Backup strategy

Topic

New Reply

At present we use an external hard drive to back up our system. Full backup one a week and daily increments. The external drive is then taken off site each night.

Our insurance company are now insisting that we keep a backup off site at all times and suggested we get a second external drive and do the backups on alternate days to each drive.

This doesn’t seem right to me

On drive A we will have day1 + day3 + day 5 + day 7
On drive B we will have day2 + day4 + day6

Unless I am going mad that means if one drive is lost/stolen/destroyed (especially drive A) we have a totally useless backup

Am I right?

David

Reply | Quote

Replies

If the full backup is made on day 1 on drive A, the backups on drive B will be useless without drive A.
Without drive B, you can at least restore the full backup from drive A.

If you really have to backup to 2 different drives, you should make a full backup every day.

Reply | Quote

Are they requiring that you have an up-to-date backup off site at all times? Obviously it would not be difficult to have a week-old backup off site at all times, since you could simply switch the drives at the end of a week.

If you want to have something better, and the offsite location does not have a PC that would let you copy disk1 to disk2, you could get a third hard drive to rotate with the second. After doing the current day’s full or incremental, you could clone disk1 to whichever of disk2/disk3 is onsite and take them both offsite. The next day, you would bring back disk1 and the older of disk2/disk3.

Reply | Quote

Hans’ idea has a lot of merit in that today’s imaging software is pretty fast and I don’t think it would be too “painful” to do a full backup every day instead of an incremental.

My full backup yesterday of about 84 gigabytes took just under an hour and a half. I realize that’s a lot longer than minutes that an incremental would take, but it could work for you.

Reply | Quote

You could also consider using differential backups. To recover from a differential backup you need the original image and the most recent differential, but not the ones in between. This may let you devise a strategy where you take two image backups at the weekend, to both disks, then move one off site and swap which drive is offsite each day.

Reply | Quote

Would an online backup fit the criteria for your insurance company ??

Reply | Quote

Thanks for all the input.

Decided to go for full backups each day

DD

Reply | Quote

Thanks for all the input.

Decided to go for full backups each day

DD

That’s certainly easiest to manage, provided you have enough time and disk space.

Reply | Quote