HI,
I would like to replicate my onsite backups to a set of rotating ext USB HDDs.
Whats would be the best way of achieving this.
Regards
We use an APC power controller on a schedule, and a set of USB drives each plugged into one controlled outlet. We do initial backups to some space on a NAS, and use offsite/local replication to push to the "O:" drive, which is whichever of those USB drives is currently powered up by the APC power controller. We run an agent procedure to "eject" the USB drive 5 minutes before the scheduled power-down/power up.
So:
Drive 1: power to APC port 1, USB to server
Drive 2: power to APC port 2, USB to server
etc.
All drives have been plugged in individually and set to be the O: drive. This means we must never power on more than one of them at a time!
We have an offsite server process running, pointing at O:\AirGap
We have a local server process running, sourcing from \\NAS01\Serverbackups
The transfer schedule says "Midnight until 11:20pm"
Say it's Monday: APC Port 1 powered on, 2,3, all the rest "off"
At 11:25pm we run an agent procedure to "eject" the O: drive
at 11:30pm the APC's schedule powers off port 1.
at 11:35pm the APC's schedule powers on port 2
So what happens is this, as soon as "drive 2" powers on, it arrives on the server as O:
At midnight, replication resumes, cleans up the drive that is now the O: drive, and starts replicating everything from \\NAS01\Serverbackups to it. If we had a terrible malware-encrypting-end-of-business-as-we-know-it crash, the USB drive hooked up (but powered off) on APC port 1 (and ports, 3, 4, ...) would all contain older sets of backups that couldn't be touched since they aren't physically powered on.
An 8-port power controller with 8 USB drives gives 7 "air gapped" days of complete backups at any given time, as long as nothing goes wrong... and of course if a drive starts to fail Kaseya monitoring will let us know in plenty of time to get it remedied. It's totally hands-off, and as long as someone is minding the alarms, pretty bulletproof.