Offsite Backups
Good Day All,
I would like to get you guys opinion on the best way to do offsite backups. Right now I am using Symantec Backup Exec and we are storing backups to tape, and then storing the tape in a bank saftey deposit box. I am looking to switch over to Acronis Backup 12. I see only the advanced version supports Tape media. However, I think tape media is a dying storage model. It's quite slow and can be unreliable. However, the ease of taking the backup offsite makes it a great backup medium. I'm trying to see if there is another way to do this.
Right now I have 4 servers, 2 of which are virtualized. I would like to find a good backup method to store the backups offsite. I know most people are turning to the cloud for this solution, but I don't think this will work well as our internet speeds are not that great. My internet speed is 12mbps down and up. Also, between the 4 servers, we probably have close to 1TB of data that needs to be backed up. Does anybody have a good solution for this? Is there some sort of centralized storage device that we can swap out hard drives to store at the bank or something? Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Ryan
Hi SinnN,
I was thinking about the external hard drives, but that would mean I would need at least 6 external hard drives (one for each server including virtual servers). Perhaps this would be required. But I was hoping to find a better solution, where I could backup all servers (or a couple servers) to one centralized hard disk that could be swapped out. I don't know if this exists or not, but thought I'd ask. Any ideas?
--Ryan
Hi Ryan,
Why so much external HDD? You can set up the same location for all of your backups, same goes for the 2nd backup location. Then you would just need a big external HDD to store them all.
No ?
sinN
Hello Ryan,
In the standard version of Acronis Backup, you can mount an external HDD and use this share as a single destination for all the servers.
In the Advanced versions, we have the Acronis Storage Node (ASN) component to resolve this issue. This allows you to designate any local storage on your server as a centralized backup location for all agents. The trafic is sent to the ASN through the network using our own encrypted protocol, which then writes the data to disk.
Version 12 Advanced is comming next year.
Igor,
I did not realize you can mount a hard drive and share it to use as a single backup destination. It sounds like this may be the solution to my problem. I'm assuming, I can setup 2 backup destinations and then just swap them out every week or so. I look forward to the Version 12 of Acronis Advance.
Thanks,
I was doing some research and discovered RDX removable media. RDX is a technology similar to Tapes but actually uses hot swapable SATA hard drives which are loaded and unloaded from a drive bay as needed. This sounds like the perfect solution to me as I can easily archive drives in a safe offsite location without having to reconfigure backup storage locations, etc.
I spoke to an Acronis representative using the online chat feature to ask if RDX storage media was compatible with Acronis 12, and he said that it was NOT compatible. However, I found a datasheet saying that it was (http://www.acronis.com/en-us/resource-center/resource/acronis-backup-da…). After showing him the datasheet, he changed his mind and said that it WAS compatible. This makes me a little unsure. Does anyone have any experience with RDX and can tell me for sure if Acronis 12 supports RDX media? If you are using RDX, does it function as expected and are you satisfied with the solution?
Thanks,
Ryan
Hi Ryan,
RDX drives are supported by AB12, there may exist some caveats regarding drive ejection which can be solved by additional post commands. I don't use a RDX but I have seen some posts here in forums.
See also 58372: Acronis Backup 12: Backing Up to Removable Devices with Regular Drive Swaps for more info.
hello,
we are using Acronis backup for 9 ESX hosts with lot of virtual machines.. the total amount of space required for bakcup is about 20TB. Actually we do backups on two nas sets, but we want to realize an offsite backup (favourite solutions are tapes but also realiable hdd would be ok).
The point is that we don't want to backup in simultaneous location becasue this will impact on the performance. We prefer to backup on nas as always and then, in a second time, copy the .tib files to tape or external hdds. This feature seemns to be not present on acronis, any tips to do this assuming that we are using only linux agents? my idea is to attach a tape to a phisical server, then grant this server the access to the agents file systems through ssh (agents are all with local attached storage).