On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 9:36 AM, Matthew W. Ross <[email protected]> wrote: > From: Kurt Buff > >> How much data are you talking about, and how volatile is it? > > Our staff VM has a home folder share with about 1TB of data. It's used by > about 250 users for their Documents and Desktop folder redirects. > >> Given your only requirement, and if the data is not terribly >> volatile, and there isn't too much of it, I'd suggest dispensing with >> backups and relying on VSS. > > Dispensing with backups is not an option, but I've already enabled shadow > copies on the server. > >> If you want more than that, you might do just fine with a couple of >> multi-terabyte USB drives attached to the server and robocopy - again, >> depending on the size of your data, and your history requirements. > > I've considered this old trick: make a VHD on a remote share, mount it as a > local drive and tell it to do backups to that VHD. Once it appears as a local > drive, the standard windows backup will use all its' nice features for > backups. I use this trick at home for a Windows 7 Home Premium backup to my > NAS. > > But what I want is something that isn't a kludge. I want a supported solution > that I feel comfortable with as a reliable backup. > > We shall see if I get what I want.
Volatility == rate of change in data over time. You haven't answered that question. How long do you need to keep your data - that is, when someone asks for a restore, how far back in time should they be able to go? A week, a month, a year, 5 years? How granular do the backups need to be? That is, do staff need to be able to retrieve from a specific day or specific version going back a long way, or will a simple child/parent/grandparent rotation work, with daily incrementals/diffs disappearing after a week (or maybe a month, especially if data volatility is low)? Do you need to keep data offsite for DR purposes? USB Disks transport as easily as tapes. But frankly, with only 1tb of data to preserve, it's looking more and more to me like a few 1-4tb USB disks and robocopy might be all you need, along with a spreadsheet and a set of labels to keep track of it. If you need to preserve the VM as well, that's not much more work - a bit of scripting to down the VM, copy it to a USB disk then fire it up again could easily fit in with the rest of the job. Kurt
