I asked a similar question before, but we shifted the topic.
I know we can archive backups, for certain amount of time, or forever.
But, how do I get those backups out of the system to a long term storage?
Lets say I dont want the old backups in the urbackup server, is there any way to move them out, so later they can be brought back if needed?
Im trying to meet a Data Retention policy for a business that requires full file backups stored for 2 years, but offsite.
Any ideas how to achieve that?
thanks
Likely we’ll need more information. How much data in one set of full backup archives? How often do you update the offsite archive? Have you calculated your expected cost for the UrBackup Cloud Server on AWS? Do you have two or more offices that run UrBackup so they could be each others offsite facility? (I’m doing this for the servers in four offices, backing up local workstations plus remote servers.)
Have you considered a separate instance of UrBackup that only runs your archive backups to a mirrored pair of removable hard drives? For example, take one drive offsite each month and let the RAID copy the other to a fresh drive. This gives you reasonably quick access to the backups, as opposed to a possible long download from the Internet, at the cost of 24 drives kept offsite. For disaster recovery you’ll already be keeping a bare-metal backup of the server itself (less the UrBackup archive and using a different product such as Windows Server Backup) to restore your server instance. Once that’s rebuilt, the UrBackup archive is attached and you restore at full speed.
Naturally any of these instances may be virtual, depending on your hardware and company IT capabilities. For reliability and expansion you may also want to use a pair of multi-drive RAID systems such as Drobo instead of a single pair of large drives, and archive one entire set each time, but the idea is the same.
Hi Don
The business Im talking about is running urbackup inside a FreeNAS, the FreeNAS has 12x 6TB HDDs, and they are backing up 20 PCs (each image is about 100Gig and the folders in the File Backup are no more than 5 Gig on each PC)
The files dont change that much, so space is not an issue. They just want to keep 3 months of backups on the FreeNAS box (setting for the backups are by defect on urbackup server, meaning images every 7 days, incremental files every 5 hours, etc)
They have two branch offices, and I can put data there as well, but this is not what they are looking for.
it is actually not about capacity, it is about long term retention (one example is keeping data from former employees, on the cloud, in case of auditing). They want to keep older backups “away” from their offices and their internal IT people.
Data older than 3 months should be store offsite (Glacier is a good candidate).
My problem is that I dont know which is the best way to extract older backups, in order, from urbackup and copy them somewhere. and even if I copy them manually, then how I put them back on a urbackup so they show up on the list of available backups so that users can restore them (ex, Old photoshop files that users had in their “mydocuments” folder 8 months ago and they want to bring back, but now are somewhere in the cloud)
Ideally urbackup could have some setting that instead of just deleting the files, it would allow you to put them in another folder in a compressed form, each backup chain separated (then we could sync that folder to the cloud), in the event we need to restore data then we would bring the backup chain back from the cloud (each chain with a meaninful name including dates) and tell urbackup to read from the folder again and do the reverse process and list the backups as available for restore. (Im not asking that urbackup direclty push and pull the older backups to the cloud, I know this is a much more complicated thing, but it would be awesome if it can put them in another folder, and also import back from that folder)
(a backup chain is a series of backups, from full to full, including all incremental in between).
I tried just copying the folders out from urbackup paths, but it is hard to identify the paths belonging to the same chain and I have no way to put them back in urbackup, in addition, every time I put them files back manually urbackup wont recognize those folders again and the current backups for that particular PC breaks.