Guys i am looking for a real life backups scenario, actually i have a home folders for users its huge in size, i need a reliable way to back up them, i got a free NAS on the network sized 600 gb, whats the software and the sequence, thanks so much guys.

Are you talking about backing the folders up to tape or to hard drives?

For now for a folder, but i want to make it automated as much as possible you can recommend a back up solution.

Try syncback (free for personal use) http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html#freeware

If you need to copy permissions though try securecopy.
http://www.scriptlogic.com/products/securecopy/

Securecopy does basically the same thing as syncback but copies permissions. The downside is that instead of being free it costs about $4000. We use both at work and they both work very well.

Is it scriptable ? can it run automatically without interaction ?

Both will create their own scheduled tasks in windows, no scripting necessary.

Thanks so much.

Bummer!

I use Syncback myself for backups. It has everything I need: a scheduler, can send files over the network, you can synchronise AND backup (whatever you need).

ONLY downside is that it can't do shadow copying. But they also have a commercial version of syncback that can do this.

We've been tinkering with MS System Center Data Protection Manager. It's more or less a client for your windows servers that uses Volume Shadow Copy but instead of copying to the local drive, funnels the shadow to a central server, which you can then back up with tape; if you've seen Windows Home server in action, it's using the same technology. So far it's looking really good; we set up a gigabit backchannel network just for this purpose, and are going to buy a cheap (yeah, $14,000 is cheap in this case) 12 TB iSCSI SAN appliance to support it; we then use 4Gbit Fiber to send it to our tape library for off-site storage. It's halved the backup time for our servers already, and it's not even on the final hardware yet.

BTW, if you don't have a plan for going to tape or an off-site disk based mirror in addition to a locally hosted disk-based backup solution, you'd better have your resume ready. You can't send that drive array off site, and a fire or catastropic overheat in your data center would wipe out your backups as well as your live data; you MUST have a plan for getting things off-site, or at least a good distance from your live data. or there's no point to the backups in the first place.

Last, be absolutely certain that you test your recovery plan; it's no good to back up if you can't get the data back.

Shit man what do you do?! You get to play with all the latest toys.

ًWell a friend of mine have a copy of Symantec backup exec for sell its version 11, i don't know if there is a newer version or not yet, but what do you think ? is it can cover all of our requirements for backup ?

Backup is expensive, and it's one of those things that management doesn't want to pay for. We didn't get our budget for it until after we had a big data loss and they couldn't deny the need anymore.

Bacup exec is a good product, but the initial cost is only part of the deal - they also charge per agent, and you need one agent for each server you need to back up as well as agents for things like Exchange, SQL, Oracle, and the like if you want to do direct exports from them. You also need a tape system that can back up the data you need in a short enough time to be useful; if your tape device takes longer than the time your office is closed to complete its jobs, it's not any good, as the first data you backed up may be out of synch with the last each day.

A modern backup scenario is the following:
1. Back up to a central storage server/device that can hold 3-7 days worth of incremental data. how much it can hold determines how often you need to run fulls vs incrementals.
2. Short term restores (the most common type) are done from the above array.
3. Backups to tape are done from the above, and sent off site for Disaster Recovery, and for long term restores.
4. Depending on urgency, a separate IT center should be maintained off site that mirrors your essential production hardware. This is to prevent long downtimes in case of fire, or other catastrophic loss.

To answer Singh's question, I'm a sysadmin for a private university. We have about 4000 users on a single campus, and an IT butget of about $1.2 million (which isn't close to enough), most of which goes to desktop replacment and support licenses.

It's been a year or two since I looked at sans, and you're right that is cheap. Could you post some details about it?

This isn't a performance SAN, it's a storage consolidation appliance, using SATA and iSCSI. We're getting a Dell/EMC AX150, but there are others out there.

EDIT: I misremembered the 12TB number; those won't be out until the end of the year This one is 6TB

We just quoted a real SAN upgrade as well, a CX3-20; it's a lot cheaper than they were 5 years ago when we bought our last one. It will set us back about $90,000 for the head unit and a tray of 15 300GB 10k RPM FC drives; 5 years ago we paid $125,000 for the same with 10 73GB 10k drives. Fabric switches are a LOT cheaper now as well, at about $450 per 4Gbit port.