Good discussion...
How does everybody address offsite retention? Are you really buying enough drives so you can retain backups for 6 months ago? What about archive? -sc From: Mike Hoffman [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, February 16, 2010 5:22 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Removable SATA backups We've only just started to move clients to Disk and as most of our clients are SBS it works really well. Unlike tape it is more difficult to keep snapshots as an archive, so it becomes a backup and recovery device. Once they start giving away 64Gb data sticks at conferences we'll start using them. Remember that if you want to do traditional rotations then 10 USB dives is a lot more expensive than 10 Tapes. We use the built in software as it works well and reports in simple language to the on-site staff if there is an issue (if they get to it before us!). We have considered using VHD's for the storage media, and I know some people who use that on an external device along with a virtualised environment. One downside is that until SBS supports VHD mounting (it's still the 2008 kernel) then it puts a few extra steps into a recovery which would increase the restore time considerably. Mike From: Michael B. Smith [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 16 February 2010 21:26 To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Removable SATA backups Not "is through the backup media", but "is through the backup application". Regards, Michael B. Smith Consultant and Exchange MVP http://TheEssentialExchange.com From: Michael B. Smith [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, February 16, 2010 4:23 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Removable SATA backups I mentioned the big one - it's vss/block based instead of file based. The major thing this means is that (just like a tape), you hand off an entire drive (or two or three...however many you need to maintain your rotation and generational coverage) to WSB and it manages the contents. You don't touch the drive as a filesystem. All of your access to the drive (just like a tape) is through the backup media. However, you can have dozens/hundreds of generations of a file on a single backup drive. Because the backup is block based - just like VSS. It takes snapshots and copies the differential snapshot (more or less). It isn't file based. The higher your disk "churn" the fewer generations you can store on a given drive. For most of my smaller (read that as: SBS) clients, I have two 1 TB drives, one onsite and one offsite and I rotate them weekly. This is one of the backup options that Microsoft DPM has, and I know recent versions of BackupExec/NetBackup support it too. Regards, Michael B. Smith Consultant and Exchange MVP http://TheEssentialExchange.com From: Andrew S. Baker [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, February 16, 2010 4:14 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Removable SATA backups Btw, Michael, what are some of the differences you need to consider in backup methodology with WSB? Thanks again -ASB: http://xeesm.com/AndrewBaker Sent from my Verizon Smartphone ________________________________ From: "Michael B. Smith" <[email protected]> Date: Tue, 16 Feb 2010 21:01:58 +0000 To: NT System Admin Issues<[email protected]> Subject: RE: Removable SATA backups I do this extensively with Windows Server Backup at my small customers, and at some mid-sized customers. It works surprisingly well. (WSB is MUCH smarter than you may think - it does require you think a bit differently than you are used to doing - because the backups are VSS/block based, not file based.) Regards, Michael B. Smith Consultant and Exchange MVP http://TheEssentialExchange.com From: Andrew S. Baker [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, February 16, 2010 3:52 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Removable SATA backups Has anyone looked into removable SATA drives as a valid backup technology for SMB environments? * http://www.storagesearch.com/nas-3.html <http://www.storagesearch.com/nas-3.html> * http://www.idealstor.com/teralyte.php <http://www.idealstor.com/teralyte.php> * http://www.google.com/products?rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS357US357&sourceid=chrome&; q=Teralyte&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wf <http://www.google.com/products?rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS357US357&sourceid=chrome &q=Teralyte&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wf> I'm trying to determine if this is really more flexible and cost-effective than virtual tape or "traditional" disk-to-disk approaches -ASB: http://XeeSM.com/AndrewBaker ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
