106rallye

Hi I could do with a bit of advice!

I am doing a bit of work for a company and need some ideas of how to implement a good backup solution for them.

There is at present a small 10mb/s network but could be upgraded to 100mb/s with a new hub/switch all the computers are networked

I have no idea what is the best solution at the moment, there are:

2 laptops with about 10gig capacity between them
1 High end PC with a 16 speed CDR and a 60Gig disk
2 medium spec pcs with about 30 gig between them.
1 old but good server running Red Hat 7.1 with a 8Gig DAT drive and about 14Gig worth of disk space

all the computers are running 98SE apart from the server

There is also a couple of 100mb zip drives and disks.

I don't quite know what to do with all this to get a reliable backup system into place!! The first thing I did was to copy all the important stuff to the server as there was no backups at all!

So far my solutions consist of -

1. Getting some more SCSI disks for the server and using this as backup with all important files copied using the DAT drive

2. Getting some sort of Tape drive travern etc. for use on the network

3. Copying to the high end pc and using the CD drive

4. Norton Ghost

5. getting a second large hard disk for the high end pc and using a program like second copy 200

6.Any other ideas?

The solution has to be easy as the people will have to continue after I have left so I am reluctant to start getting them to use RedHat and the DAT drive as there is no GUI on there at present

Sorry for the long post!

Cheers in advance
Andy

druddle

Am thinking about the whole thing a bit more, but just thought i would mention that if you want a good backup scenario you will have the ability to store backups offsite, in case of a catastrophic environmental failure, i.e. if the office burns down and your live and back up disk/tape backups are also fried.

Dave

Markus

had to implement a backup strategy for my company last year.

Was 3 servers and 4 workstations that had to be backed up.

As we're mac based we'd been using Retrospect Workgroup, so decided to stick with that. so put the client on the W2K servers and the mac workstations. It all gets backed up to a Mac G4 running Retrospect server. Is stored on hard drive.

Not too happy with this and need some offsite, currently backing up critical stuff to powerbook and using that for offsite.

current plan is to get three 40 - 60GB firewire drives and use them for offsite backup, one for mon, wed, fri, the other for tues, and thurs. The third would be a 'spare' drive. Would still backup to internal HD, so if one of the firewirre drives went down we'd be able to swap in the spare and get data copied with relative ease.

Tape was a thought at one point, but one of the chaps here has used tape and many different types I might add, and maybe it's his bad luck but whenever he needs something from a tape it's corrupted, so they're kinda against tape.

father_jack

I think this involves a bit of user education in working practices. You need to get them to store important stuff on the server and forget about their C: drives.
Sort out a proper server backup and ups etc... then do a script to copy e.g. c:\work\*.doc from the laptops and the three other PCs when they're connected to the LAN. Local hard drive use for important stuff can only end in tears, make them understand that sooner rather than later.

[Edited by father_jack - 12/18/2001 2:03:39 PM]

dsmith

My view as well.

At Work the PC should be able to be rebuilt quickly from original software.

If the PCs have a very difficult build then ghost them to the server every few months just for build recovery.

All Data on the Server with a single good nightly backup plan that doesn't get forgotten

Deano

Toerag

look up VBAK, it involves backing up to a remote datacentre using a leased line. Does it automatically.

dogmaul

things like vback cost a lot for a site that small, just get a copy of arcserve and a nt/2000 pc with a dlt or big dat do full backups everyday apart from sat/sun unless ur in, get them to save their work to the server if they dont wait till their hd fails then they will work from the server as for the laptops do they ever leave the building ??? use a different tape every night on a 4 week rotation with every 4th friday sent off site and keep that one off site.
Need any more info just mail me ok

AllanB

I'd look at a Quantum Snap Server . Sits on the network and can be backed up to using Retrospect or similar and fully automated. You can get models with mirrored drives such as 2 x 80Gb or more. The 2200 with the 2 x 80Gb is about £1049.


AllanB

dogmaul

why has the network been allowed to get into this state anyway

106rallye

Hi sorry I havn't replied sooner! Firstly thanks all for posting so far,

Dogmaul - It has got into this state as it is a small company and the 2 main people are constantly on the road and carrying out workshops etc. The trouble is that one in particular is only in the office once every 2 weeks and is out from 5.30am in the moring to about 11 at night!! They are both good with general computing I think it is just one of those tasks which has got ignored unfortunately

Anyway the HD on one of the laptops has completely failed!! fortunately I have backed up most of the important stuff when I got here but there is a few files that are now lost forever

This is why I am keen on getting the system in place ASAP

I will look into some of the solutions provided so far this afternoon

Many thanks again

Andy

dogmaul

same here i have just had a users hd fail and shes just asked what about my outlook pst file i said what pst file it turns out my previous helper who decided he knew more than me because he was older had decided to create a pst file for her on her local drive for her to copy all her old e-mail into but told them dont worry it gets backed up everynight fecking plank he is now hes geting 27k a year and im sorting out his cockups. Sorry bout that just needed to rant :P

devils_ad69

I partition my drive as follows:

C - Operating System
D - Applications
E - Actual data

C & D should be [fairly] easy to rebuild from CD's. E is the smallest and are my most critical files.

Works fine for me.

NickAdams

iTrader: (5)

Shouldn't us techies be charging for our services???

Not that I've contributed to this post but normally do where IT stuff is concerned!

Btw,before anyone flames me,I was jokin about chargin (Just trying to get to 200 posts really and it's late in the day )

Cheers,

Nick..

dogmaul

We should charge i need the extra cash as im on slaves wages here

Jerry B

If you're after some hard removable storage we're about to dump 4 HP Surestore Optical disc jukeboxes complete with 350 1.2G discs. Each one has a SCSI connection, two drives and 76 slots, giving about 100G per box.
They sort of work like an external hard drive really, more reliable than DAT. You'll need operating software for these as we used proprietary stuff.
Don't want any money, replaced the system and we need the space, it just seems a shame to skip them as they cost a fortune 5 years ago and they still work fine.....

[Edited by Jerry B - 12/20/2001 6:37:52 PM]

106rallye

Jerry B I would be very interested! What sort of software is needed to run them?

Many thanks for the offer

Andy

Jerry B

Well I'm a voice comms guy, not a server/networks man, so if anyone knows otherwise please advise, but as far as I know installing one or more on the SCSIs on your server or PC they should detect them, just like any other external drive, but it's the driver it may not have in the back-up config files. You may be able to get that from HP's website if it's not on there, the jukeboxes are HP Surestore 100i's.