Host your own off-site backups!
We have recently been looking at a solution that allows you to host your own off-site backup without having to subscribe to a hosted solution. When I first saw this I was very interested in it as a concept but was not at all sure that it would work. I thought that the amount of data having to be transferred over a simple ADSL link would simply be too much for a daily backup or that the set up and management would be so difficult that it would not be worth doing, however having tried it out ourselves it really works well.
How to host your own off-site backup
First of all you need to have an on-site backup with the right software installed. The "master" backup on your network that would carry out a full backup of your server creating a full image in the first instance and then would then carry out incremental backups every 15 minutes throught the day (these are small and fast as only the changes are being backed up) previous versions of the backups are kept in place giving you the ability to roll back to an earlier version of any file. This gives you a good on site backup.
A second “remote” device would be paired to the master with the data being synchronised initially whilst both devices are on the network (this is because the first bacjup would be too big to go over an ADSL connection). Once the two boxes have syncronised for the first time you would take the slave box to your remote office or home and connect it to your broadband router,from that point onwards synchronise any changes automatically. All data sent between the boxes is encrypted so you are not in danger of someone sniffing out and stealing your data as it moved over the internet, and of course you are only sending the changes in any case.
At this point it would be worth mentioning that as well as compression the backup software uses a deduplication feature that minimises the size of the backups and as we are only talking about transferring changes made at block level this means that the amount of data transferred is minimal.
You now have a backup in place that provides both an on and off premise backup solution. in the event of needing to do a restore a file or database you will be able to do so from the master box in the office. In the event of a site disaster you will have an off-site backup that you can carry out a bare metal restore from to dissimilar hardware to get you up and running quickly. you can even mount an image as a virtual machine to expedite the recovery time.
this works really well and is worth looking in to if you need an off-site backup but don’t want to have your data hosted at someone elses data centre and pay the costs associated with that service.
If you want to talk to us about this feel free to contact me at
[email protected] or take a look at our website to see how we can help you www.cselimited.co.uk
