Backing up data

JacobG

April 6, 2012 1:51:02 PM

I work at a sheriffs office and I was tasked with backing up and installing a new 3tb hard drive for their file sharing server. I noticed that they don't have any kind of backup for this hard drive. I was wondering what kind of system should I implement for backing up 3 tb of data? We can't us cloud backups because of security issues, so we have to go with another alternative. I'm just assuming we get another 3 tb drive and set up a raid 0? My question with that is, how slow will the back up processes be? When I went to backup the current data, they had a 1 tb drive in the pc, so I took another 1 tb drive and backed up all data. It took nearly 4 days to do. It was extremely slow, so I was scared backing 3 tb up on another internal drive will take forever! So what do you guys suggest?

The PC is running windows server 2003 so it's not the newest thing.

Thanks,
Jacob G.

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skaz

April 6, 2012 1:59:37 PM

JacobG said:

I work at a sheriffs office and I was tasked with backing up and installing a new 3tb hard drive for their file sharing server. I noticed that they don't have any kind of backup for this hard drive. I was wondering what kind of system should I implement for backing up 3 tb of data? We can't us cloud backups because of security issues, so we have to go with another alternative. I'm just assuming we get another 3 tb drive and set up a raid 0? My question with that is, how slow will the back up processes be? When I went to backup the current data, they had a 1 tb drive in the pc, so I took another 1 tb drive and backed up all data. It took nearly 4 days to do. It was extremely slow, so I was scared backing 3 tb up on another internal drive will take forever! So what do you guys suggest?

The PC is running windows server 2003 so it's not the newest thing.

Thanks,
Jacob G.

I would say go with RAID1 instead of 0. RAID1 will mirror the other drive where as RAID0 will stripe the information. Your internal speeds should be better then most external sources depending on what type of connections your running internally and externally. 4 days is a long time. What kind of connections are you running off of? IDE, SATA?

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Brett928S2

April 6, 2012 2:23:38 PM

Hi

NO....to Raid 0 ..YOU LOSE ONE DRIVE....you normally cannot recover data from the second...without HUGE expense....

All the best Brett

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Onus

April 6, 2012 2:38:14 PM

RAID-1 is what you want, in which a pair of drives each get the exact same data. If one fails, it can be replaced and the data recopied. You should still arrange for a separate backup, as the controller could fail too.
Something like Acronis True Image is good for creating backups. What you want is a full backup perhaps once per month, and then incremental or differential backups at least once per week. You want to do file backups, not image backups. The former copies only actual data, whereas the latter copies every sector of the drive, whether or not it contains data; that could be what made the initial backup so slow, especially if it was done at USB 2.0 speeds.

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