On Wed, 2009-06-03 at 14:17 -0500, Frank Smith wrote: > Hopifan wrote: > > Thank you for response. > > To clarify, my current setup is: > > about 30 remote offices with between2-50gb of data each. Each office has > > Symantec BackupExec running ($700 initial cost), each server in each > > location has a tape drive ($800 initial cost) and 10 tapes ($300 initial > > cost), so basically to backup these 30 offices locally cost me > > 30x1800=$54,000 first year + admin overhead and time, etc. so the question > > is: what can I use to backup data from these 30 offices to my central > > DataCenter in Wisconsin? I was doing some testing backing up one of the > > offices using BackupExec over the WAN I got 200mgb/hr transfer ratio, not > > too good. SO I need some software with good compression or other algorythm > > to pump data over the WAN, is Amanda or Zmada the answer? > > > > If your links are slow compared to the size of your data, it may be > more efficient to use something like rsync to make a central copy of > all the remote servers, and then just back up that copy locally > using Amanda or even your existing backup software. That way you only > have to copy the unchanging parts of your data once across the WAN, > and from then on the only WAN traffic will be new or changed blocks > of data, and it won't load your WAN to have your full tape backups > run as often as you like. > I currently use this approach with some offsite servers and it > works well, however I'm strictly in the Linux world and don't know > how well the Windows rsync programs (such as DeltaCopy) actually > perform. Perhaps someone else on the list can comment on that. > > Frank >
Hi, I know it sounds like a little bit of admin hell, but anyway my 2 cents: Use AFS (which has a windows client) with replication to make sure that new/ modified data is replicated from the remote to the central site. Than do backups on the central site with the tool of your choice (e.g. amanda/ zmanda ;-)) The setup has quite some benefits: - AFS is well supported with Windows - Large replication tasks only need to be done once - Changing data is backup almost immediately - Less headache with bandwidth usage Of course there are some downsides: - You need more storage space (as every file is stored twice) - AFS _can_ be a hell to administrate Regards --- Mr. Olli Ps: yeah I don't like rsync ;-))