I started my job as an ICT Technician (Which basically is Helpdesk/System Administrator) at a Catholic College in Australia in February 2008. At that stage the Computers let alone the Network infrastructure left much to be desired. Let me just say most network engineers in even small business would laugh at the mess of this place, but that’s another article.
Moving on to the backup saga, if you can imagine just around 250 computers (sets of up to 30 computers in a lab, admin machines and a few specialty computers) and over 500+ users 6 server based apps, Maze (A school database program running on SQL 2005) and User Folders, all running from one server. This is an Apps Server a Database Server and a Domain server all in one. The next scary problem was that it was running Windows Backup to backup all this data to tape.
So firstly it was decided to split up the server and so moving from 1 server to 15 in the space of a year (this includes a Backup Server), these servers now include Library Database, Apps Server, Domain Server, Maze Server, File Server (User Folders) Web and Virus Server to name a few. The next decision to be made was to work out how we could backup all this information, especially at this stage the users has grown the over 600 and are now managing over 300 computers. First thoughts and tests proved that Windows Backup didn’t even want to think about managing this sort of workload and the IT Manager decided it was time to source another solution.
Having so many servers with up to 5 Terabytes (In full and incremental) worth of data that needed backing up, managing this size of data and the many servers would be a rather hard task. We needed a solution that could easily create devices and backup to large media, in this case five 1 terabyte stripped drives. Backup Exec was our first choice because I had already used it back when it was owned by Vertias. The decision was made easier by the fact that the whole server structure was Windows OS-based.
Install was not only simple and quick; setting up was done relatively quickly. All the folders had already been created and all that needed to be done was created devices for each folder and create a scheduled job. Also nothing special had to be done for XP machines running as servers, which we have 2 of.
We sometimes have issues though with Exceptions been thrown with open files or servers doing work while backing up (Altiris Deployment Jobs, Updates), but this is to be expected and we get notified straight away with email reporting. However it works well with no exceptions on SQL server and File Servers, which is our main concern.
It really was and still is a good experience using Backup Exec 12 for Windows Servers and maintaining a backup for all student and teacher work throughout the school.
