a re-install. They're fine - a good bit of kit I have to say.

Thing to watch out for is that they use the UDF filesystem - similar to DVD's - so you need to install the drivers/software to write tot he disks.
If you're backing up XP/Windows 2K, then no worries.
Once it's available to the OS then any backup package that can write to a disk is fine - NT Backup, Veritas etc. etc.

Iomega have a good range of interfaces - internal ATAPI, SATA and SCSI and external SCSI, USB and Firewire.

Yeah, I'd recommend it as a backup solution for the amount it holds - 35-90GB (90 is with 2.odd times compression - better aim for about 35-60GB per disk)

TempestSabre

Whats the pros cons of a rev over a regular drive?

Capt'n Midnight

SwampThing wrote:

Yeah, I'd recommend it as a backup solution for the amount it holds - 35-90GB (90 is with 2.odd times compression - better aim for about 35-60GB per disk)

I've always found 1.6-1.7 in the real world. 2.0 seems to be for marketing gimps or a different mix of files I've ever used.

SwampThing

TempestSabre wrote:

Whats the pros cons of a rev over a regular drive?

Check out the Iomega site. The Rev drive uses removable 'disks' - a bit like a super-duper Zip drive but a hell of a lot more reliable and faster.

Pros/Cons - depends on the user and the use really.

TempestSabre

SwampThing wrote:

Check out the Iomega site. The Rev drive uses removable 'disks' - a bit like a super-duper Zip drive but a hell of a lot more reliable and faster.

Pros/Cons - depends on the user and the use really.

I know what they are, but whats the advantage of it. When last I checked they weren't cheaper or faster than a regular drive. What they were was proprietary which usually is a bad thing in my book. I would have thought a hot swap external SATA raid system would be better.

zilog_jones

Are Rev drives they actually reliable? I lost a lot of trust with Iomega thanks to the hideous mess that were Zip disks - I'd rather iron my sack than waste money on that junk again! Then again they do seem to be largely different architecture, in that they are "rigid" hard disks instead of the wobbly plastic crap in floppies and zip disks.

Also, I've been working in a place using DLTs for the last few months and I haven't seen much go wrong with them (and some of the drives are nearl 10 years old), except for the SDLT drive which doesn't seem to like tapes sometimes (i.e. it just spits it out again immediately).

SwampThing

TempestSabre wrote:

I would have thought a hot swap external SATA raid system would be better.

No argument there, but would you really consider a REV drive for the same scenario you would an external SATA hot-swap RAID?

For the OP's question -granted he didn't say how much data was involved - I think a REV drive might be suitable, given that he raised an eyebrow over the cost of a tape drive.

For cheap-n-cheerful backups, they're great. They're are not an enterprise backup solution and I wouldn't suggest they were. Again, going back to the OP - depends on circumstances...

TempestSabre

Even just an external USB drive. I use a couple of those for my own backup.

personally I would consider an external SATA raid set up vs a rev drive. Can't be much difference in the cost.