I'm looking for a way to create an offsite backup of around 8TB of data. I've currently broken the data down into 2-4TB file systems and I'm using ShadowProtect to backup the data from an SBS 2003 server to a Windows 2003 backup server using a weekly full backup, and nightly incrementals.
I'm not very happy with this solution for a bunch of reasons.
- It takes too long to backup.
- To hold more than a weeks worth of backups requires tons of space.
- Offsite backups to external hdds would require too many disks, and too much time.
- Offsite backups over the internet would take too much bandwidth.
What I'm looking for if possible is someway to have a local backup server to house many snapshots without storing duplicate data like faubackup seems to be able to do. As well I would like to be able to span the backups that are made across a set of external disks, without duplicate data because the filesystems are bigger than I can fit on a single disk.
Correct me if I'm wrong but as far as I can tell it's a bit of an impossible situation to span the new data across more filesystems than faubackup itself uses due to it's use of hardlinks.
I've also been thinking about using openfiler some way to achieve the same goals, but haven't thought of a way yet.
How do other people cope with offsite backups of such large amounts of data.
edit:
For a bit more background information, we are a relatively small (about 15 employees) geology company where we basically take huge data sets, and make them readable. Projects often run into hundreds of Gigs. In spite of the importance of offsite backups, I will have trouble getting the money required to buy a tape autoloader that will do the kind of data we are looking at. I've tried and was basically told that there must be another way and I have to find it.
We have two servers. An SBS2003 server and a Windows 2003 R2 server which is used as a backup server. Both machines have a 20TB RAID6 array which houses our data. In any given day as well as regular stuff there will be minor modifications to many very large files.