Backing Up - 3 Sites with 100Mbit Links, 2 Miles apart

[Vini]

What backup options/solutions would you recommend. With varying SLA's...

At present we do a full backup, each night, all sites to Tape; HQ does 1Tb, HS does 5Gb, HW does 200Gb.

In my head I see the 100Mbit link between sites (which is not a full circle) allowing for mirroring/fail over type situations aswell as replacing the tape backups at each site. Quite how this is done, I have no idea, hence asking.

My colleague thinks tapes as we are is the best solution, but I'm not sure they provide the quickest 'restorability' and even reliability.

[jim]

Depends where the tapes are physically stored a lot of the time as to their usefulness...

Surely you could easily replicate the data between each site - so presuming that not much data is going to change on each individual day, with a 100Mb connection you should have more than enough time over night to send across any alterations?

If you had sufficient storage in HS, presumably you could backup HQ and HW to HS, and HS to HW or HQ, giving data redundancy for each location?

I don't think the online systems used for this type of thing are very special - we're using one currently to backup around 500GB remotely over a 200Kb upload connection... supposedly made by the firm who do our IT stuff but in reality I think it's just a very basic system with a few company jpegs to look like they designed it.

[mikerr]

Depends where the tapes are physically stored a lot of the time as to their usefulness...

Hah yes.. and I hope some of those tapes are held off-site too ?

Surely you could easily replicate the data between each site - not much data is going to change on each individual day, so with a 100Mb connection you should have more than enough time over night to send across any alterations?

How do you know that ?

[jim]

How do you know that ?

I don't, in my mind I'd posed that as a question . I'll go back and rewrite it.

[Moby-Dick]

you could go with disk and a replicated solution. I assume you have physical servers ?

[Vini]

Tapes at present are held off site.

We have Physical servers at the minute, but would look at getting one server capable of virtualising 4/5 most important from HQ and the one from HW

(or thats what I envisage)