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Thread: Drive Snapshot

  1. #1
    Gonzo District BOFH westin's Avatar
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    Drive Snapshot

    Hey guys,

    We are doing some disaster recovery planning around here, [hence all the questions about recovering data and such]. I was wondering what you would recommend as far as a good utility to take a snapshot of a drive. I have come across several, but I haven't seen many reviews on them. I was hoping you could make some suggestions. We are going to back up every Friday night, and I would like to have a few weeks stored on our drive [1TB external] at any given time, in case we need to roll back. The amount of data on the drive that will be backed up is only about 60GB, and is hosted on a Windows 2003 server.

    Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. If you need any more info, let me know.

    Thanks in advance!
    \"Those of us that had been up all night were in no mood for coffee and donuts, we wanted strong drink.\"

    -HST

  2. #2
    Senior Member nihil's Avatar
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    Hi westin, and thank you for posting to the Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Planning forum. Yeah, I was the bozo who suggested it a while back.

    Just a few questions:

    1. You clearly state that you will do this on Friday nights. That implies to me that you will have the server in dedicated mode. Is that correct, and have you considered the possibility of making the image on the fly?

    2. Will this be a manned (locally or remotely) exercise, or will it just run? The problem with the latter is the larger disaster opportunity window until someone comes and removes the backup media to a safe location?

    3. What are your plans for offsite storage or copies?

    4. How do you see this integrating with other data backup requirements? For example; finance are driven by periods, HR want to keep everything forever (HR are anal ) and so on?

    5. Do you use journalling?

    Cheers,

    Johnno

    EDIT: You might like to take a look at this site:

    http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/intro.htm

    gore will like it because it is German stuff
    Last edited by nihil; January 26th, 2009 at 07:34 PM.

  3. #3
    Gonzo District BOFH westin's Avatar
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    Hey Nihil, thanks for the response.

    I haven't given much thought to making the image on the fly. Honestly I didn't even know if that was a capability with making an image.

    2. The drive will be backed up locally from it's current location, across town, and then I will bring the external drive back to my office with me for safe keeping.

    3. We are looking into using a company called Mozy for our offsite backups. http://mozy.com/pro

    4. Not sure on this one. It is student data, I am not sure how long we are required to keep it.

    5. I did not set this server up, and have only logged into it a couple of times to look at the file structure, and run updates. So I couldn't say for sure at this time whether or not it uses journaling...
    \"Those of us that had been up all night were in no mood for coffee and donuts, we wanted strong drink.\"

    -HST

  4. #4
    Senior Member
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    Mozy is actually pretty good, as an EMC employee I get access to a small acount for free I think 10GB or something.

    In general the solution should be based on at least:
    - How important the data is
    - How fast the data needs to be restored
    - Space the backups will take
    - How secure the backups need to be (security)
    - How the restore will be distributed based on the environment

  5. #5
    Senior Member Wazz's Avatar
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    Stay away from Iron Mountain's Live Vault whatever you do...Your Exchange Data will be unrestorable and your backups most likely will corrupt...everyone I know has had BAD experiences.....
    "It is a shame that stupidity is not painful" - Anton LaVey

  6. #6
    AO's Filibustier Cheap Scotch Ron's Avatar
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    We use Dell Virtual Copy and Snapshot (Premium features included with hardware) to copy volumes to our backup SAN (Dell MD3000i). Easy GUI for configuration and decent performance (wall time).
    In God We Trust....Everything else we backup.

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