We're running Windows Server 2003 SBS and another machine with Server 2003 Standard on it.
The SBS server is about 7 years old running pretty much 24/7 – a HP server of some description. We have an Ultrium 448 cycling LTO2 400GB tapes daily and incrementally backing up approximately 100gb worth of data (20gb C:\ and system state, 40gb exchange, 40gb database for some crap marketing software) on BackupExec 10D. As of 5 months ago, the backups have been consistently failing with IO errors, bad reads and some write errors.
When I say consistent, I mean every time and we haven't had a proper backup for the entire 5 months – So if the server explodes tomorrow, 7 years worth of data will just cease to exist. I've only just recently rejoined the company and am looking at rectifying the more concerning problems, so the first thing I did was try a backup to an USB2.0 external drive. It was excruciatingly slow. In fact it was so slow it took 40 hours and it still wasn't finished. I ended up cancelling it and reconfiguring the selections again to reduce file size. This, however, isn't a permanent solution.
I concluded that the IO error was either from a faulty tape drive (which has a tape stuck in there right now and not coming out) or from a dying SCSI controller. Neither of them are good news and both are extremely expensive to fix. I'm operating on an extremely low budget so have been looking at outsourcing the backups.
A company in Sydney (where I'm located) offer incremental online backups via a NAS. It costs almost double a new tape drive but offers monthly repayments which will let us get through times when cash flow is minimal. It seems like a sweet deal but it is still a little bit pricey. So I'm looking for a cheaper, yet reliable solution. Maybe some in-house NAS or something offsite? The idea is to avoid using tapes.
Are there any recommendations for rectifying my current situation? Or are tapes the only way to go? I'm concerned that the server will die one day in the near future and I must be able to restore it to another server with different hardware.
Best Answer
There are some good discussions on backup already on Server Fault. I'd have a look at them:
my local backup request
Is our planned backup strategy adequate for my new server insfrastructure?
Recommended Backup Media for Circa 2009?
I notice that you're already ruling out tape. I'd do a cost-benefit analysis of the alternatives pitted against tape before dismissing tape out of hand. It sounds to me like you've either got a bum SCSI controller, cable, or bum tape drive and it's unfortunate that it has soured you on tape because tape can be very reliable and robust.
I did some calculations a few months ago (posted on Server Fault in one of the questions above, but not updated) and found that tape wasn't necessarily the most expensive route. Call me a traditionalist, but tape has worked very well for me and my Customers, and has proven to be reliable and suitable for disaster recovery. I tend to think that a lot of the "horror stories" associated with tape being unreliable often stem from backup strategies that don't involve testing of the backups after-the-fact. As is often said, backup isn't about backup-- it's about being able to restore.
Having a maintenance agreement for your hardware is, obviously, a component of any robust solution as well. You state that you need a backup you can restore to other hardware, but I'd caution you that your SBS server's "System State" backups aren't restorable by any Microsoft-supported means to alternative hardware. Hopefully your other server is a domain controller, since you'll be losing Active Directory (and, thus, making your Exchange data fairly difficult to get at) if you lose that SBS Server computer.
Having a maintenance agreement on the tape drive and / or server would get you out of the mess that you're in, in this case. It's particularly critical since you've currently got a backup, assuming you don't have another domain controller, for which you really need the identical server hardware available for restore.
You shouldn't center your whole backup regime around writing backups to an on-site storage device. Backup is off-site and offline. Anything less isn't backup.
I'd question if you can restore fast enough to get back up and running in a timely fashion if your main backup is an off-site device and accessible only through your Internet connection. If your renmote backup provider has a provision to ship you a physical storage device I could see that working. If you have to download your entire backup corpus over a consumer Internet connection, though, I'd think that you'd be talking about at least a couple of days to get everything back up and running. Ouch!