RE: Re: [OT] - Office IT support

["Alex Monaghan" <ha@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Does anyone recommend backup online? To an off-site server?

Do you want the whole of your 1TB backed up off-site? How quick do you want
to be able to get the data back?

Simple solution would be to rent a server and install an rsync based
solution to pull changes over night when your ADSL line is quiet. I use a
similar solution with a local charity to pull their data down to a spare
disk in my dev server. The only real issue is recovery time, download of
1TB
of data would not be quick! You could co-locate a box, then if you needed
to
recover a huge volume of data you could recover the box from the data
centre
connect to your LAN pull what you need and then return to the data centre
later in the day.

What about this as an extension to the disk to disk to tape solution...

Box 1 - Live Server in office

RAID box with hot-spare disk(s), more or less 100% uptime and automatic
rebuild of RAID (subject to not losing more than the number of not-spare
disks in a single failure)

Box 2 - Backup server in office

Run an rsync job every hour (or XX mins) to pull changes from live, attach
tape drive with auto-loader. Probably worth having RAID on this if budget
allows.

Box 3 - Backup server off-site

Run an rsync job during quiet times so as not to kill your Internet
connection. If this was your own box rather than a rented, then as
suggested, you could recover it from the DC in the event of needing a total
restore of your network.

You mention AutoCAD, it's a while since I've used this, but if it doesn't
keep a track of internal changed versions of drawings, you might want to
consider an increase in storage to allow for storage of multiple customer
issues to be saved before the final drawing is complete to allow for
roll-back.


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