Best small-business off-site backup

DamageTrain

Member
SoSH Member
Sep 29, 2014
671
Vermont
Looking for advice for the best service for a small-business off-site backup. Looking for something that allows 10-15 TB of data storage.

My business' data footprint is approximately 7.5 TB over a few computers and servers (there are lots of big GIS files some from old projects).

I backup everything daily on site. However, my off-site backup currently involves putting files on external hard drives monthly and storing those at an off-site location. This is probably only about an hour's work each month and is probably mostly effective, but there is a risk of losing up to a month's worth of data in the worst case scenario and I'd be happy to spend a bit of money to lose the hours worth of work.

Ever since a Ukrainian URL tried to brute force its way onto my server, I'm a bit paranoid about ransomware and getting shut down. So I'd want to be able to restore back in time to before any encrypting happened, in that particular scenario.

Thanks for any advice!
 

Max Power

thai good. you like shirt?
SoSH Member
Jul 20, 2005
7,878
Boston, MA
Does your backup platform offer options for an offsite backup to an Azure or AWS storage? Our entire infrastructure is virtualized and we use Altaro's VM backup package. That does a local backup of all the VMs and also pushes them up to an Azure blob. We're a non-profit, so the Azure space is free, but I think it was less than $1,000 per year if we paid for it.
 

DamageTrain

Member
SoSH Member
Sep 29, 2014
671
Vermont
Thanks for raising this apparently-related question. Which software platform should I use?

I just use the crappy Windows Server Backup and Windows 10 backup and then swap out hard drives.

I assumed that most of these on-line backup services would bundle software with their product. As you can tell, I'm exclusively in the Windows and Windows server world...
 

Max Power

thai good. you like shirt?
SoSH Member
Jul 20, 2005
7,878
Boston, MA
It depends on your environment. Are these bare metal servers or are they virtualized? And do you really need to be backing up workstations directly? Or can you replicate data to the cloud? Or to a server and back that up instead?

We use Office 365 with "protected folders" turned on for the end user computers via Group Policy. That automatically sets everyone's Documents, Desktop, and Pictures to be synced to OneDrive where they have 1TB of space. With file versioning, it's an effective way of protecting against overwritten data and hardware loss.

We went with Altaro's VM backup suite for our Hyper-V cluster. It was cheaper than Acronis and Veeam, but had the features we needed. You can restore single files out of a VM, spin up a copy of a whole machine offline if you need something more, and it integrates with Azure for automatic offsite backups. You can do a hard drive based offsite backup with it, too.