What will be better, please?

[SvenKopitz]

Good time of the day, everyone!
Not sure is this is the right plase to post this thread, but I'm kindly asking to be patient to me.
I've got such problem:
I'm serving network with 37 computers and shared storage for 30 TB for them. My object is to make data transmission optimized best and to all data was backup reliably. We're using Windows.
What is the best way to do this, please?

 

[root]

can you re-phrase the question.

I don't fully understand, are you trying to back up the machines? backup the shared storage? or optimise the traffic between the 37 machines and the shared storage?

 

[SvenKopitz]

Thanks for answer.
I want to backup everything - machines, shared storage. We are the new company, and I don't know what is the better way to do this.

 

[berry120]

There's lots of options available to you, but backing up 30TB + each individual machine's drive isn't going to be cheap. If I'm brutally honest, the fact you're implying you haven't got a reliable backup solution as a company with this much data at stake is pretty dire, you should've got this sorted as a priority before you started investing in lots of storage.

I'd personally look at first centralising all your data so everything worth keeping (i.e. all employee data and suchlike) all gets saved to a shared area, and keep that shared area as a robust RAID array (preferrably using RAID 6 here with this many drives.) This will at least give you protection if the individual drives start failing which is better than nothing - though you should then really look into off site backup solutions in case the worst happens.

I could go into lots of detail here, but if you're a registered company and you don't know how to backup things yourself reliably you really ought to be considering contracting someone to do this work for you, or at least looking at some formal training on the best approach. In this day and age, having over 30TB worth of data that's not backed up anywhere is a HUGE unnecessary risk.

 

[root]

the best way to do this (in my opinion)...

firstly, back up all the 30 machines to the central server. have this run as a log off script in your domain so that the end users press shutdown and their work is automatically backed up to the central storage...
(you want your logoff script to do a differential copy so that it only copies things that are new, or the copy on the local machine is newer than the copy on the central server).

this will let them have a local copy of their work that they can access speedily, (assuming that a centrally stored network copy won't be sufficient).

after this you should backup your central storage to a tape drive...
(and this is where it get's really (really) expensive)...

LTO 5 tapes can store 1.6TB nativly, and almost double that when compressed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open

if you can wait till LTO 6 then that's 3.2TB native capacity and you won't need to use hardware or software compression and your backups will happen faster... and you'll only need 10 tapes, instead of the 30 tapes that you'd currently need....

you'd also need a tape drive.
and a robotic loader...
and the backup software to control each of these...

also to back up 30 TB in an evening, you'd need something of a miracle...
a speed of LTO5 is 180MB/second...

180MB/second = 10.8GB/Minute = 648GB/hour = 15.5TB / day.

so it's going to take you 2 full days to backup your 30TB... (so that's nightly backups out the window!).

in my experience, it's difficult to get anywhere close to the max write speeds of the media...

so you end up with multiple tape drives inside the tape loaders...

you're talking thousands of dollars per LTO drive.
thousands of dollars for a tape loader robot.
the tapes themselves aren't cheap and you need at least 30 for a full backup, if not more to have a decent media rotation...

 

[setishock]

Could he make the first back up with all the time involved then do incremental backups from there?

 

[SvenKopitz]

Let me say with other words - we haven't got any network now - we're new company. I'm looking for solution to this situation for now.
root, I believe that tape devices are pretty expensive, but the idea is good.
setishock - yes, that is the best alternative for now.
BUT HOW?

 

[berry120]

Is the 30TB in a RAID configuration? If so what one? If you're not already I'd recommend that as a first step.

 

[root]

for full backups then incremental,

I'm suggesting that for the workstation -> central storage that a full backup is taken first, then incremental backups from there on in.

So you have a network drive, which we'll call z: and all the work that needs to be backed up is on the local machines in a folder called d:\work

you run a logoff script that's a sime batch file that says

xcopy d:\work z:\backups\%USERNAME%\ /d /s

that makes an incremental backup, (only copies files/folders where the file is more recent on the machine than the server) to a folder that is on the Z drive, called backups, and stores the users data in a folder matching their user name...


the incremental backup to tape is a lot harder. you can't just take incremental backups forever.

basically you'll make 1 full backup so all your files will be stored on the tape.
we'll call these files 1, 2 and 3.

origin media has 1, 2 and 3 on it.

the next day file 2 changes, so file 2 is copied to the (new) backup tape,
now you have files 1, 2(original) and 3 on the origin media set and the most current version of file 2 on the tape for monday.

If throughout the week no files change the rest of the tapes for the week are blank.

the following monday file 3 changes, and this is written to the monday tape.

now you have file 1, 2 (original) and 3 (original) on the backup tape.
and you have the updated file 3 on mondays tape.

you don't have a current backup of file 2 any more because the tape is over written.


even imagining that you did have an endless supply of media, over a year you'll have 365 tapes. if you need to restore a lot of files that have only been periodically changed you'll be changing a lot of tapes...

so your only option for tape backup is the enormously expensive one!


what you really need to do is rationalise the data.
do you really need 30TB of data.... if you do need the 30TB of data does this all need to be backed up?

do you need to have your own backup at all? you could contact a company like Iron mountain who do offsite backups for you, (basically they connect to your network and backup the data remotely). -but this is an expensive option, and managed backup solutions get even more expensive when you need to restore.

 

[SvenKopitz]

Thank you. Please take a look at suggestion that I get on Technet:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com.../thread/03be08d4-3061-4151-b2f3-3898b72797b0/
What do you think about that please?