Backup Suggestions for Small Business

[alex20850]

I may be in the wrong forum. If I am I apologize and would appreciate redirection to the right one.

Short Question: Are External USB Hard Drives a valid backup alternative?

My wife is the office manager for a small business, but they have 60 gigs of data that needs to be backed up - client files, etc. It is growing about a gig a month. Their computer consultant is suggesting tapes. I am looking for some place that gives a list of pros and cons of tape versus external hard drives versus other alternatives. I am not wedded to the idea of using the hard drives, but wanted to consider it since it would make the backups simpler - it could be restored or used anywhere versus having to have another tape drive. She is concerned that if she drops one, the data would be lost.

 

[Sybje]

Hi,

If planning a back-up strategy, you have to answer a few questions...

- What's the RPO and RTO of the servers, you are backing-up?
- What's the retention time of the data?
- What is the back-up window?

According to the information, you provided, I would choose for a simple (LTO2) tape drive...

You can run a weekly full in the weekends, incremental of differential back-up on working days...

You have to change tapes one time in a week...

If you set retention to infinite, you can get a year of data on 52 tapes...

Will be an investment of approxiamtely 15K, but can worth it...

I fyou provide more information, maybe the case can de discussed in more detail...

Regards, Bart

 

[nate12345]

Well it's great that your wife is looking into backuping up her data, and now that she is going in the this direction she should look at multiple solutions to implement rather than just one. Also, budget is always a factor, but keep in mind that if 1 hard drive became very corrupt and needed to be sent to a data recovery, they have no problem charging $1500-3000 to recover the data (and no guarantees that they can recover it).

First I would say is all of the data on one computer or is it on several dozen? If it's on one computer I would recommend instantly configuring a raid 1 in her computer - even if there are a half a dozen computers or a dozen computers I'd do a raid 1 in them all.

A Raid 1 basically copies all data (instantly without the user noticing) from the hard drive she's using on the computer, to another hard drive in the computer. So the components she would need to purchase are an identical hard drive and a raid card (although most motherboards support raid 1 on sata slots now). However, if her building burns down, then Raid 1 doesn't matter, which is where an off-site backup will save you.

60 gigs of data and a gig a month is pretty lite so I would recommend just using an external usb drive (on top of the raid 1). I'm thinking your wife works for a small company and is in a small office, so a raid 1 combined with a simple usb hd backup would offer extreme simplicity and would put her way ahead of most people and other companies for that matter.

Tape is worth looking into, but perhaps I'm old fashion but I like tape for large archival purposes, not small incremenal backups. Either one will actually be the right answer though, I would just make sure you supplement it with another backup solution.

Nate

 

[gecko27]

Another option that we use is a NAS box configured as RAID 5. NAS is set up on the network w/ a fodler for each PC user. Pick your favorite backup software and have it backup to the users folder.

We happen to be using a Dell 705N and syncback as out inexpensive version.