Media Help

[CharadeUR]

I work with mostly small to medium business. I have been putting out the Highly Reliable Systems Tandem devices. These are pretty inexpensive and mirror two SATA drives that are hot swap. This way one drive can be pulled and taken off site but yet the repository and full image are available for the next incremental backup. However this device seems to be very unreliable (go figure.) The High Rely will go off line with something as simple as one drive having bad blocks. If one disk fails it should still work with the good disk but you end up having to reset the whole device. Not to mention it will go offline and not give any indication as to why. I doubt it is bad hardware as I have a dozen or so of these out there and most act the same way. Any little hickup and they are offline.

What do others do to have a low cost cartridge backup to take off site that does not look like Rube Goldberg designed it? I was considering going with a single bay cartridge device but then you pretty much have to do a full backup every time, correct? Any other inexpensive off site solutions you guys want to suggest. It is hard in recession impacted Michigan to sell a small business any of the higher end solutions.

[jsprinkleisg]

Have you found a good alternative to the high-rely yet?

I've had some success with using WD My Book Live. It's a one-or-two-disk NAS intended for home use, but it seems to work pretty well as a cheap offsite backup for small businesses. Here's how I'll typically set it up.

- Configure Veeam to back up to direct-attached storage, as an onsite backup. This may be a vmdk if no other suitable storage is available.
- Turn up the compression and turn on reverse incrementals if there's enough CPU & storage resources.
- Configure at least 3 My Book Live drives, all with the same IP address. These will be rotated offsite, so only one will be connected at a time.
- Use some synchronization software to daily synchonize the Veeam repository files to the NAS, after Veeam job completes.

I like to use SyncBack for synchronization. It's free, has a built-in scheduler, and can email a report upon job completion. When the user receives the email, they'll see whether the sync was successful and then swap the backup drives. Simply move network and power cables to the next MyBook in the rotation.