Morning All

My boss has just approached me, as he does, with an informal chat about looking into solutions of archiving our vast quantities of company (digital) data.

At present we employ, sporadically, tapes to backup our RAID 10 storage volumes - but with it all sat within our one server room - there's clearly "risk". We're a single-office practice, so we don't have the option to do a dual-way replication with another location - although we have considered doing as much with a NAS volume at one of our Director's house - but we've pretty measly lines and so far any effort to get that running (stable) hasn't been particularly great.

Now that there is the lure of cloud-based solutions, I'm just wondering if that really is the way to go these days?

Personally, I would rather a more "wholesome" service - one that incorporates simple volume archival storage with a more functional features (like version control, team-access management, etc) and have been looking at http://www.gteam.com/ which is priced around $500 for 250GB for a years signup... and (since I've not looked just yet) I was wondering what else is out there I should start looking at.

EDIT
My primary focus is on the architectural documentation control side of things - over IT considerations of archive (but feel the two could be one and the same) and if it makes any difference, we do have Sharepoint, but again, hosted locally (and not backed up) - and I was thinking we could use that, but (apparently) there's a 100mb file size send limit (!?! - doesn't sound right seeing as we can email that with hotmail accounts!) and then there's the fact that our hardware (and line) will be subject to the demands imposed by external access - and we'd take on that IT-management risk (which clearly isn't cool) - and it would be better to farm out that responsibility to another party.

How many servers?
How much data?
Do you just need backup or full disaster recovery (the ability to fire your servers up in the cloud & "dial in" to them in the event of a disaster?)

I think it's safe to say that's fairly important info. Simon!

Err... we've got two servers, (I think) and 10TB (I think) - so not a lot really.

We'd probably go with plain old backup, but clearly would consider disaster recovery if it's attractive.

10TB is a vast amount, far more than you could possibly upload. Our main off-site backup is only around 50GB and that takes all weekend to just synchronise the changes.

10Tb are you sure?

We back-up 6 servers and that is around 900Gb if we do full backups not incremental.

We currently backup using Acronis to a USB3 hard drive which we then take off site every day - so we have 5 drives for a weekly cycle.

Just about to change that with Simon's help so we get replicated in "almost" real time to a data centre so we can "dial-in" there if we have a major disaster - although it is not cheap and you need a good fibre broadband line to do it it will give us much more protection.

Don't forget, if you do graphics work, you use a lot more space than just text based. I get through about 2TB (on a 2 TB server) a year and there's only two of us and I could do with having files of more than a year old instantly accessible without going back to the archive.

You are talking serious money there.

I'd say around £3300 a month or so for 10TB with most backup providers.

Hmmm, I think I might have got some numbers wrong somewhere - or at least mixed up. First thoughts are that although we may have 10TB of storage, we're most probably not using all of that - most of our jobs are in the 3-10GB range (we do do a lot of image work), and we have around 150-200 jobs accessible - so even conservative maths puts that in the 2TB range - which would still be mighty pricey if we were to put it all up on a cloud somewhere if Simon's guesstimate is a fair measureof £/GB.

The main problem we (read, I) have is a reluctance to get a faster line - which I think is incredidbly short-sighted - especially because we employ absolutely no traffic management or IT policy to restrict access to anywhere on the web (a lot of people are streaming all day long).

I personally like the portable hard drive solution and/or a fireproof&water-tight safe for the tapes since it's the most economical - but I know people will forget to take the drive(s) away every day - which is why the passive tricklefeed replication is so much more appealing (in terms of maintenance, price is another thing)

For the solution Simon is sorting out for us, we got a dedicated fibre-line to do it so no one else in the company can nick it's bandwidth. Costs around £75/month with Zen.

On backing up to removable hard drive - this is the solution we are about to replace. We got 5 x WD 1Tb hard drives that we popped into an Icybox enclosure with USB3 interface. That solution has worked fine but, as you say, people have to remember to swap the disks over every night, but at least the backup is taken off-site.

Have you tiered your data yet? You should start by working out what has to be available for immediate restoration or access in a DR scenario, what you can wait maybe 24 hours to get at, and what you only need to keep at all for purposes of nostalgia. Very few companies need access to all files equally.

Some cloudy providers will allow you to use cheaper storage zones for the less urgent stuff. Or you can maybe use a monthly tape for that and put only the stuff you need to in the cloudy storage.

I'm looking at fireproof hard drives and leaving them on site.

The main question is do you want archiving, backup or DR?

Archiving would mean you could search it (essentially a server offsite you move data to).

Online backup would backup every night & have a retention period on it. You'd be looking between £500-600 a month for this (on 2tb data).

DR would involve images of servers taken both locally to a NAS box in the same building (for fast recovery of a failed server) & uploaded offsite to other servers that you could VPN into in the event of a disaster and carry on working. This could easily be £10-20k in the first year & £8-10k per year after that.


Any of these solutions would need a half decent internet line (& probably a dedicated one at that, unless you go full on EFM or Fibre in to the premises).

Drop me over a BT line (maybe your existing ADSL or fax number) and I'll see what's in your area.