Backup System For 5 PC SMB
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I should mention Aetherstore would work best if everybody is working from Desktops that are left on 24/7, and not desktops that are shut off at the end of the day or laptops that are gone a lot.
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The use of the NAS should only be for the data. I suppose you could also image the PCs and store the images on the NAS, the replicate it to the cloud.
Again, move away from making regular images of the endpoints. That's home user thinking, not SMB thinking.
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@BRRABill said:
@dafyre said:
This is one of the areas where Aetherstore would really shine, I think. I'm currently using it as a backup target for my lab at work, and it seems to do pretty good (and I have a crappy lab setup, lol).
How does it deal with getting the data offsite?
It does not. You would do that using any normal tool to move the data offsite. AetherStore is an onsite storage solution only. It turns your desktop PCs into a "network SAN."
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@MattSpeller said:
@BRRABill said:
Though to go from 250GB to 500GB the price goes from $299 to $1049.
Acronis is horrifically expensive but it can be the difference between 1 person IT department and having to hire a 2nd.
Except we've been hired by companies because Acronis was so complicated to get working correctly that even with Acronis support they couldn't get it working. So it could, in rare cases, be getting Acronis to work that requires you to go from one to two IT staffers
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@dafyre said:
I should mention Aetherstore would work best if everybody is working from Desktops that are left on 24/7, and not desktops that are shut off at the end of the day or laptops that are gone a lot.
Should be mentioned that you have a lot of control with AetherStore and you could use just some of the desktops for it and not others. But you hope to have four "always on" nodes which doesn't leave a ton of flexibility at this size.
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@Dashrender said:
Again, move away from making regular images of the endpoints. That's home user thinking, not SMB thinking.
I'm still not sure I understand why. I would think the opposite. Home users do NOT do images. Yet, IMO an incremental image based backup is the best you can get.
Let's take for example a 1 person accounting office or a 2 person law firm. It seems to me the method I am looking for would be more efficient for them, not less.
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@BRRABill said:
I'm still not sure I understand why. I would think the opposite. Home users do NOT do images. Yet, IMO an incremental image based backup is the best you can get.
Well in the big enterprise space, even servers are more and more rarely being backed up. Backups are moving towards data only to allow for lower storage needs, faster backups, faster recoveries and more ability to retain data long term as the retention needs are lower.
Home users rarely do backups. When they do, either image backups or "file to cloud" tools appear to be the most common.
I would argue that the image based backup or block based with incrementals like you have that can create an image is very good, it is not the best. The best that is practical with what you are working with, sure. I'm not saying that you should consider anything "more" as that would push the bounds of the ridiculous, but I just don't want it to be missed that this would not be generally considered the best even for situations where data is stored locally.
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@BRRABill said:
Let's take for example a 1 person accounting office or a 2 person law firm. It seems to me the method I am looking for would be more efficient for them, not less.
If you are able to retrieve individual files from the backups (StorageCraft and Veeam both allow for this) then I would agree that that is a very good approach when you have a local backup target like AetherStore or a NAS device. When going to cloud, I would say that it is generally quite impractical unless, maybe if you have Gigabit connections like Google Fiber.
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@scottalanmiller said:
that this would not be generally considered the best even for situations where data is stored locally.You mean in terms of ease-of-use for the end user? Yeah, I agree with that.
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@scottalanmiller said:
When going to cloud, I would say that it is generally quite impractical unless, maybe if you have Gigabit connections like Google Fiber.
Really just for the initial seeding, or if the user has really big files. On our servers (and probably the PCs of people in a 5 PC or less office) the incrementals that are sent to the cloud are pretty small.
Most services have initial seeding options, some (such as Datto) for free.
We didn't use that on our servers. It took a day or so but the initial upload went fine. But we have 75/75 FIOS. I guess not everyone is lucky to have that.
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BTW: this is only my second posting, but this is really like live chatting with a bunch of my close IT buddies. Awesome!
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@BRRABill said:
@scottalanmiller said:
that this would not be generally considered the best even for situations where data is stored locally.You mean in terms of ease-of-use for the end user? Yeah, I agree with that.
