Small Business Backup Solutions

[cyberspace]

This may not be the correct forum so forgive me if this is the case.

I recently did some work for a small business (3 employees/3 PCs).

While I was there I noticed there was no backup in place.

I have thought that getting a small NAS drive would be suitable, as this could be taken off site each evening, while also providing a central point of storage in the office (it's a peer to peer network and there are files over all 3 machines...pretty messy!).

Is this a reasonable idea? What software could i use to automate the backup to this drive on a daily basis (looking for a cheap solution...not something like Veritas!)

Your thoughts are appreciated, thanks in advance.

'When all else fails.......read the manual'

 

[dkediger]

In a peer workgroup, a portable NAS with the workstations configured to use it as a central file repository is probably the most straightforward and least expensive way to go. Note that it doesn't provide a true restore capability as a proper backup solution would. A tape solution in one of the workstations to back up the NAS could provide coverage there.

Its also inevitable that files will eventually become scattered to the individual workstations as people work early/late while the NAS is still offsite.

 

[BJ9]

The Iomega REV drive has a small, relatively inexpensive, model that we use to back up our HR data. It works pretty well for us. We rotate the tapes and take the current one offsite.

 

[Sheco]

My father will forget to change the motor oil in his car for 20,000 miles... no way will he actually follow any backup schedule... he would take the box home for the first few days and then just start forgetting it at the office.

So I put a UPS and a disk mirror RAID 0 on his server and I personally back it up to CDROM whenever I visit... so Thanksgiving, Xmas, and one or two other random times of the year.

 

[cyberspace]

Thanks for the tips so far, something to think about.

Sheco - A RAID0 offers no fault tolerance, if one drive goes down you lose all data of all drives. Perhaps a RAID1 would have been a better idea for something that's rarely backed up. RAID0 is for performance only.

'When all else fails.......read the manual'

 

[Sheco]

oh, sorry I guess it was RAID 1 then... it was mirrored and not striped.

 

[cyberspace]

Ah I see, then yes, that is RAID1


'When all else fails.......read the manual'

 

[skiflyer]

I had a similar problem for a slightly larger office... here's what I did...

I went to their basement and found the two oldest computers that could run IDE drives.

I installed the Debian base system & a 250gig drive in each... the first one is the fileserver, and the second one gets rsynched with all the data every couple hours.

Then, I bought two USB harddrives... at 4am each morning the important data gets copied from the backup fileserver to the USB drive... then when they come in the morning they switch USB drives & the unused one goes home at night...

Further the data is date stamped so the USB drives can hold a few copies, in case it's a corruption instead of catastrophy issue.

It's not perfect, but it covers everything except for the viruses (or anything that would destroy all the copies before something got noticed), and a catastrophe so bad during the day that the person can't get the second USB drive out of the location.

Sounds kinda complicated reading it, but since we built it up one step at a time (the USB drives first) it went smoothly... we're not a peer to peer network tho, so that made it alot easier.

We started looking at NAS, but I just couldn't find one for the right price... a Pentium3 + big IDE drives + linux + samba was just easier to roll our own.

 

[tbtcust]

I have been using EMC Retrospect 6.5 formally (Dantz

http://www.dantz.com)

for years.

I have used it for simple backups for mobile customers with laptops to large servers with 100+ workstations.

You can configure the software for remote backup and recover, batch backup and recover, scheduled backups, etc.

The scheduled is a tad weak in that you can not schedule for the first weekday of a month. I use Kirby Alarm and Task Scheduler and the Retrospect batch scripts to fill the gaps.

You can backup to CD, DVDs, HD, external drives and Tape.

very inexpensive solution.

Hopes this helps.