Bill Gradwohl wrote:
Having considered your mindset, and knowing my client, I can confidentetly say that although they would like to SAY that they want a backup for a true dissaster, if I provide them with a quote for that service they will quickly change their mind. Your suggestion of in chasis drive backup, and not RAID seems very interesting, and I see your point where simple mirroring prooves useless for typical problems.Arthur Pemberton wrote:
However I'm planning this for a smal business. As I'm sure you're aware normal employees (ie. non geek, or computer centric) shouldnt' really be trusted with anything computer, so if possible, I woudl prefer not to rely on them to switch on the USB HDD to allow it to backup.
In a business situation, you have to answer the question: "Am I going to take a true disaster into consideration or not?"
Since 1982, we've seen only 1 real disaster. A twister that rolled thru downtown Ft. Worth and did lots of damage. One of the larger building was so heavily damaged that it was condemned by the city. A client of ours in that building had their office space so completely trashed, we couldn't identify where we were when we hit their floor. The interior walls were gone, exterior windows blown out, etc. We found a users area where the monitor was sucked out the window, severing the cable to the computer. The computer however worked just fine when we retrieved it from under the desk and gave it a new monitor.
Their server room was drenched in water with soaked ceiling tiles and insulation all over the equipment.. We physically moved the gear to a new site a few miles away, opened up and dried off everything, plugged things in and they were up. Not one computer was lost.
Now, when someone says that you HAVE to consider disaster recovery, I'm no longer in complete agreement. Its up to you. If you want off site backup fine. If not, that's fine too.
We don't think software RAID is a good idea. We prefer real hardware RAID. RAIDing a server does not provide disaster recovery protection. If the box burns, gets flooded, stolen, etc, its ALL gone. RAID isn't even good for "oops" recovery. When someone creates an "oops" mini disaster by erasing the payroll master file, its still gone even with a RAID array.
In our experience, "oops" mini disasters occur all the time. They are the ones you need to protect against. Having a spinning "snapshot" backup on disk is the way to go. We set them up to snapshot the servers main drive or drive array(s) every hour during working hours, and once over night. Should someone destroy a file, the admin can reach into the latest snapshot and retrieve it, or the generation from an hour ago, or the one from 3 hours ago, or the one for 3PM last Thursday, etc. That's the flexibility a business needs. If the latest upgrade to the accounting system software turns out to be problematic, we can roll it back by grabbing a generation of the environment from before the upgrade. These are the common problems that backup can handle well and occur routinely in any business environment.
Most small business users can't properly handle restores from tape, or even consistently feed the machine a new tape daily. Therefore, we gave up on tape a few years ago. Any "admin" can use their Windows Explorer to hit the snapshot area and retrieve a file with a few mouse clicks. Note that only the admin and the business owners are given access rights to the snapshot area. Internal drives are perfect for this, and require no manual intervention. If a site has more than one server, we'll consider backing up server1 to the backup drives of server2 and vice versa as added protection. In a pinch, server2 can mount those drives for the end users to access almost immediately should server1 go up in smoke, for example.
If you want disaster recovery backup on top of this, then you need to be able to take something off site. Realistically, thats a stack of drives for a raid array, or a USB drive. That client I mentioned previously with the 2TB data area takes 6 400Gig drives in a RAID 5 out of their backplane chassis and replaces them with a new set of drives to start the snapshot process all over again. They keep one set of drives off site. They swap the drives on an as needed basis, using a 400Gig USB drive to backup the backup and take that off site nightly.
The added benefit of this is that they can ship these drives to their sister locations in a true disaster situation, or just to move a huge amount of data between offices (Civil Engineers with tons of CAD drawings). The other benefit is that the data is immediately usable. No waiting for eons as a tape tries to find the file needed. Instant access.
So, when you say you want backup, think thru what you're trying to protect against, and then get that set up.
But I'd like to know what technologies (for lack of a better word) do you utilize to do the snapshoting? If you prefer, a few suggested google queries would help.
On a side not, I find it amazing that computer can take that much a beating.
