I've been tasked with rearranging our backups. It's a pretty simple set up, but I know many of you have a lot more experience so I'm after some advice. We need to backup:

Exchange 2007 running on Windows 2008 server.
MS SQL 8.0 database running on Windows 2000 server.
A few shared folders.

These are each around 20GB, growing a little all the time.

The SQL server is being migrated to a new machine next month.

The primary backup device will be a 1TB locally attached USB drive.
A secondary backup will be made to a 1TB Windows share at a remote location via a 1meg link.

Specific requirements are:

• minimised traffic over the 1meg link.
• email confirmation.
• reasonable cost.
• I need to get it all working by the end of the week.

Left to my own devices, I'd probably use SQL's native backup and NTbackup for exchange. For the on-line backup backup I'd probably use something like Deltacopy. The very first on-line backup will actually be made locally and then physically transported to the data centre.

The Boss seems quite keen on using ARCserve which I've never used before. Anyone have experience with this product?
Any other products that you'd specifically recommend?

Thank you!

USB drives!? You're lucky! Back in Sun we were still using tapes!

I have always detested tapes, especially when they're transported off site. At a well known European car manufacturer, it once took them a whole day to extract a single file from last nights backup. Half of that time was fetching the tape, the other half was waiting for damned thing! That's actually an example where the tape worked. Horrible things, and about a zillion times more expensive than a USB drive.

</phobia>

Yes I've used ARCserve when I was on a technical refresh of a major organisation a few years back.

It isn't cheap but its effective. One interface to do everything. I can't comment on what is best as I'm by no means an expert in this arena.

Hope that helps.

I see where you're coming from, but off-site backups are good. And USB drives really don't scale and are rather slow (modern tape can sustain >100MB/s, the seek time's cr@p though). File checkpoints (eg Windows VSS) help quite a lot to remove the drawbacks you mention

Well, we've committed to a solution now.

We're using "Backup Assist" for everything. It's a lot cheaper than either ArcServe or Backup Exec, and it had the huge advantage of a website that was both informative and worked properly. The ArcServe website is one of the worst I've ever seen, obviously made by a retarded sales man with a list of "important phrases" working with a designer who didn't have a clue - probably because he wasn't actually given one. The Backup Exec web pages were slightly more useful, but the site crashed repeatedly while trying to register. After half an hour of them failing to process our details, we gave up. Seriously; who'd trust their backups to a company with a borked website?!

Everything is backed up to a local 1TB drive. The total storage use is less than 100GB, so this will hopefully last for 3 years where upon it will be replaced. This weekend I'm testing an Rsync to another drive, and provided it's all OK then on Monday I'm driving down to Docklands and putting it in the hosting centre.

I'm sure that tapes have advanced vastly since my experience many years ago, and USB drives may not be the most sophisticated solution but given the scale of our company I believe they're ideal. I think our daily local backups should only take about 20 minutes a day.

We'll have 4 copies of all our data; the mirror on the server, a local backup and the off-site backup. I may do a 5th copy to a drive in my house, just to be sure.

I'm just about to log in remotely to check the state of play. What fun