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 ;-))