Solid Know How™

Here is an economical, reliable, enterprise solution for backups currently in use by Solid Innovation to handle our 12+ computers.  It provides both on-site and off-site backup automatically.  This system is based on 2 widely available products, two Raid 5 NAS devices each with 4 TB of storage plus an enterprise grade backup software.  In this solution, tape backups systems are not used.

Note: While this article describes our situation and is relatively easy to install, it is a good idea to employ a competent network administrator to setup this system.

1. NAS Device:

The first product is the Buffalo LinkStation Quad 4 TB Network Attached Storage (NAS) of which 2 such units are employed.  The first NAS is located in our office while the second is located at a remote site, connected to the local device via the Internet and software supplied with the LinkStation.

Different sizes are available.  Technical information can be found at www.BuffaloTech.com.  In this case, we used the 4 TB systems, which include 4 x 1 TB drives which, under Raid 5 provide 3 TB of on line storage.  The Raid 5 configuaration, which is the default configuration for this device, means that if any 1 hard drive fails, simply power down the system, replace the hard drive, and all data is automatically recovered.

This device simply plugs into the ethernet network, thus taking a port on your network.  It's a good idea to assign a static IP address within your LAN and to ensure the device is supported by a battery backup.

The second NAS device is located in a remote location, connected to the internet and plugged into a battery backup.  Again, a static IP address is required.  After setting up port forwarding on the office and remote routers and using the software provided with the Buffalo NAS, the local NAS now replicates itself during off hours. 

2. Backup Software:

We used the economical, and easily deployed CrashPlan Pro available at www.CrashPlan.com.  This system comes almost pre-configured.  Within this configuration is automatic backup, deduplication of files, and file compression.  In practice, we're amazed at how economical CrashPlan is on space.

On your server, use the NTBackup program built-in to Windows to backup the Active Directory.

CrashPlan also provides a number of other features to maintain copies of all of your important files even after being deleted.

Summary:

After setting up and running this system we conducted a restore.  Not only was the restore simple and fast but worked flawlessly.

Overall, this is one of the best backup systems we have ever seen.