Suggested offsite backup methods?

[r3b00+]

Can anyone recommend any offsite backup methods, perhaps that you use at your company. I would like to stay away from tapes, dvds due to the inconvenience of transporting the tapes offsite. All suggestions greatly appreciated.

Regards

[Aardpsymon]

Well, I can't name any off the top of my head but I do know there are companies that will take your backups over the internet. We have had a few mails off them offering their services.

We did consider going that route for backups but hit two main snags...
1) monthly cost to backup our data
2) backing up all our data over 10Mbit line would take about 12 hours, if the connection worked 100%, and upgrading to cope would cost a small fortune in our situation.

The main con for tapes is the cost of the drive. £1,300 for a 200-400Gb drive as I recall.

But for a simple solution to your off-site problem, just pop it in your pocket when you go home? we run a daily backup that stays on site, thats the one that covers most user documents and so on. A weekly backup that covers system settings we just keep at home. Although, in our case anything that manages to destroy server and on-site backups has removed the need to restore backups since the tapes are stored well away from the server and anything that gets both clearly took out most of the building too.

To get back on topic and stop rambling, I will have a root around see if I can find any of our junk about internet backups and forward it to you.

[nihil]

Biggest problem that I see is that you are not in control............. so what about regulatory compliance for example?

[mencken]

We came close to going with evault a little while back. Pretty cool product but a bit costly for our size. We were able to justify our SAN based on the cost of evault so in a way they helped us

They are able to address compliance issues and do diff updates to minimize the time over the wire once you have moved the first backup to them. Depending on the level of complexity of your environment and the amount of data your dealing with they might be worth a demo.

hlm

[mohaughn]

We use Veritas Netbackup enterprise. Every week it automatically picks the proper tapes to kick out of our silo. A tape pool technician goes around to the silos and pulls the tape.

A few hours later a secure delivery truck arrives, picks up the tapes, and moves them to a secure offsite storage bunker. I don't recall the company that we use.

Of course I'm backing up terabytes of data off of every server on a daily basis, and storing several terabytes of data in offsite storage every week. Doing it across a network is just not possible.

Last time I checked our tape drives were more than $15k a piece.

[nihil]

Hi r3b00+,

Both Aardpsymon and Mohaughn have made good points on physical constraints.

We could probably be a bit more specific if you could tell us:

1. Data volumes
2. Frequency of backups
3. Time window for making the backups