Hello,
I recently picked up a client who had virtually no IT support for several years. I have spent the last few months with them slowly working out the problems they have with their current infrastructure and am in the process of getting them back on track. A few weeks ago, a user on the network opened an email that contained Cryptolocker and the virus was able to encrypt all the data on their local computer as well as some data on other user's computers through SMB shares as well as some data on one of their servers. No backup infrastructure.
Implementing an adequate backup infrastructure was of course on my long long list of things to get to, but unfortunately I hadn't made it that far yet. Long story short, I have plan for a new backup procedure that I wanted to get some feedback on.
As part of their infrastructure upgrades, I have installed a new Hyper-V host and have virtualized most of their physical servers which has left us with one Dell PE T320 unused. I have upgraded the array to an 8 drive RAID 50 with 5.5TB of storage for the purpose of storing backups of servers and critical data from their workstations.
My plan is to implement a reliable backup infrastructure that is economical, contains as many historical versions as disk space allows and that would present as low an attack interface as possible to protect the backups from ransom ware, accidental deletion and other threats.
My idea is as follows....
1. New backup server to contain an iSCSI target VHDX for each workstation/server.
2. Use Windows Server Backup/Windows Backup with "Backup to a hard disk that is dedicated..." option on servers/workstations using the iSCSI targets as the backup destinations.
3. Attach a local USB drive and configure the backup server to backup the server iSCSI target VHDX files. This would be configured to run before the nightly server backups so that there is always a second, complete copy that is 1 day behind.
4. Future implementation of an offsite cloud backup for absolutely critical data.
It seems to me that this option would not only allow the windows built-in backup to create incremental backups so there would be a history, but since there is no drive letter assigned and no UNC path to the destination, any potential ransom ware would not be able to access the backups. Also, since there are multiple complete copies, their data would be safe short of fire, natural disaster or the building coming down on top of it. Theft is not much of a concern at their facility.
I have already implemented the above solution for the servers and all the backups seem to be working properly.
Any thoughts or concerns would be much appreciated.
Thanks