Raid drive just failed, need backup solution

[SteadySystems]

We are running an older system, Windows Server 2000 with RAID 5.

Drive 2 of the 3 drives has a bad block and the tape backups they were doing daily were not working.

So what I am looking for is a new backup solution for 2008, I've been out of the loop for a while and not sure what's available these days.

Any help? We want to keep it inexpensive.

 

[Davetoo]

Inexpensive? NTBackup and an external USB drive.

I'm Certifiable, not cert-ified.
It just means my answers are from experience, not a book.

There are no more PDC's! There are DC's with FSMO roles!

 

[SteadySystems]

I do have an external 400gb hard drive

what type of backup plan should I be rolling out?

 

[Davetoo]

I think the one that makes the most sense for your environment. Does the data on the server change daily? Then back it up daily.

I'm Certifiable, not cert-ified.
It just means my answers are from experience, not a book.

There are no more PDC's! There are DC's with FSMO roles!

 

[SteadySystems]

Does NTBACKUP do this automatically? daily?

 

[Davetoo]

If you set it up to run via task manager it will. Google is your friend in this case on how to set it up.

I'm Certifiable, not cert-ified.
It just means my answers are from experience, not a book.

There are no more PDC's! There are DC's with FSMO roles!

 

[bdintegrations]

We tried using NTBackup with task manager but we found it unreliable unless you spent the time to make a really good script. We just shelled out the money for a program like Backup Exec. If you like Open Source, or do not want to spend the money, you can use AMANDA on a Linux box(which is free).

For the hardware, we used external hard drives a long time ago but found them to be unreliable. Many people use external drives because they have "lots of space". However, if a drive went bad, then all the backups on that drive would be lost. In addition, external drives are limited if you want to keep your backups for a long period of time(it does not make sense to keep buying drives).

We also ran into problems when changing the drives when they filled up. There were many occasions where we had to reboot the server for the new drive to be recognized(not good at all).

We bought a DAT drive and now we can keep the DAT tapes as long as we want(or reuse them). If one tape failed are hundreds more we can restore from. DAT tapes are not proprietary like Sony or Exabyte tape/drives so many companies make them, thus relatively cheap.

Which ever solution you choose, make sure you use full and incremental backups to save space and ALWAYS test the backups!!!!



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