Responsibilities for PBX Backups

[ralph]

I'd just like to bounce this off of both the vendor and customers.
From your point of view, who is responsible to ensure backups of equipment and how often.

I know that's kind of a loaded question but I'd like to know how everyone is addressing.

For example, we ensure backups for contract customer at least once a year and maintain them off cust prem.
Also after major changes. (no usually for single name changes)

But for T&M customers we don't have the same procedures in place.   
We backup after major changes but expect the customer to maintain their own backups.

And of course there is the issue of trying to backup a system remotely, where depending on the type of remote access we have, we may not be able to backup at all.   

I'm just looking to get a feel on how you handle these and where you think the ultimate responsibility lies for ensuring that a backup exist - customer or vendor.

And of course this question applied to all other systems such as voice mail, data switches and routers.

Ralph

[brantn]

We of course backup when onsite and at maintenance check time. Opsman auto back ups if they still have the server otherwise we encourage them to include it in their backup routine after all it is a server.

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[Mattmayn]

We maintain backups for contract customers and for the T&M ones we take a backup after major changes only. If you don't want to pay for the contract then you must not need that peace of mind that is the VAR making sure that the system will be up and running and in the event something does happen there is as little downtime as possible. That being said it is a good idea to make sure that you do keep a fairly recent backup of all of those T&M customers for your own sake (in case it does die).

[ralph]

Mattmayn,
It looks like you and I are on the same page.   That's pretty much how we handle T&M.

Ralph

[MitelAvayaNortel]

As a Customer we are responsible for checking our Enterprise Manager backups, and making any ad-hoc backups as required.  I think our maintainer has only taken one backup and that was during a major reprograming, not even sure if he took a copy after the changes were made.  Certainly they never connect to the network to copy the backup back to their site.

[Chakara]

  As a var I'm with the rest of you.  Personally I take a back up whenever I make a change.  Who knows what changes have happened since I was last there and it makes me sleep better at night....

-Chak

[bobcheese]

Also as a VAR, I take backups whenever I visit a site providing the last is older than 3 months or major changes have been made. The way I see it is, if something goes wrong I will be the one who has to fix it and as we cover many customers on a 24/7 basis the quicker I can recover a site if a HD fails etc the quicker I get back to sleep 

[ralph]

Let me expand the question just a bit.

When you do take backups, how do you maintain the media?   
In our case we will leave a memory stick on site and then place a copy on our network.
We take the memory sticks, put a velcro button on it and stick it directly to the 3300.
That way no matter which tech we send to site, he'll always know where to find it.

Ralph

[Chakara]

  I like that.  For me we usually have and maintain thier network and servers as well so the backups are located on an onsite server which is backed up offsite in one way or another.  If I don't have a local server, I store them at my office.  Usually it is backed up to an encrypted volume on my laptop which I sync to the clients folder on our server.

-Chak

[nintendo1889]

Sorry, please delete my post if this thread is too old.

Is there a way to use sftp (secure ftp) to do backups? If so, then an off-site backups could be done securely and automatically.

Can redhat el or centos packages be installed the msl mcd servers (eg openssl or a secure ftp server)?

[ralph]

No SFTP on a standard controller.   But...    It's an interesting thought regarding what might be possible with the vMCD since it's MSL based.
Perhaps some scripting could be done on the SFTP client side.
I'd have to play to see if I could find where the 3300 files are stored.

Ralph

[acejavelin]

Sorry, please delete my post if this thread is too old.

Is there a way to use sftp (secure ftp) to do backups? If so, then an off-site backups could be done securely and automatically.

Can redhat el or centos packages be installed the msl mcd servers (eg openssl or a secure ftp server)?

I don't know of a way to do SFTP for backups, but you can do FTP for backups, we do it all the time to our public FTP server, and beginning with MCD 5.0 you can schedule FTP backups to occur on just about any day and recurrence automatically.

As far as installing openssl on MSL, not sure that's necessary as it (or some SSL variant) is already installed. As far as the secure FTP server package, you should be able to install it... The real question is to what end, the 3300 doesn't support SFTP and what would you do with it once the MSL server got the tar file of the backup? For that matter, how would you get the system to create the tar file, it needs to run the backup script to create it on demand?

[x-man]

FTP introduced with MCD 4.0 so before that you are stuck with local backups.

We tend to backup on the customer site to their server if at all possible. Otherwise we have a copy of any other locally at our office.

 But I am coming round to the backup on a usb stick and velcroing it to the machine.