Firstly, if you rely on your data for your income, then you must follow the holy trinity of:
- Daily reliable backups.
- Off-site replication.
- Disaster recovery.
If you plan these 3 items then you can be sure of your data integrity.
The hard part is what are your requirements. If you backup solely to the cloud, you essentially cover all your bases and have a fairly low cost.
But when (not if) you do have a failure, how quickly do you need the data recovered? Cloud solutions usually mean a very slow restoration process which depending on the size can take days to replicate back into your environment. Can you and your projects afford to sit and wait for several days as that happens?
A multi-tiered approach is often the best strategy, cost is obviously a major factor, but luckily due to the proliferance of consumer grade NAS devices from Enterprise grade manufacturers we now have options in all price points so we can find a solution for everyone.
A decent workstation environment should have at minimum a daily replication period to local storage (local being within the same building).
The older Mac Pro's can hold 4 Hdds, so that is going to be the quickest place for you to perform a restoration from to think about keeping a complete replica there ready to take over incase of a drive failure you can use RAID in your boot and data drives for this. Recent advances in solid state storage improved speed and reliability so this is no longer so important but we still need to make sure we have local backups and remember the mantra (RAID is not backup).
All your local files and data must be backed up to a separate storage device.
What this is depends on the number of computers, and how much money you want to spend.
QNAP had a nice range of models
so you can backup multiple computers over the local network many models (even lower end) support 10Gb so you can have very good speeds (I am not sure if anyone has gotten 10Gb cards working in Mac Pros though).
Once the data is saved to the backup device, you can now think about off-site replication, if you have another office, you can replicate data to a device in that office and vice-versa. Or you can replicate to a cloud storage provider. Either way, what you are protecting against if physical destruction of the data at a single location (fire, earthquake, meteor).
If you replicate to another office, the data is still "local" to you so you can get the data back into a working environment quickly.
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Aren't you being overly hard on the guy? It sounds as if he was doing what he could within the constraints he had. He had a RAID5 configuration and was performing some level of backups. He just had a bit of bad luck in that he had multiple drive failures at the same time in his RAID5 configuration.
While enterprise backup solutions are interesting they're outside the reality for individuals and small businesses. If we were to poll the users in this forum I would be surprised if the majority of them were using something other than a RAID configuration with some form of backups...just as the poster you're referring to was doing.
The frequency of his backups may not have been sufficient but then backups, as we can see as very important, tend to take a backseat to getting real work done (i.e. as in the work that pays the bills).
No! This is exactly why everyone needs to actively think and prepare for this.
Budget is not a reason for a bad strategy, it is an excuse and will always bite you when you are unprepared.
A good backup strategy is not just for enterprise. You can backup, and replicate your data on a budget. The trade off to cost is speed of recovery.
The bigger question is can you afford to not have a good data backup and recovery solution in place.
I build and manage virtual machine clusters around the world, the hardware and solutions are different but the concepts are the same and can be done at nearly any price point.