That was not my primary thought. Generally backups are managed (injecting personal assumption there, but I'm pretty sure that that is correct.) This is valid, but just not what I was getting at. I was referring to less network and systems overhead, more ability to rapidly restore, less cost, etc.
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@BRRABill said:
Really just for the initial seeding, or if the user has really big files. On our servers (and probably the PCs of people in a 5 PC or less office) the incrementals that are sent to the cloud are pretty small.
What is sent TO the cloud is of minor concern. The issue is how do you restore quickly if you have to pull down a massive image of your systems instead of only the data?
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@BRRABill said:
We didn't use that on our servers. It took a day or so but the initial upload went fine. But we have 75/75 FIOS. I guess not everyone is lucky to have that.
That's pretty good for a five person office. How big are your images? What would be the expected "pull down" time for a restore?
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Here's a thought -Assuming all 5 computers are identical, make a baseline image (though legally that might be touch, it would mean having a Open License copy of Windows to create images of, because you can't legally image OEMs to any machine but the one it came with). Deploy that image to all computer, and save all the data on the NAS. Backup the NAS and have a DVD/USB stick with a copy of the image on it. Update the Image yearly.
When you have a failure, virus infection, whatever - simply restore the image, do a bit of configuring, connect to the NAS and finished.
If the whole NAS dies, you've been backing that up to the cloud, get a new NAS and start the recovery.
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@scottalanmiller said:
What is sent TO the cloud is of minor concern. The issue is how do you restore quickly if you have to pull down a massive image of your systems instead of only the data?
Ah, I see what you are getting at.
Well, the only time you would need something like that would be in the case of a total catastrophe locally. (Or everything gets stolen.) I'd hope the solution includes some sort of way to spin up the image in the cloud. Again, like a Datto or the premium service ShadowProtect offers.
But I think what you are saying is, the risk/reward versus price to a 5-PC SMB just isn't worth it.
One of the options I had thought about (and someone mentioned) was one of these NAS devices that can replicate itself. I had been looking at the Synology which someone mentioned.
You have ShadowProtect (or Veeam) running the backups to the NAS on-site, which replicates, say, to my office (or the owner's home or whatever) so we could just grab that and bring it over.
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@BRRABill said:
Well, the only time you would need something like that would be in the case of a total catastrophe locally. (Or everything gets stolen.) I'd hope the solution includes some sort of way to spin up the image in the cloud. Again, like a Datto or the premium service ShadowProtect offers.
Well okay, this has its limitations. Only a few specific services offer this, most do not. This adds a lot of cost, of course. And you need to check to see if VDI is covered, because as desktops these are not covered by any normal licensing and you will need VDI licensing both for spinning up the VMs and for any devices that will be used to connect to them. VDI isn't a simple process. My guess is that those vendors (Datto actually uses ShadowProtect so that's the same solution twice more or less) leave all licensing liability up to you, which sucks as that is super expensive.
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@BRRABill said:
One of the options I had thought about (and someone mentioned) was one of these NAS devices that can replicate itself. I had been looking at the Synology which someone mentioned.
All of the cost effective small NAS units use Linux under the hood and RSYNC is the tool used across the board for this. You'll find the same capability in every small device.
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@BRRABill said:
You have ShadowProtect (or Veeam) running the backups to the NAS on-site, which replicates, say, to my office (or the owner's home or whatever) so we could just grab that and bring it over.
Exactly. And you can restore over the WAN if necessary and 99.99% of the time you'd do a restore from the local NAS, not a distant one, for super fast restores.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Well okay, this has its limitations. Only a few specific services offer this, most do not. This adds a lot of cost, of course. And you need to check to see if VDI is covered, because as desktops these are not covered by any normal licensing and you will need VDI licensing both for spinning up the VMs and for any devices that will be used to connect to them. VDI isn't a simple process. My guess is that those vendors (Datto actually uses ShadowProtect so that's the same solution twice more or less) leave all licensing liability up to you, which sucks as that is super expensive.
Yeah in my testing of this, licensing becomes an issue. I have not had to officially do it yet (I worked around it with an OEM key workaround in testing) but am assured MS will help in a disaster recovery scenario.
You are right it's basically the same solution, twice. Though it's interesting that they are pretty different. Nice technology, though.
