Backup solution recommendation required please?

[chavo]

Hi all.

A fried has a hosted windows 2008 box. he keeps his company website on it and alot of other stuff, if this server went down and he lost his data he is sure he would have no business left.

I know a little bit about IT stuff so i suggested that he purchases a backup software package that allows full and incremental backups from bare metal rebuild images, then we create a webdav folder on his home PC server (in his loft), map this as a mapped drive on the Win 2008 server use a folder synchronisation tool to sync the backup folder to the webdav mapped drive and bingo. we have 2 full bare metal copied of the company data, only costing the price of the backup software.

i created the webdav for him no issues works a treat, he got a trail of some Novabackup software. that created the backup and i used Synkron to replicate the data between the 2 folders... happy days.

The problems...

The backup is 249Gb so far it has been running for 55 hours! it has 5 hours left, i personally know that this is far to long, the back up is running to the same drive yet he is only getting 12mb per second.

Secondly when the sync tool runs it is synking 0b the backup file shows but at 0 bytes could this be because the backup is still running?

Does anyone know of a backup software that is sub £300 that will do bare metal full and incrementals that is faster than this?
Server specs are 3ghz Q9650, 8gb ram. Wndows 2008 R2. hosted on easyspace

Thanks for any advice or tips

[Agent]

A couple of things to keep in mind:

Backing up doesn't ensure minimal downtime on its own. Sure, you have your data, but if it's going to take you days to redeploy everything on another machine, you're losing sales (nevermind the hassles of getting someone to set it back up)

Backup software for servers isn't cheap. If you take Acronis for example, you're looking at £650ish (http://www.acronis.co.uk/backup-reco...erver-windows/). There probably is cheaper and comparable out there, but you'll have to wait for others to advise on that.


Have you considered a VM / VM based hosting?

With a VM, you can simply backup the entire VM file. If the server dies, even hardware, simply boot up the image on another machine with the VM software installed. Downtime is as long as it takes you to copy the file and boot it up / reconfigure any domains to a new IP if needed.

VMWare have a PDF with some details in it: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_301_201_vm_backup.pdf

There is also software which backs up VMs in near realtime too.

Keep in mind the difference between hardware and software failure (even being hacked) though. Make sure you have a contingency for both.

[chavo]

Thanks for your reply, i thik the real issue is how to get the image weather that be a TIB of a physical server or a VHD from a virtual machine FROM the hosting company to a safe location offsite preferably at his house. thats where i thought of using Webdav but it keeps copying 0 byte files.

[Paul_tech]

Did you check whether the speed issues are connected to the software itself or is that some hardware issue? I can recommend Handy Backup 7 for your case since it's pretty cheap and does what you're looking for, but there wouldn't be any point if it's not the software issue that the backup goes this slow.