DBAs out there,
We have a SQL environment that needs a backup solution upgrade, and we are looking for some input from the community. There are 8DBs spread across 4 servers total in 100GB of size, plus a 9th DB that is 450GB that is excluded in the numbers below. All are located at a data center with a large amount of bandwidth (OC-3).
Currently backups are run from SQL Management Studio Maintenance Plans to an array at the data center with the DBs. Off site backups are conducted by an employee plugging in a USB drive weekly and x-copying over the data and taking that drive back to the office. We would ideally like to remove the aspect of a human having to come into the data center to pull the data off.
Currently the backups are daily fulls. Lite-speed is available for compression and we could continue to run daily fulls for comfort's sake, or we could move to a mixture of 1 full 3 days diff plus trans for some of the DBs and 1 full 6 days diff plus trans for the other DBs, instead of all fulls. Any thoughts on that?
One off-site option is use DFS, or another copying mechanism to sync the data center backup share to a share down at the office/off site location over a T1 at night. In running the numbers if we were to move to diff plan, we are looking at ~6GB most nights, and ~19GB on Saturday nights of backup data. If the full T1 was available to the syncing process that would be 9 hours on most nights, and 27 for Saturday.
Another option is to purchase a device with an off site backup subscription to send data from the off-site location to the 3rd party data center, but we could be looking at a steep cost.
It's about 59.5GBs of data a week, so if we wanted to keep 2 months that's roughly .5TB.
Any thoughts?
Thanks in advance!