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This is probably one of those topics that gets regurgitated periodically, but it's always good to get some fresh answers.
The small consultancy business I work for wants to set up a new file server with remote backup. In the past we have used a Windows XP file server and plugged in a couple of external USB drives when space runs out. Backups were performed nightly to a USB drive and taken offsite to a trusted employees home.
They are looking to Linux for a new file server (I think more because they found out how much a new Windows file server would be).
I'm not a server guy but I have set up a simple Debian-based web server at work for a specific intranet application, but when I was asked about ideas for the new system the best I could come up with was maybe ssh+rsync (which I have only recently started using myself so I'm no expert by any means). Using Amazon's cloud service has been suggested, as well as the remote being a dedicated machine at a trusted employee's home (probably with a new dedicated line in) or with our local ISP (if they can offer such a service). A new dedicated line out of the office has also been suggested, I think mainly because daily file changes can potentially be quite large (3D CAD models etc). A possible advantage of the remote being nearby is that the initial backup could be using a portable hard drive instead of having to uploading terabytes of data (I guess there is always courier services though).
Anyway, just thought I'd chuck it out there. A lot of you guys probably already set up and/or look after remote backup systems. Even if anyone just has some ideas regarding potential traps/pitfalls would be handy. The company is fairly small (about 20-odd employees) so I don't think they need anything overly elaborate, but all feedback is appreciated.
(Score: 2) by egcagrac0 on Friday July 11 2014, @04:20PM
And then, once that's done, see if your ISP offers colocation - that's probably a better landing spot for the remote contingency plan than someone's home closet.
VPN is probably a more cost effective solution than a dedicated circuit.
When you're designing the storage solution, remember that the primary storage server (fileserver) needs to be fast and reliable, but the backup server just needs to be reliable (speed is a secondary concern - informed by RTO).
Set up some sort of monitoring. You want to discover before it's "too late" that the backups aren't working. Or that the RAID on the remote storage is degraded. Or that the RAID on the primary storage is degraded. Or that the chassis intrusion has gone off in your supposedly locked rack. Or that the remote system has gone offline because some bonehead kicked a power cord. I, for one, find notify-on-success to be an unhelpful monitoring system (it all just becomes background noise to me), whereas notify-on-failure is a somewhat harder problem to solve.