Disaster Recovery

I've been looking into a better Disaster Recovery System then I am currently using. I'd like to have the backup/mirror/virtualized machine within my network and not at some offsite server farm.

What type of Data Recovery system do you all use? Any recomendations? Thanks in advance.

If there is a major fire, isn't off site needed too?

I would recommend that. I can't really contribute much here, because our site isn't large enough to warrant some of the expense of off site mirroring, backups, etc. What I do alternatively is daily backups of our servers on tape backup that are kept in a fireproof lock box. I also backup the majority of critical files and folders onto DVD regularly and those are kept off site.

Realistically I need to force myself to sit down and write out a complete and detailed Disaster Recovery Plan. I could put Humpty Dumpty back together again, but nobody else could because it's basically all in my head. That's not good.

If it's all in your head & nowhere else, that's job security.

Now that's what I'm talking about!

I do run nightly backups to tape and keep them offsite.

My network consists of several differant locations so if I added a mirror or something, I'd put it at one of the other buildings in case of fire and do the backup/mirror/whatever over the network.

I'm just curious if any of you are doing the same type of thing and what you are using.

When I managed a small network, 16 workstations & a server, the office manager would take one tape with her at night & swap them daily. That's all the was really needed.

I think that my tape drive may be on it's last leg so I'm trying to figure out if there is a better way to backup then what I'm doing before replacing the old stuff.

You could use an external hard drive & a USB drive at the same time & take the USB drive off site at night. That would cover all bases.

that seems like a lot of extra work. Automated sounds a lot better to me

It's still automated other than you taking one of the drives with you. Hire someone to put it in your pocket for you.

With the data on the device, putting it in my pocket would be a bad idea.

I'll keep looking around for something.

I was hoping for a mirror type server located on my network but in a different building. Full automation so in a Disaster Situation I could eigther restore the server or switch to the mirror.

Then look for an FTP backup.

Take a look into Marathon Technologies. They might have a solution that will work for you. They handle both physical and virtual servers but it does come with a price.

http://www.marathontechnologies.com/

Have you used this?

We have. It is pretty neat but their FT solution will limit you to one core, I was usuing dual quad core processors and the application we had running was just killing that one core. But if we had one server go down the application stayed running, never skipped a beat.

We then switched to their HA solution, it gave us the use of all cores but if the server hosting the app went down the app would have to do a restart on the secondary causing a bit of downtime.

We have since then moved the app to a virtual server running on Citrix XenServer which has an HA component. So far we haven't had to rely on that yet.