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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Backup Thread -- RAID is not backup!
 
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Dimestore Merlin
Jul 14, 2007

Obey your Spider-Lord

Zigmidge posted:

Hey backup thread, I've been tasked with setting something up for our little office here and I think I've got a decent plan but I didn't know what I was doing before the few hours of research I put in so please tear my idea apart - it can only help.

I have four machines that are using Crash Plan's software to backup automatically to a dedicated harddrive(A) on my workstation. Crash Plan on my workstation will also be backing up to their online solution. Once every two weeks (or month or every week, we haven't decided yet) the owner will bring, from home, an identical harddrive(B) that I will mirror the harddrive(A) backup to which the owner will take back home at the end of the day.

If my thinking is right, this gives me a few points of failure before we can't recover and even if everything fails we can always call them up and have them mail us a physical copy. Am I missing anything?

Full disclosure upfront, I work for Code42.

One thing that should be pointed out right off the bat is that you cannot back up the CrashPlan backups to the CrashPlan cloud. See here for more details. So the only thing getting sent to the cloud would be stuff from your workstation.

It sounds like you're using a combo of our home and free products to enact this. Personally, I'd recommend looking at the CrashPlan PRO option (The blue box on the far right under "Business"). $50 a month for those 4 machines plus yours, you can back up to an external drive on-site as well as the cloud plus you get more control over the backups.

Also, thank you thank you THANK YOU for trying to have multiple destinations. Ideally, you'd have one locally for "need it right the gently caress now" restores, plus one or more off-site for "holy poo poo the whole building went up in flames" kind of situation.

* # ¿ Aug 26, 2015 23:49
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# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 19:50
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Dimestore Merlin
Jul 14, 2007

Obey your Spider-Lord

ConfusedUs posted:

Hi-5, backup industry buddy!

My critique of his plan--outside of the technical limitations that I did not know--is that the human part of the "swap drives" is always the first to fail. People are going to forget to swap drives, or leave the drat things in their car on a hot summer day, or something of the sort.

If you go that route, you want it to be as automatic and painless as possible. I'd suggest doing something like getting two drives to rotate in addition to the one you have permanently attached. Sync (via a script or something) to the rotating drives on a very frequent basis. Then just have the people swap them out on a regular basis. That way they don't have to wait for it to do something; it's always ready to go.


Local backups are for when you delete the wrong thing or you lose a hard drive.
Off-site backups are for when your building burns down.
Cloud backups have the benefit of working if your whole TOWN burns down.

:hfive:

Oh yeah. Having what sounds like a single drive for the storage location sounds like a bad time. RAID may not be backup, but ideally you'd like your backup location to be a RAID. You get a bad sector with a single drive and you're SOL.

More generally, for any backup situation, you need to consider your environment and your goals. What data are you backing up? Where is it? Will the solution you've come up with be able to get the data back in a reasonable amount of time? Seems like every day I'm reminding people that trying to cram a 20TB file server into a single backup archive is no bueno. Good luck doing a full restore in any reasonable amount of time if it's not local. You need to consider network, disk iops, permissions, all sorts of things. The good thing about taking care of that on your end is that if you've done your due diligence your users shouldn't really notice a thing.

* # ¿ Aug 27, 2015 04:46
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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Backup Thread -- RAID is not backup!