Minds Eye

How do you manage the daily backups of your company. Do you rely on tapes which are rotated daily, or contain series of incremental backups from a monthly/weekly master?

How quickly can you restore from these backups? Do you need to restore the master and then incrementals from this point? Are the backups taken off-site regularly or are they done over the Internet to a remote site to start with?

Are you using a remote office site to store replica data sets on and how often are they synchronised or replicated?

If they are off-site, either remotely via the Internet or physically via some medium, how quickly can you restore from these backups to get a business up and running which had been totally burnt to the ground?

All questions which I ask myself when I am trying to answer and overcome the problem of data storage explosions and the expectation that everything is backed up and immediately recoverable.

I am currently using a set of external hard disk drives which are rotated through sets of daily and weekly units and provide daily backups for a fortnight and weeklies which will span 2 months. Is this enough for our company who have (a moderately small at) 300Gb requirements of data which needs to be restoreable for disaster recovery?

What is the best practice used for these scenarios?? We do not need tape libraries and I do not see the need for this amount of data backup to grow beyaond 500Gb in the next 5 years.

Thoughts and suggestions welcome.