Small Business
Networking -
Backups
First created: 08/07/2005
Last modified:
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General thoughts
When choosing a backup solution, a few things will drive your decisions:

  • Do you have a bunch of tapes that need to be restored from?  If so, you need a tape drive that is backward compatible with those tapes.
  • How much data?
  • What is your time window?
  • You need to periodically generate offsite media for disaster recovery.  Approach this with the mindset that all you ever get to see are those tapes (or whatever media).  Don't forget to rotate your media.  I have seen computers hit by lightning with a tape in the drive that was, well fried as well.  It would have been nice if the tape had been ejected and put on the shelf (or physically removed from the building).
  • Will you use your backup software for permanent archives?  This usually means you need an easily accessable database of everything on your backup media.  This is a business norm and will drive up the cost - You wont find this feature in a consumer product, but in an Enterprise level software - think around $700 and an annual fee (Veritas, Ultrabac, etc).
  • In all but the smallest environment, I like to have one computer/server setup to run backups (and other utility type functions).  It then attaches to the other servers (usually via Gigabit Ethernet) and runs a backup.  Tape drive software just seems to need to be restarted too often and it usually is too much of a load to run on a busy server.

    Tape Drives
    Don't put tape drives with disks on the same controller.

    Hard Disk backups
    I am using this in a few locations and love it. Particularly the AMS Venus DS3 drive enclosures. More here later, I promise.

    Veritas Backup Exec
    We have used Veritas BE since around 1997.  One thing about BE is that is puts the data on tape using Microsoft Tape Format, unlike ArcServe.  I have used BE to run a complete disaster recovery scenario with good success (including Microsoft Active Directory and Microsoft Exchange Server.  Be sure and backup the System State.

    NetWare
    ArcServe 6.5 for NetWare Servers was my last exposure to this software. ArcServe was excellent when it was owned by Cheyenne. Then Computer Associates purchased them and the quality went down (in my opinion). Its easy to backup with ArcServe, but hard to restore. BETRIEVE has a limit of 4GB, at least it did around 2000. It does not matter how you setup suballocation, its a BETRIEVE database engine thing. That's when we dropped ArcServe and Computer Associates like a brick and never looked back. Don't use ArcServe.