[JohnR]

I'm quite proud of the fact that the whole AC file system is backed up daily, and the database hourly.

Except that I've just discovered that our current backup service has been down for several days. Given that we've also just had a power outage, this makes me nervous. So I'm looking for a backup to our backup as it were....  if you have positive experience with an rsync/ssh enabled backup service, pse let me know (or post it here).

Thx

JohnR

[JohnR]

OK, I've opened an account at rsync.net, using the unassailable logic that anyone that names their domain after a Unix command probably has a clue

(Well, I'm not really quite that random. But I'll start the backup backup going soon as I get the necessary info. In the meantime... fingers crossed.)

[JohnR]

Just for the record, our backups are fully operational again. I've also taken the precaution of making a critical subset of the backups also copy over to a server in Switzerland, of all places. Just in case...

At this point in time, I would tentatively recommend rsync.net to anyone looking for a remote backup solution, and quite strongly not recommend strongspace.com, as they have been down for over a week and only today decided to email account holders with critical information.

[Levi]

We use IronMountain for offsite backup but it is expensive even for a small sized business.

Backup or disaster recover is extremely important.  I am sure you have local backup in conjuction with offsite backup.

I will look more into rsync.net it looks affordable.

Thx
Levi

[brj]

Would something like Netbackup running from another AC owned server in a separate facility be any more price/performance competitive?

I've been a user on systems making use of Netbackup, EMC SAN systems with Redstone tape archiving, and most recently NetApps filers with their (local) snapshot capability.  I'm guessing all of those are over the top for this application...

[JohnR]

If we had another server we could in theory use rsync (the Unix command) to have them back each other up. My reservation there though would be that if one were compromised then the attacker could easily get to the other. I think the ideal would actually be to have a dedicated backup server in the same DC that initiated the backup connections to the production servers. And set up the firewall so that the backup server couldn't be accessed from outside. And then have the backup server back itself up to something like rsync.net

The amount of data that we have to back up is actually relatively small. (A few GB.) It would be nice to have it backed up as often as possible though...

[JohnR]

Oh right. I forgot to mention that the main problem I have with our current backup solution is that if something goes wrong (a la the StrongSpace downtime), I don't know about it. This is still an issue, actually... 

The other problem is that I've never done a recovery test on the hourly backups. The daily backups, yes, the hourly ones, no.

[Levi]

Another backup server would be nice.