Paying 5 Chaos for a good backup schema and disaster recovery plan

Had a job interview today for an IT position with 3 servers, 20 workstations, 30 mobile devices, and around 4 TB of video per year in two 2 TB segments. They currently have no backup schema or disaster recovery plan. Roughly 40% of the workstations and mobile devices are Apple products.

I want to at least put a proposal or action plan together, not because I want the job but because them not having one offends the daylights out of me.

So, most helpful person gets 5 chaos and I may be able to swing a couple runner up prizes if I get good advice.

**edited to clarify distribution of workstation OSes**

Get some stone tablets

and scrawl all of their data onto those tablets using a hammer and chisel

Stone tablets last forever bro.

Ok I don't know shit about how to back shit up properly

note: I am an IT guy.

Don't want to use DAT tapes (which is pretty much that stone tablet thingy you were talking about).

... HDD's are cheap now, and mostly reliable.

Get 4 TB HDD's, RAID 10 them. That means get 4, raid 0 two of them, and raid 1 those two with two more. The RAID 0 is to accommodate 2 Terabytes of data being written quickly (if it is quickly).

You'll likely want a RAID Card for this, but considering the company has servers, they likely have those to use too.

Set up a backup with whatever server software you have. Windows 7 Server has built in software for this, if I'm not mistaken. RAID cards often have software for it too.

???

Profit! (Literally, considering your situation).

NAS's are fun too.

The words "disaster recovery" usually mean backup-restore events that can occur after the whole building burns down. That's a bit of a higher bar than simply getting backup running.

Anyway, if you can find a centralized way to monitor Windows-provided backup (and all your stuff is Windows), obviously that's free. I don't know a way to do that myself, although it's totally possible that Microsoft System Center can totally do that. If it can, you're done with software, and need to think about topology. System Center is not free.

What I would do is backup everything to a central disk based entity (RAID 5, not 10), and then use some additional software to mirror that into one of the online storage clouds. They'll charge a monthly fee for that of course.

Anything bigger than a 4 disk array will quickly flip over into server space. You can get 36 drive arrays from colfax international that can store 120TB total disk for something like $15K. Total overkill here, but it gives you an idea of the hardware costs on the extreme end of it all.

You can also get LTO<N> tape based systems from a variety of sources. These tend to be cheap, but the cheap ones will all involve manual tape shuffling. All the ones with robotics start in the price range ~$30+K.

It's important to note that a backup admin's job is not actually about BACKUPS. It's about RESTORES. Which is to say, if your process does not involve regular restore tests, you may have a fool for a backup admin.

If you have a mix of operating systems, there is a free Enterprise backup solution called Zmanda that you may wish to look at. I should warn you that it's not going to be setup.exe. It's pretty technical.

--C

EMC Avamar. GG

Best Backup and Recovery Software/Hardware in the world.

"

EMC Avamar. GG

Avamar is indeed pretty good. Easy to use, too.

So is CommVault, which can go to tape if you want it to. I don't think Avamar can. It couldn't a couple of years ago.

I'm not super sure that a company that hasn't decided to foot any expense so far is going to swallow the costs of a full fledged Avamar system very easily, though (or for that matter, CommVault).

--C

Roughly 40% of the workstations and mobile devices are Apple products.

How would that effect the outcome of using Avamar or Microsoft System Center?

It can backup to tape. But I suppose the cost might be a bit of an issue if a company hasn't even considered implementing a backup and recovery solution previously.

"

Draikon1 wrote:

It can backup to tape. But I suppose the cost might be a bit of an issue if a company hasn't even considered implementing a backup and recovery solution previously.

Curse those overly efficient mods for moving this to Off Topic so quickly.

I don't believe that cost, but rather time and labor constraints. They currently have one IT guy who is quite competent and the job interview was for an internship position that could lead into full time. The main objective of the position is to get their one IT guy out from behind the routine minutia of the IT department so that he can be strategically effective for the company in things like updating and maintaining their mobile apps and website.