Food for Thought: Backups - from terrible to functional
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Here is the current "backup" system that has been in place since the beginning of time. We run Yosemite Backup Server, which stores backup data on an external hard drive (good 'ole consumer WD My Book drives. Full backup is run every week with daily incremental backups. Three disks are rotated every week. Apparently before the weekly backup the disk is formatted, so here is what three weeks of data storage looks like.
Day 1: Full Backup on Disk 1.
Day 2-6: Incremental backups on Disk 1.
Day 7: Full Backup on Disk 2. Disk 1 goes to off-site location 1.
Day 8-12: Incremental backups on Disk 2.
Day 13: Full Backup on Disk 3. Disk 2 goes to off-site location 1. Disk 1 goes to off-site location 2.
Day 14-18: Incremental backups of Disk 3.
Day 15: Disk 1 is wiped (formatted), then full backup is taken. Disk 3 goes to off-site location 1. Disk 2 goes to off-site location 2. The cycle continues.Items that are backed up are SQL Sever backups, transaction logs, and data directories used by IIS.
There are several problems with this. First, there is no data archiving beyond two weeks -- this might actually not be a problem depending on what's is decided as acceptable retention. Second, this requires someone (me) driving to our local data center, and swapping out the drives every week. Third, if something were to happen to the currently connected backup drive, and we need to restore the data, we're screwed, as the off-site disks will have data that's at least a week old.
So...
Part of my deal with our data center infrastructure project is deploying a functional backup system. For our environment it looks like Veeam seems to be the way to go (5 VMs in production). Of our three physical hosts, one would be hypervisor with a single VM (Veeam) and plenty of storage, which would store the backups from the other physical host that's a hypervisor for our production VMs. The question becomes how to get a copy of the backup data off-site. For those that use Veeam, what methods do you use to create an off-site copy of the backup data?
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You can replicate the backups to another server at your office or backup to a cloud solution.
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@dashrender said in Food for Thought: Backups - from terrible to functional:
You can replicate the backups to another server at your office or backup to a cloud solution.
It looks like Veeam has it's own marketplace with Veeam Cloud Connect. Also, replicating back to our office could work as well, since once I get the ERLs in place, I imagine our site-to-site VPN speed will improve.
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@eddiejennings said in Food for Thought: Backups - from terrible to functional:
@dashrender said in Food for Thought: Backups - from terrible to functional:
You can replicate the backups to another server at your office or backup to a cloud solution.
It looks like Veeam has it's own marketplace with Veeam Cloud Connect. Also, replicating back to our office could work as well, since once I get the ERLs in place, I imagine our site-to-site VPN speed will improve.
I use Veeam copy job to copy backups to an offsite Veeam instance. I can post more on this later.
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Can you guess when the Copy job started?
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@jaredbusch said in Food for Thought: Backups - from terrible to functional:
Can you guess when the Copy job started?
14:11?
So that's copying to another VM somewhere that's running Veeam. Other than rtfm, how's the connection made to that instance?
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@eddiejennings said in Food for Thought: Backups - from terrible to functional:
@jaredbusch said in Food for Thought: Backups - from terrible to functional:
Can you guess when the Copy job started?
14:11?
So that's copying to another VM somewhere that's running Veeam. Other than rtfm, how's the connection made to that instance?
You add a server. In my case, I have infrastructure in a colo that am backing up to that is already running an instance of Veeam (free version there) that is the backup target.
But you do not have to have a Windows server on site to do this.
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@jaredbusch said in Food for Thought: Backups - from terrible to functional:
Ah, I see. I assume you have a VPN connection to that colo, yes?
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@eddiejennings said in Food for Thought: Backups - from terrible to functional:
@jaredbusch said in Food for Thought: Backups - from terrible to functional:
Ah, I see. I assume you have a VPN connection to that colo, yes?
Yes, but you can do it over the open internet as nothing is in the clear to my knowledge.
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@EddieJennings That setup I took picture of before had to get reset and so those three VM's were sending the initial copy over.
That finished about 4 hours ago.
Now, I removed the DC from being excluded and told the job to sync now.
You can see in the text that the existing jobs barely had any change to send.
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Making their poor coax service from Charter (Spectrum now) cry like a baby...
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@jaredbusch said in Food for Thought: Backups - from terrible to functional:
Making their poor coax service from Charter (Spectrum now) cry like a baby...
hahaha 1.7GB in 30 minutes. Going to take 35+ hours at this rate.
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Having to drive somewhere to swap the drive each week sounds like such a PITA. Bet you cant wait to get that sorted.
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I run my servers locally in Camden. Space is not an issue for us, and we have dual lines/cooling anyway, so have not moved to a colocation. We run the free veeam agent on all the VMs to an on site Synology NAS - 60TB WDRed Pro drives.
I then have a second Synology NAS sitting in a colo in Enfield, and replicate the backups nightly to that.Works nicely. Veeam agent emails me the results of each backup nightly. So all I have to do is just delete the emails, and troublehoot any failed ones. Smooth and other than the hardware, pretty cheap.
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Guess what just finished..
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@jaredbusch Wow.
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@eddiejennings said in Food for Thought: Backups - from terrible to functional:
@jaredbusch Wow.
Was an initial seed of a server. So totally expected when the WAN pipe is only 10mbps up.
120GB of real data on a thin provisioned 500GB vhdx.
