I have sort of settled on this as my current backup strategy, what I am looking for is some outside opinions as to whether I should add/remove or change anytyhing about how I do it. Mostly I just want to be sure that is anything happens I will be able to get my data back as it was with a minimal loss. As this is a home network I am not all that concerned about the speed of getting it back, especially as most of what is essential to save is a small amount of data.
So to start all of the computers in my home are networked. They are part of a domain controlled by two servers, a SBS 2003 as the primary, and a Windows 2003 Standard as the backup. The SBS has six hard drives in a RAID array, 5 in RAID 5 with 1 as a hot spare. The 2003 box has 4 drives in RAID 0. The Server 2003 PC has most of the data and profiles, I know it is a bit backwards that way. That is the first server I setup and goofed it a bit, and haven't had the time or guts to try and do a reinstall as RAID 5.
So I have scheduled that every night at midnight they will both do a backup using Windows built in backup tool. They write the backup to a seperate partition of a secondary hard drive in my main PC. I did a full backup some time ago, and just do incramental backups every day now. I am currently backing up the system state plus all files. Is this sufficient, or should I add some more to be safe?
Also this is starting to grow rather large lately. Each server has maybe 10GB worth of files, tops. The backups just get larger and larger each time I add to them. Is there anyway that I can keep them smaller? Or is it recommended to delete everything every so often and start fresh? I mean will I really need system state data from say a month ago if I have a failure and need to do a restore?
I guess what I am really looking for is a solid strategy I should be using. Like should I do a normal backup once a week, overwritting everything that was there before, and then daily backups everyday appedning? Or maybe a normal backup once a week overwriting everything once a week, and incremental backups appending everyday? Also I don't need to do system state backups daily as I don't change things around on my servers that much. So is weekly good? Monthly?
Thanks.
So to start all of the computers in my home are networked. They are part of a domain controlled by two servers, a SBS 2003 as the primary, and a Windows 2003 Standard as the backup. The SBS has six hard drives in a RAID array, 5 in RAID 5 with 1 as a hot spare. The 2003 box has 4 drives in RAID 0. The Server 2003 PC has most of the data and profiles, I know it is a bit backwards that way. That is the first server I setup and goofed it a bit, and haven't had the time or guts to try and do a reinstall as RAID 5.
So I have scheduled that every night at midnight they will both do a backup using Windows built in backup tool. They write the backup to a seperate partition of a secondary hard drive in my main PC. I did a full backup some time ago, and just do incramental backups every day now. I am currently backing up the system state plus all files. Is this sufficient, or should I add some more to be safe?
Also this is starting to grow rather large lately. Each server has maybe 10GB worth of files, tops. The backups just get larger and larger each time I add to them. Is there anyway that I can keep them smaller? Or is it recommended to delete everything every so often and start fresh? I mean will I really need system state data from say a month ago if I have a failure and need to do a restore?
I guess what I am really looking for is a solid strategy I should be using. Like should I do a normal backup once a week, overwritting everything that was there before, and then daily backups everyday appedning? Or maybe a normal backup once a week overwriting everything once a week, and incremental backups appending everyday? Also I don't need to do system state backups daily as I don't change things around on my servers that much. So is weekly good? Monthly?
Thanks.
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