Back-up programs/methods

[Anonymous]

Hi there,

Just curious as to what back-up software everyone uses? I'm working in a building design/drafting office and we use Nero to burn our work to a dvd once a week, but we find that Nero doesn't seem to notice updated pln files, at times we're not sure if we're backing up the latest edition. We feel as though there has to be a more efficient way of doing this, any ideas?

Thanks,
Emily

[Anonymous]

We use Retrospect to back up the server that contains all of the project files to an external hard drive. We rotate two hard drives each week and always keep one offsite. As jobs are complete, we archive them off the server and burn those to DVD.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Millard, we had thought something like that might be the way to go.

[Haneef Tayob]

Hello
At our office, we've just installed a network drive (iomega) which came with some backup software. The drive connects directly via any ethernet cable into the network.
The advantage is that backups are created unattended and even daily or as used.
We set which folders and when we would like to backup. We also set how many revisions it should store. In the event of a file being corrupt, the network drive is directly accessible as a drive like any pc drive on the server for quick restoration.

This backup is on site, but we keep it tucked away out of site under one of the table.

For a second backup which I take off site, I try to backup onto dvd at least once a month (I'll need to try more often). I usually search for the last 2 month work and store it onto the dvd.

[Chazz]

Millard wrote:
We use Retrospect to back up the server that contains all of the project files to an external hard drive. We rotate two hard drives each week and always keep one offsite. As jobs are complete, we archive them off the server and burn those to DVD.

Ditto.

I work alone so my server is my back-up machine. That's all I use it for. The best thing to do is locate the backup machine in another building if you can.

Retrospect is a pain to set up and admin and their tech support is close to predatory. The last several upgrades have been expensive and very limited in scope. It's old archaic looking software but I've never seen anything better in terms of feature completeness.

More and more my stuff is sitting on web-servers maintained by other poor shlubbs and connected via project management web apps. I pay US$9.99/mo for 100GB of space. It's almost free and I don't need to maintain it. Web apps is where we are all headed. Soon, it will only make sense to back up our local data to remote servers maintained by people we never meet.

[Thomas Holm]

Chazz wrote:

Millard wrote:
We use Retrospect to back up the server that contains all of the project files to an external hard drive. We rotate two hard drives each week and always keep one offsite. As jobs are complete, we archive them off the server and burn those to DVD.

Ditto.

I work alone so my server is my back-up machine. That's all I use it for. The best thing to do is locate the backup machine in another building if you can.

Retrospect is a pain to set up....

We use LaCie's Silverkeeper for the same purpose, to backup te external hard drive (Firewire). Free, fast, but supported and maintained software! (they sell hard drives with it) Has worked flawlessly since 2002 here. And the backups are Finder-mountable and don't need the software for restoring, should that happen.

[Chazz]

Thomas wrote:
We use LaCie's Silverkeeper...Free, fast, but supported and maintained software!.....And the backups are Finder-mountable and don't need the software for restoring, should that happen.

Yeah, Finder mountablity (did I just type that?) has always been a bane of Retrospect. But does Silverkeeper create iterative "snapshots" that allow you to create unattended backups and then restore a backup from ANY date in the past? (at least going back as far as you have disk space for). The most common form of data loss is actually users trashing things accidentally. Frequently you don't know it's lost for a while and then a simple volume copy will overwrite the lost file and you're sunk.

When I set this up years ago I poo-poohed all the free stuff because I thought going with heavy duty, complex software was the more secure way to go. It was probably overly paranoid of me but that was kind of the conventional wisdom at the time.

Right now my machine is backed up 2x per day (night and lunchtime). The backups are iterative for two weeks and then get rewritten after that. However, the Night and Lunchtime rewrites are staggered so you can always get something going back a ways.

Some of ISPs are now offering cheap 15-30Mb broadband connections in select markets here in the US. That, combined with some hosting services offering UNLIMITED storage for under $US13/month (see ix web hosting) means we are not going to be doing this firewire, local server, DVD dance much longer.

I won't miss it.

[Anonymous]

Here is my ideal backup setup which I recommend to the firms I work with (those that ask anyway):

1. Mirror Raid(s) for file servers: Level 0+1 or Level 5 (as I recall) depending on the circumstances.

2. Nightly duplication to external drives that rotate offsite.

3. Archival backup to DVDs: Every version of everything you've ever done. Two copies; one on site for file restoration, one off-site (safe deposit box?) for business restoration in case of catastrophic fire, flood, or...

Retrospect's proprietary access to archives is troubling to me too, but I haven't found anything else as robust, reliable and easy to use. Silver Keeper is interesting though, I'll have to take another look at it.

Most of my clients use some variation on this arrangement. I do not use it myself since I work on laptops (no room for RAID) and I move around a lot, etc. Most of my work is duplicated on my client's servers anyway.

[Anonymous]

Déjà Vu is the best an fast, I do not understand how could it write so fast. All data is in native format.

I used to use Retrospect but I had a major problem with loss of data.