BackUp Strategy

[TimothyPaul]

Hey Folks -

I'm an IT guy that recently took the position of Media Minister in our Church.

Sunday our SSP computer died. leaving us in a rather unpleasant situation. Curious what strategies others have put into place for potential computer failures / data failures, etc.

I have my own ideas coming from the IT world but thought I would see what others are doing. Sometimes us IT guys don't understand church budgeting!! LOL

Thanks...TimothyPaul

[waynehoskins]

At my church, we have a ProPresenter computer, an audio recording/playback computer, and a video recording computer that warrant backing-up. (Interestingly enough, we converted from SSP at the end of the summer, and in the fall the old SSP disk failed.)

I have a file server on the network to store all of the data I really care about. It has segregated system and data RAID1s. The recordings are pushed there immediately after they're complete, and the Pro4 machine places a daily backup of its library there. I think I'm also pushing the Pro4 backup off-site to my server.

For us, off-site backup of large files (e.g., video recordings at 18GB) isn't practical because we're on a highly asymmetrical DSL service with like half-T1 up, and my server shares a bonded T1 with several other servers and an office building. Pushing anything big up the wire would saturate both networks and take forever to complete.

[Gracetech]

On all mission critical computers this is the setup...

Mirrored drives(drives are usually the first thing to go out)
Enought parts lying around to get the system up and going if any other component should go out.
Ideally you would have an exact machine waiting in the wings to pop in but having that kind of money just sitting around in a church just doesn't happen that often.

I only back-up the system drives of my servers but i do have a sync of all the media on our 9 media computers. I can rebuild a machine in less than a few hours the media on the machine would take alot longer, if it was even possible.

Most software mirrors you find on standard desktop hardware controllers are fine for this task.

crt

[waynehoskins]

I love RAID. RAID is what lets me sleep at night. We've had a bunch of 1T Barracudas fail at work the last few years. Could just be disproportionate misfortune; our sample set is too small and uneven to draw a definitive conclusion. Thanks to RAID, we've had very little data loss and server downtime due to disk failures.

The purists quickly point out that RAID isn't backup, only a fault-tolerance mechanism. They say that true backup involves at least two additional copies of the data, with at least one of those sufficiently off-site to guard against things like tornadoes, floods, and the like, and they really like at least one of those to be out of the geographic region entirely to protect against large-scale regional disasters like hurricane. For most of our churches, that's probably overkill.

If you can combine mirror RAID, backup-thru-replication, and SMART monitoring, you stand a good chance of catching and recovering from a disk failure. And if all of your machines are sufficiently hardware-identical, a logic board failure could be temporarily worked around by pulling the disks from machine A and putting them in machine B, where machine B is less mission-critical at the moment than machine A.

[[Admin] osborn4]

I copied the SSP data tree to the LAN drive a while ago. Then every week, when I'm done creating the SongShow program, I do a package to go to the LAN drive, so anything new is backed up. This isn't a great solution, but it's what I got.

If I had to restore from this, I'd have to copy the SSP tree that I originally created, then restore each package to go package.

We were talking about synching the SSP data tree to the LAN drive, but the server guys wanted us to clean it out first, so we weren't backing up a lot of stuff that we weren't using and I never got around to that, so we never implemented anything like that.

We've also considered redirecting the SSP data tree to the LAN drive, so that all the data resides on the backed up RAID drives on the server. Others I know have been quite happy with that.

[petereit]

We have a PP4 site license and run it on two iMacs and two MacBooks. We keep our lyrics files synced with a common Dropbox account. We do system backups to multiple WD Mybook external drives. Mission-critical data is backed up to CD-ROM, external drives and Carbonite.com.

[Gracetech]

Originally Posted by petereit

We have a PP4 site license and run it on two iMacs and two MacBooks. We keep our lyrics files synced with a common Dropbox account. We do system backups to multiple WD Mybook external drives. Mission-critical data is backed up to CD-ROM, external drives and Carbonite.com.

You mean you don't use PP's sync feature? Man i just started using it and it's great.

crt

[Arlin]

Does PP's sync work across the internet, though?

[daver2]

A separate 'ghost' image on a second hard drive located within the machine so that we can very quickly recover the OS and associated 'system' software.

We then perform a separate ghost session to a removable drive and store that off-site when necessary (e.g. after updates to the presentation software or 'major' Windows or anti-virus fixes).

Our song database is stored as a password-protected file on an A/V corner of our Church website that has no URL link to it. This is convenient as most of the technicians prefer to generate the visuals on their home computers and bring it to Church on a memory stick for final check-out. The website song database ensures that everyone can obtain the latest copy when required.

This set-up has served us well for 8 years or so.

Dave

[blonborg]

Actually, with Ghost, you can re-image the c: drive of the pc, with an image residing on c:. If I couldn't connect to my Ghost server via the netowrk, I could copy the image to the C: and image it locally.

Originally Posted by daver2

A separate 'ghost' image on a second hard drive located within the machine so that we can very quickly recover the OS and associated 'system' software.

Bill

[Gracetech]

Originally Posted by Arlin

Does PP's sync work across the internet, though?

Not over the internet, per se. Of course he said site license so most of the time that means in one location, and usually one network.

As always there are ways around separate locations and syncing as though local. One technology being VPN connections. These can either be implemented at the gateway or just at the remote computer. Of course you better have a killer internet connection or work with smaller files.

crt