A wiser option than crossing your fingers and making regular sacrifices is to partner with an off-site service provider like QualityNOC.
QualityNOC’s Managed Services offer affordable round-the-clock monitoring, management, and maintenance oversight giving you the confidence to concentrate on your core business while trained personnel are ensuring your systems and network’s health.
Since 2015 Quality NOC S.L. have a team of Sys Admin working 24/7 for our customers.
The work is performed 100% remotely, from our offices we connect through VPN to customer’s network or Cloud.
We do operations and maintenance task daily.
System we manage:
Cloud infrastructure: different public cloud vendors
Linux: CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, and others.
Microsoft Windows server
VMware
We have large experience in networks and we specialize in VoIP / IP Telephony.
We speak English and Spanish fluently
We monitor our customer’s systems 24/7 all year and we have experience with:
Icinga2
Prometheus
Grafana
Nagios
Zabbix
Zenoss
and customer’s proprietary systems.
Key benefits of outsourcing NOC services
Significant reduction in downtime
Immediate management of incidents occurring around the clock
Reduced Operational costs
Increased productivity and job satisfaction for your network and IT support staff
A good backup plan is essential in order to have the ability to recover from
Human errors
RAID or disk failure
File system corruption
Data center destruction and more.
Here you have some suggestions:
Important features the backup software should have:
Open source software – You must use software for which the original source code is made freely available. This ensures that you can recover your data in case vendor/project stopped working on software or refused to provide patches.
Cross-platform support – Make sure backup software works well on the OS deployed on all desktop and server operating systems.
Data format – Open data format ensures that you can recover data in case vendor or project stopped working on software.
Autochangers – Autochangers are nothing but a variety of backup devices, including library, near-line storage, and autoloader.Autochangers allows you to automate the task of loading, mounting, and labeling backup media such as tape.
Backup media – Make sure you can backup data on tape, disk, DVD and in cloud storage such as AWS.
Encryption datastream – Make sure all client-to-server traffic will be encrypted to ensure transmission integrity over the LAN/WAN/Internet.
Database support – Make sure backup software can backup database server such as MySQL or Oracle.
Backup span multiple volumes – Backup software can split each backup (dumpfile) into a series of parts, allowing for different parts to existing on different volumes. This ensures that large backups (such as 100TB file) can be stored on larger than a single backup device such as disk or tape volume.
VSS (Volume Shadow Copy) – It is Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and it is used to create snapshots of data that is to be backed up. Make sure backup software support VSS for MS-Windows client/server.
Deduplication – It is a data compression technique for eliminating duplicate copies of repeating data (for example, images).
Commercial support – Open source software can provide community based (such as email list or fourm) or professional (such as subscriptions provided at additional cost) based support. You can use paid professional support for training and consulting purpose.
Reports and alerts – Finally, you must able to see backup reports, current job status, and get alert when something goes wrong while making backups.
Bacula – Client/server backup tool for heterogeneous networks
I personally use this software to manage backup and recovery across a network of computers including Linux, OSX and Windows. You can configure it via a CLI, GUI or web interface.
Operating system : Cross-platform
Backup Levels : Full, differential, incremental, and consolidation.
AMANDA is an acronym for Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver. It allows the sysadmin to set up a single backup server to back up other hosts over network to tape drives or disk or autochangers.
Amanda: Open Source Backup
Amanda is the most popular open source backup and recovery software in the world. Amanda protects more than a million servers and desktops running various versions of Linux, UNIX, BSD, Mac OS-X and Microsoft Windows operating systems worldwide.
Operating system : Cross-platform
Backup Levels : Full, differential, incremental, and consolidation.
Data format: Open (can be recovered using tool such as tar).
BackupPC is a high-performance, enterprise-grade system for backing up Linux, WinXX and MacOSX PCs and laptops to a server’s disk. BackupPC is highly configurable and easy to install and maintain.
Operating system : Linux/Unix and Windows
Backup Levels : Full and incremental (rsync+hard links and pooling scheme)
It is an easy to setup open source client/server backup system, that through a combination of image and file backups accomplishes both data safety and a fast restoration time.
UrBackup also continuously watches folders you want backed up in order to quickly find differences to previous backups. Because of that, incremental file backups are really fast.
Your files can be restored through the web interface, via the client or the Windows Explorer while the backups of drive volumes can be restored with a bootable CD or USB-Stick (bare metal restore). A web interface makes setting up your own backup server really easy.
Currently there are over 10,000 running UrBackup server instances (with auto-update enabled) with some instances having hundreds of active clients.
Operating system : Linux/FreeBSD/Unix/Windows/several Linux based NAS operating systems. Client only runs on Linux and Windows.
Other open source backup software for your consideration
The Amanda, Bacula and above-mentioned software are feature rich but can be complicated to set for small network or a single server. I recommend that you study and use the following backup software:
rdiff-backup – Another great remote incremental backup tool for Unix-like systems.
Burp – Burp is a network backup and restore program. It uses librsync in order to save network traffic and to save on the amount of space that is used by each backup. It also uses VSS (Volume Shadow Copy Service) to make snapshots when backing up Windows computers.
SafeKeep – SafeKeep is a centralized and easy to use backup application that combines the best features of a mirror and an incremental backup.
DREBS – DREBS is a tool for taking periodic snapshots of EBS volumes. It is designed to be run on the EC2 host which the EBS volumes to be snapshoted are attached.
Old good unix programs like rsync, tar, cpio, mt and dump.
Conclusion
I hope you will find this post useful to backup your important data. Do not forgot to verify your backups and make multiple backup copies of your data. Also, RAID is not a backup solution. Use any one of the above-mentioned programs to backup your servers, desktop/laptop and personal mobile devices.
Quality NOC S.L., which provides remote monitoring and management 24/7 Network Operations Center (NOC) that enables monitor, troubleshoot and maintain IT environments.
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