Backup solution for Windows
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Is it OK because it is one person?
In my other non-business thread, I was talking about personal machines. Your uncle's PC, whatever.
Chromebook, everyone said. Never backup a personal machine.
And how do we know this backup is working? The only way would be to put another hard drive in there and recover to it. (Which I have come to understand is the trade-off of all this ... convenience (paying for a license to spin up a VM and check in minutes) vs time (having to do the whole actual restore to test).)
And it was mentioned in another post to boot the recovery image on a USB drive. Is that OK? I thought no, technically.
So, I think the same themes are in play. Just playing devil's advocate here.
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@BRRABill said:
Is it OK because it is one person?
In my other non-business thread, I was talking about personal machines. Your uncle's PC, whatever.
Not really, but better. Everything should be hosted somewhere. Although his backup is a bit unique in that he is backing up a very complicated environment that he does not want to have to set back up again. Power user rather than non-power user. He has local RAID, for example, on hardware.
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@BRRABill said:
And how do we know this backup is working? The only way would be to put another hard drive in there and recover to it. (Which I have come to understand is the trade-off of all this ... convenience (paying for a license to spin up a VM and check in minutes) vs time (having to do the whole actual restore to test).)
Which he would totally do. He has lots of drives in his machines. This is the polar opposite of the "uncle" scenario.
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OK, I get it.
This is one of those rare cases.
Not the case for your uncle.
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@BRRABill said:
And it was mentioned in another post to boot the recovery image on a USB drive. Is that OK? I thought no, technically.
Why would that be bad? Licensing is about the system, not the storage type or location.
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Also important to note that he is not doing this to restore his data, it is to restore his apps and settings. It's non-critical. He's willing to drop huge money for really little things. His critical data is all on servers. This is a system recovery system to him, not a backup system. He is still using enterprise tools for his data.
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So, this would be more like your uncle who really, really did not want to reconfigure his apps and needed things that a Chromebook could not run and was willing to drop $1,000 to make reconfiguring easier. But still followed all of the advice about having nothing local and getting everything from a server. It's because this is an AND not an OR.
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To quote Into the Woods.
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If he's looking to restore applications, why not just reinstall them?
He could use open source tools like Fog or BackupPC (for incremental type changes, BackupPC specifically) but where is the gain? Installing an application usually only takes a few minutes per.
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@DustinB3403 said:
If he's looking to restore applications, why not just reinstall them?
You've not been a developer, I see
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@DustinB3403 said:
He could use open source tools like Fog or BackupPC (for incremental type changes, BackupPC specifically) but where is the gain? Installing an application usually only takes a few minutes per.
Veeam is free here, why go with one of those others?
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Just putting them out there.
Veeam is another good one.
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Veeam does individual file restores that the others do not. Pretty huge deal in a case like this, in case he needs something when there has not been a failure. Veeam uses imaging as a means of taking "normal backups", rather than FOG which is just an imaging system.
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Shouldn't offsite also be mentioned in here somewhere?
Or is this more time-saving than disaster-saving?
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@scottalanmiller said:
Veeam does individual file restores that the others do not. Pretty huge deal in a case like this, in case he needs something when there has not been a failure. Veeam uses imaging as a means of taking "normal backups", rather than FOG which is just an imaging system.
Is FOG even an option for a home user? We are talking about a home user, aren't we? yeah not Uncle Bob, but still a home power user. Clonezilla would be I would think the better option over Fog, but suffers the problems that Scott mentioned - lack of individual file restore. Though is that even really needed, Scott did say that this user is cloud/server storing all of their data, so what file level stuff would you ever be restoring?
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@BRRABill said:
Shouldn't offsite also be mentioned in here somewhere?
Should it? In a small business of less than say 20 people, the term server should imply hosted already except in cases where that is not possible and if it is not possible, the question is answered, right?
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@Dashrender said:
Though is that even really needed, Scott did say that this user is cloud/server storing all of their data, so what file level stuff would you ever be restoring?
More of a "why give up that functionality" question.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@BRRABill said:
Shouldn't offsite also be mentioned in here somewhere?
Should it? In a small business of less than say 20 people, the term server should imply hosted already except in cases where that is not possible and if it is not possible, the question is answered, right?
I disagree. In most cases the reason you need a server for an SMB today is file storage, possibly large file storage - the one main place that cloud storage really suffers, because of throughput.
though if you don't have need to move move large files from the server to your machine and vice versa.. then hosted might be the way to go.
SMBs rarely need the level of uptime provided by the hosted server solution, and they certainly rarely install servers into dedicated spaces with dedicated heating/cooling, etc... so you've added an additional cost that I still see a hard time justifying if they only access that data when onsite.
Now if your SMB is mobile, accessing from any/everywhere, that's completely different and gives more reason for the extra spend.
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@Dashrender said:
I disagree. In most cases the reason you need a server for an SMB today is file storage, possibly large file storage - the one main place that cloud storage really suffers, because of throughput.
Does it? Ours doesn't.
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@Dashrender said:
SMBs rarely need the level of uptime provided by the hosted server solution, and they certainly rarely install servers into dedicated spaces with dedicated heating/cooling, etc... so you've added an additional cost that I still see a hard time justifying if they only access that data when onsite.
Opposite. Cost of hosted storage is so cheap for an SMB, in most cases, that there is no good way to store it internally without just wasting money. It's specifically because it is so costly to run your own storage and so cheap to get it hosted that you get the "always hosted" mentality.
