Good afternoon, folks!
I'm after a bit of advice regarding my current employer's existing backup procedure and how I can improve it. I took over as the 'IT Manager' here 11 months ago and, for the most part, have left the backup procedure as it was. However, it's time for a change and I'm keen to make sure that the procedures we have in place are both practical and effective as well as being reliable in the long-term.
We currently back up multiple servers and a fair amount of data on a daily basis. All of this data is backed up to tape and I currently use a cycle whereby I'll re-use 'Daily' tapes after 14 days, 'Weekly' tapes after 4 weeks, 'Monthly' tapes after a year and 'Yearly' tapes after 7 years. I'm currently in possession of around 150 LTO2 tapes.
We currently have around 1TBs worth of call recording data. It's spread across two HDDs stored on the server provided by the recording company and is backed up fully on a weekly basis and incrementally on a daily basis. It's become clear to me that a full backup on a weekly basis is unnecessary as this data never changes. Additionally, the weekly backup job for this set of data takes over 30 hours to complete when writing to tape and uses a lot of media in the process. I've just purchased a custom-built file-server from a local vendor that will provide me with network storage capability. This, however, isn't a backup method. I'd like to investigate the possibility of utilizing HDD backups as opposed to tape for these call recordings.
However, I'm a bit unclear on how best to begin. Is it best to buy myself some high-capacity HDDs from a reliable vendor and an enclosure and connect them directly to the backup server? I can't imagine speeds would be too hot if I was backing up via USB 2.0? What are the recommendations for cycling the media etc?
Apologies if this query is a bit open ended, but I'm looking for a starting point more than anything else!
Cheers!
Luke.