Home Forums Discussions Problems Backup time

Hi all, doing well with amazing charts after three months. I really am enjoying it. Just a question about backing up. I have been backing up to a 8 gig thumb drive every-night and taking that off site just in case. Some days the back up stops responding about half way thru then starts again adding time to the back up which takes about 15-20 minutes. How long does your back ups take?
The server is 8 gig of Ram on a 1 terabyte hard drive.
Thanks Susan

The answer is "it depends".

Mostly, it will depend on whether or not you are backing up imported items. Imported items files grow very big very quickly, and the backup can take some time; plus, your thumb drive will OD very soon. I'm not sure about your pause. However, if you DON'T figure out how to backup your imported items, a server disk crash will wipe out all your lab, x-ray, consultant, EKG etc. data.

The backup plan is crucial, and unfortunately gets complicated. Bert will give you a link to a presentation he made at the conference, and here is a link to a really long thread that is chock-a-block full of nerdspeak.

http://amazingcharts.com/ub/ubbthreads.php/topics/22401/1

It is important, I believe, to sit in a quiet room and let your hounds of paranoia loose in full cry. What if the server burn down, and takes the office with it? What if a backhoe takes out the internet connection, and that is down for a week? What if the building transformer takes a lightning strike and sends a huge power spike into the lines? Can I afford to be down for an hour? A day? A week? Could I just retire?

Having had quite a number of computers crash on me, I am frightened to death that I am so totally dependent on them to keep my practice functioning. From that view, I would strongly encourage you to wade through the above link (and others relating to "backup") and design a backup plan more robust than you can accomplish with a thumb drive.

I backup about 3.3 GB(imported items included) to a USB drive. It takes 15-16 minutes.

Here is our report of the backup to our offsite service. It took 28 minutes over the internet, but note that it is really only backing up new data (93 MB), not the entire 7 GB file. It includes imported data. It gives an idea of how fast our files are growing.


Jungle Disk Backup Report
Start Time 11/4/2010 12:00 UTC
Backup Job AmazingChartBackup
Computer DSGRECSER1
Online Disk dsgrecser1
Username DSGRECSER1
Searched 9618 (7.0 GB)
Uploaded 72 (93.3 MB)
Duration 0:28:30
Errors 0
Result COMPLETE

I back up 80GB of data a day with an eSATA drive which is 3Gbps compared to USB2.0 which is 480Mbs.

If you are backing up your server to a thumb drive you are begging for disaster. The first thing to do is right click on it and see in properties if it is FAT32 or NTFS. If not, format to NTFS.

Second thing to do is throw it away and either go online or Best Buy or Staples and get a 250GB or greater external USB drive. Get two of them and alternate them for now.

Next thing is what software are you using to back up with? Have you tested the backup files? Have you tested restoring?

If you are only backing up 8GB of data, get Jungle Disk and use it as an offsite backup.

Thanks David,

Wendell's and my slide presentations: http://tinyurl.com/33ehpda

Our back-ups to the AC server usually take several hours...

I am going to need to make a separate post about this shortly. Our back-up situation is horrendous, and requires some outside help!

Our back-up of AC which does NOT include imported items- we back that up separately- amazingly takes less than one minute. We have checked and it is an accurate back-up.

Wow, you have given me alot, Thanks. I checked the format of the thumb drive it is Fat32 not NTFS, any idea how to convert the format (in baby steps, sorry). I was going to try to do a practice restore but can't find the restore utility anywhere.(I have the latest version of AC.)Any hints?
I will also get an external hard drive very soon!
Thanks again all
Susan

Backup Restore Utility in AC folder.

Formatting a flash drive: Right click on it in My Computer. The drop down menu will give you a format option. CAVEAT: Anything on the flash drive will be overwritten. Under File System, you can change FAT32 to NTFS IF the flash drive allows it. Most don't.

As you may notice from my presentation, backups are a passion with me, almost an obsession. Over a year ago, there were the "backup wars." If you are going to use a thumb drive (and my guess you are putting all 8GB on the drive), then use it only for backing up the .enc file drom AC. That will be rather small and having a home backup would be helpful. However, it is my hope that you are not backing up your entire computer and putting it on your thumb drive and taking it home. That is a recipe for disaster. One, you have only one backup that is already showing problems from too much data. Two, the advantage of a flash drive is also its biggest disadvantage. It is small. Easy to lose in the car, at work, at home, etc.

Once again, start general to specific. Set up at least two, five is better, USB2.0 drives or eSATA drives. Back up your "main computer -- server) every night to these drives, alternating. Five works best, because you have one for every day of the week. Back them up five or six deep.

Now do your modular backups. Schedule the complete backups to run at night. Then do the modular backups before you leave. I click on AC, I click on eMedware and I start my Imported Items backup. Now all three of the small backups are set.

