Back in January, I sat down with Todd and Mike (my bosses) and we began to discuss what we wanted our goals to be for 2007.  One of the bigger items on the list was the streamlining of our backup process.

Our old process involved rotating 3 external hard drives around and copying our users’ data onto it every night (along with our Exchange store).  Since then, we’ve come very close to outgrowing those external HDs.  In addition, the accumulation of data on our file server and exchange server has caused our backup window to grow to over 8 hours.

After discussing how we needed to address this and looking at what other organizations are doing, we decided that the best course of action would be to set up a backup server and start with disk-to-disk (D2D) backup.  After that is in place and our budget allows it, we will add tape to the mix and begin spinning off full backups onto tape on a yet-to-be-determined basis.

The first thing that needed to happen was the building of a backup server.  I’ve had an AMD whitebox sitting in storage for about a year or better now, and this seemed like a good application for it.  The backup server has a RocketRAID 1740 PCI card that supports 4 500GB drives, with a separate OS drive on IDE.

Now for the backup software.  After asking around and doing some reading, we decided to land on CommVault Galaxy Express to do the work.  This software comes in a few different flavors, and we opted for the Email and Database edition.  This software lets you install on either an Exchange or SQL server, and also allows you to install clients on 3 other file servers, which is a perfect start for us.  The software is a bit overwhelming the first time you dive into it, but I’m slowly getting used to it.

As far as a backup strategy, we are going to rebuild that from the ground up.  This Wednesday, the Mike, Todd, K and I are going to sit down to discuss what we will back up, how often we back up (for each item),  and what shouldn’t be backed up (unimportant stuff, rogue iTunes files, etc).

I’m pretty jacked about this; it’s yet another way that we’re going to be able to serve the staff and make their lives easier.  In addition to that, I’m going to breathe easier knowing that our backup system is not only doing its job, but it’s not going to run out of space anytime soon.