<div id="_htmlarea_default_style_" style="font:10pt arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br><br><br>On Thu, 15 Apr 2010 14:12:49
-0500<br> Matthew Nuzum <newz@bearfruit.org> wrote:<br>> On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 1:25 PM, Tim Champion
<timchampion@gmail.com> wrote:<br>>> We are already planning to do a site-to-site data sync between
Marshalltown & Ames, but that will be a live >>sync, and would not protect against accidental deletion. We've
all heard the horror stories of places using >>mirroring or something like a live sync and then losing data anyway
because they did not have a "real" backup. >>The piece I'm specifically looking at is the nightly backup so we
have at least 2 weeks of history of our data. >>Explaining it now, it now seems like overkill to take the nightly
backup off site since there will be a remote mirror >>of the data, but I'd rather be over-prepared than
under-prepared.<br>> <br>> I'll make a suggestion, but first, let me point out a problem w/ off site backups,
especially when you are taking >them to a remote location. To put it simply, it's a burden. It's a routine,
monotonous chore and humans are not as >good at these types of tasks compared to machines.<br>> <br>> Since you
have a site-to-site link, here's a possible suggestion. Let each office have an extra, low-cost, high >capacity
storage unit for backups. Then do a weekly or fort-nightly full-backup which gets stored off-site and a >daily
incremental backup stored across the wire.<br>> <br>> There's also "back blaze" which charges $5 a month for cloud
storage and unlimited data. Hard to beat that.<br>> <br>> What ever you do, look for something that is as
automatic as possible.<br>> <br>> /me goes to double check his own backups now<br><br>I'd second DR'ing each site
off the other--IF you have the bandwidth. I just recently transferred ~40 GB of data in around 36-37 hours.
3Mb encrypted links on each end, 70 ms latency with a average 320 KB (or around 2.5Mb)/sec throughput.<br><br>Taking
bandwidth and cost constraints into account, I'd probably look at getting a "storage array" at each site (as someone
mentioned) and then seriously look into using Amanda/Zmanda (Zmanda is the commercial company formed off of Amanda; nice
Enterprise version of Amanda.) to back up each site locally (full then deltas) and then back up it's peer site's backup
(again, full then deltas). Just do a couple full backups/night until you're done, and you should be
ok.<br></div>