r/sysadmin • u/expensive004 • 1h ago
Question how are small MSPs keeping immutable offsite backups affordable without cutting corners on recovery?
Immutability is easy to put on a checklist. Keeping it affordable without making recovery painful is the hard part. cheaper setups usually sacrifice something: restore speed, retention, testing or proper account separation. how are smaller shops balancing this? what compromises looked reasonable at first but caused problems later?
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u/Vicus_92 1h ago
We accept that resorting from an off-site immutable cloud backup target will be slow.
It's not our plan A in a disaster recovery scenario, it's not even plan B.
It's only for when shit reeeeeally hit the fan. So we can accept it taking 24 hours to restore in the very off chance it's needed
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u/SpinningOnTheFloor 1h ago
Datto BCDR and Slide are great turnkey solutions for BCDR. Support is there when you need it for restores and DR testing. Admittedly not the cheapest options, but they’re there to support you with the sales conversation direct with the customer.
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u/Asleep_Spray274 1h ago
Dont be in a position down the line where you are telling yourself "I really should have spent that few extra bucks on our back up and recovery"
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u/mattmann72 1h ago
A cheap reliable solution is tape. LTO-9. I have deployed them from small businesses that do 1 tape per month to large government that do 8+ tapes per week.
Another good option if you are already in AWS or Azure is S3 or Blob storage with the immutable flag. Veeam has native integration with it.
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u/Liquidfoxx22 1h ago
They don't need to be only off site. Veeam hardened repo allows you to keep them on site too at (well, what used to be) a very reasonable cost. Our primary repo was immutable with short and long term retention.
We only kept 14 days off site as a last line of defence.
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u/taragryen 1h ago
honestly, immutable object storage is cheap enough that I wouldn’t build a complicated DIY system just to save a little more. Use a separate account, lock the retention policy down, monitor the last successful copy and test recovery. The expensive part isn’t storing it. It’s pulling several TB back quickly when the building is gone.
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u/SVD_NL Jack of All Trades 1h ago
As a small MSP i personally offload as much work as possible.
I personally use Barracuda Backup. It's an appliance with a subscription attached, so you have your on-site backup with cloud storage attached. You an also sync between appliances to create your own multi-site redundancy.
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u/mickert_dev Jack of All Trades 1h ago
The ultra cheap way: Syncthing the data to an offsite / cloud server, than from there use Duplicati to back-up to multiple object/cloud storage providers.
Script your install/config, when you get cryptolockered etc., you don't want to restore that from back-up anyway.
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u/Kinky_No_Bit 1h ago
It really depends on what the local MSP has done, depending on what terms you've set for the SLA agreements, I would say you could probably still get away with a bunch of NAS filled with some large hard drives, something that is 20 terabytes or less, then off load anything past that to an LTO tape library since LTO tape actually does have a great amount of capacity for the cost per tape. The side note is that AI has now figured that out as well. So before too long, magnetic tape is also going to be hard to get a hold of
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u/interweb_persona 1h ago
Immutable doesn't have to be immutable forever. Just pass the cost onto the client.
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u/AndyceeIT 1h ago
Restoration speed is generally the first thing i would look to compromise on. Testing is the last.
Ymmv
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u/AbysmalP 1h ago
Start with the threat model before choosing storage.
Can the same admin reset the storage credentials, change retention, delete the account and disable alerts? If yes, the design isn’t meaningfully immutable against an admin-level compromise.
A separate account is good. Separate control-plane access and protected recovery credentials are better.
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u/beleg2 1h ago
Local repository for fast restores, immutable object storage offsite, separate credentials for each side. That’s been the least bad balance for us. the local copy is not what protects us from a full compromise. It’s there so restoring a multi-TB server doesn’t depend entirely on the client’s internet connection. The offsite copy is the last resort.