Finally, get Jungle Disk to back up just your data. It will back up your data every night. The first time it will back up your 8GB, then next time, it will back up 43Mb. These aren't incremental or differential backups. These are deduplication backups, which are 30 times better.

You should really look at a good backup strategy.

This site with Backup Assist will at least give you an idea of how to back up. I don't think it works on non-server OSs,but I could be wrong.

http://www.backupassist.com

Bert: I have changed my backup scheme over the last year from doing that very same USB key method, thanks to much good advice. Also, I have to thank the HDD in my home computer going out. Online, offsite backups are an important option, but a full recovery can take a week depending on your download speed, and most people cannot afford to be down that long. Do you see any holes in my present backup strategy?
Nightly AC backup to the backup folder and to the external USB HDD. Nightly full computer backup to the HDD. Continual backup to Carbonite of the server user accounts. I figure if the HDD fails, I just slip in a new one and restore of the external HDD. If the external HDD fails, the internal should be fine. If a criminal breaks in and steals the hardware - unlikely as security system in place - then everything can be restored from Carbonite. Perhaps I should have a second external HDD that is taken offsite, as the Carbonite would have us down a week while downloading the restore. How do you switch between the external HDD? Do you have five of them in a RAID setup?

Hi Chris,

You will have to explain what you mean by server USB accounts. I think your backup is rather good. I will tell you mine, and you can take it from there.

The key to backups is to back up data. It's great to have entire backups each night to use for data or for bare metal, but you do want to, in the least, back up your data. For me, 80% of backups should be on site. They are easily accessible and much faster. The other 20% can be off site, online and distant.

The first thing about good backups is good partitioning whether you have RAID or not. I like having a RAID1 for my system partition on two drives that makes one virtual drive. Then I like a RAID5 for data on another virtual drive. This makes it nearly foolproof to restore the OS from disk or restore the data.

So, with my setup, I have my system (Windows OS) and then I have the RAID5 with D: data, E: Installs, F: Internal backups.

ALL of my data (Amazing Charts, Files of FAP, Medware billing, and every share) goes on the D drive. These are shared and therefore accessible to all clients based on NTFS permissions. THIS IS THE PARTITION THAT HAS TO BE BACKED UP NIGHTLY. If you back this up, you will always have the data you need.

E: is installs. I learned this from an IT friend of mine. If you install anything on the server or for clints such as OS, AC, print drivers, PDF, Microsoft Office, it goes there. Any CD or DVD, I install from I rip to there. Ever have Microsoft Office act funny and need a file from its disk. Who wants to find that disk, when you can browse to it. You can put the CD Keys on a text or PDF or whatever in that folder. This only needs to be backed up weekly or monthly as it doesn't change much.

F: Is just for things you need to put somewhere. Sometimes you can put backups there.

As far as backups, I have overkill. I have eight 1TB external eSATA drives in an ICY Box enclosure each of which can be removed. The first five are for Monday through Friday and my C and D drives are backed up nightly via Backup Assist. The 6th one is the drive where I backup AC, FAP, Medware, Exchange and SQL Server. SQL Server backs up AC every hour for five days and Exchange backs up Exchange User Mailboxes in .pst nightly. These are what I call the modular backups: AC .ec backup, FAP's own backup, Medware's own backup and the aforementioned Exchange and SQL. The Backup Assist backups of C: and D: go back a month.

I then have SBS 2008 back up the entire server to an image file to drive 7 nightly using deduplication. It is the best bare metal backup and goes back over two months.

Weekly, I backup C and D to an NAS in the basement at least 100 feet away. This is set up to back up to one year.

Nightly, the D: drive is backed up to Jungle Disk also using deduplication and backing up many days.

I do a D: drive data backup weekly and take home. This is probably the weakest part of my backup as it should be daily, but with the other backups, I am fine with weekly.

I also backup each client weekly to a second NAS using Acronis software as an image. Even though most of the data is on the server, it comes in handy now and then, and is your best security against a non-removable virus.

Finally, I do have an eighth eSATA drive, but it is empty.

This is definitely overkill, but I feel like this data is mission criticial. If you add this to VSS in Microsoft, you can be in pretty good shape. And, oh yes, I have the auto AC backups on the data drive which are then backed up every night to the various hard drives.

Just to explain a little of the overkill. I definitely want more than one external drive and I have never found a good rotation without one for each day of the week. So, it was either two or five. Love the Monday through Friday aspect. And, before I changed from USB2.0 to eSATA (about six times faster), I thought I would go with the RAID5 NAS backups. That didn't work out as well as I wanted, hence back to the external eSATAs but still wanting to use the NASs.

Chris,

As I see it, your biggest point of weakness is the one external drive. I would highly recommend two or more. Hard drives in particular are a high point of weakness. There are more than a few reasons why that one drive would not be usable in the case of a server hard drive crash. I would get at least two, if not more.