Just got through restoring the Work PC, looking to Improve our Backup Strategy
OK, so first let me run you through our current backup strategy (it's pretty close to a 3-2-1 strategy) we currently have 2 portable USB hard drives, one is kept at the office and I do a MANUAL Backup (picking and choosing which folders to delete off the external and replace with the current versions from the PC's SSD) Once a Week, this is very time intensive due to the amount of GB's of data being copied, much of it realistically being UNCHANGED.
The Second External Hard Drive goes home with me and comes into the office every 2 weeks to get the same MANUAL update.
The third angle of our backup strategy is Google Drive, but we have an absolute joke of an Internet connection which only gives us a 6 mbps UP connection and the Business owner uses OUTLOOK for email and doesn't like to delete things, so every time he checks emails about 40 GB's spread across 9 or 10 PST files register as "modified" in Windows, it's simply not practical to even attempt to backup these PST files to Google Drive given our slow upload speed so what I do is I set outlook to keep the last 2 weeks of Inbox Emails (Pop3 email server) on the server so that even if we lost everything (like if the office burned down) we would at most lose the last 2 weeks of sent items (while not optimal this is an acceptable loss), we then utilize Google Drive to simply backup any currently active projects (with the assumption any changes to inactive project folders would get caught in the weekly MANUAL backup).
OK, so thats the history of our current backup strategy. Now Friday when I came into the office after the thanksgiving holiday the computer was stuck in a loop where shortly after booting to the desktop the computer would blue screen blaming "atikmdag.sys", after enough of these crashes the computer wouldn't even boot to Windows and Startup Repair wouldn't fix it not booting to Windows so now it wasn't even an option to get into safe mode and the only thing left to do was a System Reset and keep my files, this meant spending my Saturday reinstalling every program, multiple Printers and re-configuring to all the settings and networking so the other computers could talk to the main computer.
Due to this my primary plan is to get an extra External and create a "System Image" (so that if we have another catastrophic failure that a restore point can't solve we can revert to a "freshly configured" copy of Windows with all our programs already installed and setup).
Beyond that I want to find a way to simplify the weekly backups to reduce the time they take without eating up a bunch of hard drive space, in my ideal situation I would have a local backup that effectively functions the way Google Drive does where every time a file is changed the backup will update to the new version of that file, so that it's one contiguous backup, not like the old days where you had a Primary "Full" Backup then a bunch of intermittent backups that just kept increasing the file size on the external drive (this is important because 40+GB of Outlook PST files getting backed up daily will eat up storage stupid fast), so my question is are there any backup softwares that backup to a local USB hard drive like how Google Drive backs up to the cloud but maybe with the ability to set it to swap in the changed files once a day instead of every time they are changed like Google Drive does (The once a day would be used as a buffer to catch a Ransomware Attack before the encrypted files backup and replace the files on the backup). Then the second half of this quest would be software that will manage and compare multiple backups, like if I brought in the offsite backup on it's every 2 weeks schedule and have the software just update changed files. The basic Idea would be to have one NEW External added and left connected to the PC all the time that would do the daily backups then I still do the weekly and bi-weekly backups (but more efficiently by having the software update just the changed files) and ideally these backups wouldn't be Image Files, they would be browsable so if I needed to pull something off of the backup I keep at home to work on over the weekend I could do that. Is there software that offers that scope of managing multiple backups like that?
Posted Nov 29, 2020, 8:08 AM UTC
Sounds like a good place for a Nas with file history revisioning and dedupe, you could still backup the Nas to an external HDD or if your internet was better to another Nas somewhere else. I'd also put the data on the windows machines in shared folders and give the Nas access to those shares to back them up. Instead of sharing the Nas with the windows devices and them having r/w access to the Nas which means Ransome ware has r/w access to your Nas.
It's close to the 3-2-1 backup methodology. https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/3-2-1-backup-strategy-why-your-data-always-survives I would simply use the existing OP's strategy but add an additional cloud for critical data. Also, as additional cloud storage I would take enterprise-grade storage, here is the difference between personal backups.
The third angle of our backup strategy is Google Drive, but we have an absolute joke of an Internet connection which only gives us a 6 mbps UP connection and the Business owner uses OUTLOOK for email and doesn't like to delete things
While cloud backup Is good and should probably be used it doesn't seem feasible with the internet connection they have atm. And depending on the size of the business should be using SMB - enterprise Nas & HDDs
very small home business, the owner/president and 2 contract workers (me being one of them) and the other only working 2 days a week doing book keeping on a decade+ old dual core laptop.
I talked him into a new external hard drive which we ordered tonight, i'm thinking about connecting the External to the USB port on the wireless router (note PC is hard wired, laptop is connected via Wifi) as that allows for a "sorta NAS" as that router supports that kind of function of turning an external drive into a network attached drive that I could then point software to backup to that network drive.
I created a System Image to the portable on site drive today and will do one on the offsite drive the next time I take it out there, but I gotta free up some space on it.
Right now i've got 2 concerns:
Finding a Backup Software that replaces/deletes things in the backup to make it match the current state of the PC when the backup is run without taking an ever increasing amount of storage capacity on the external drive. (Is this a thing?). Like if we delete a folder from the PC when the next backup is run that folder would be deleted from the backup, is there any software that does that? This is my main focus right now, Number 2 is secondary, we have gotten very cautious about opening files after the ransomware we got hit with several years ago.
a way to "firewall" off the new External so that as long as we shutdown the computer if we got hit with a Ransomware before the backup did its daily update we wouldn't end up with the backup getting encrypted. Realistically this is the lower risk angle, the "only plugged in while updating" Onsite and Offsite backups would still be run on their weekly and bi-weekly schedules, the primary purpose of the new "always connected" onsite would be an attempt to keep the latest versions of the outlook PST files and to keep the current versions of files backed up on a daily schedule, so it's kind of a half measure between the weekly that could never fall victim to a ransomware and the Google Drive that would instantly fall victim to the ransomware.
Lots of cloud providers have such offload option like Backblaze Fireball.
"We will send you a Backblaze Fireball, a 70 TB hard drive array with 1 Gbps connectivity. Fill up the Fireball and return it back to us for secure upload inside a Backblaze data center."
https://www.backblaze.com/b2/solutions/datatransfer/fireball.html
That is pretty overkill for our needs in terms of storage capacity, we don't even need 1TB but even if we did something like that for the initial PC Backup it misses the part about the vein of my existence that are those Outlook PST Files, we are talking like 40 GB of PST Files that register as updated files every time you close Outlook, on our upload connection that would be about a 15 Hour Upload at full speed and we have a Wifi Camera at the gate that eats up half the data, until they bring Fiber Optic to our area web based backup is simply not viable to do online backups of anything more then critical path project files.