Using a harddrive as a backup device.

[JeffRT]

Greetings,<br><br>Hard drive are cheap and fast. Can I use a hard drive as a backup device for my WIndows NT Server? What are the problems? Can I use the native NT backup software? Can I Mirror the drives, break the mirror and then expect to use the mirror as a recovery device?<br><br>Thanks for your help.<br><br>JeffRT

 

[scott22]

JeffRT,<br>Possible caveat to using mirroring as your backup...if your data had been corrupted by the iloveyou virus recently, your mirrored, backup copy would have also been corrupted. Then you would have no backups to turn to in order to restore the good data you had before.<br>The benefit of backups by an &quot;offline&quot; (as opposed to a real time backup)is that the data is isolated from the day to day interaction of users who potentially are corrupting, deleting or changing the data in such a way that they may need data restored to a &quot;good state.&quot; Usually you have to go &quot;back in time&quot; in order to find that &quot;good state.&quot;<br>When looking at the cost of backup media, you formulate the measured risk to cost and time and set your back up plan and schedules accordingly. In other words, if you can afford the tapes to backup every night, then do it. If not, how much time can you afford to lose when it comes to work performed on the data. Can your users afford to lose two days of work, three days...how many days of work recovery can you afford to have?<br>These are the things you must consider when looking at the cost of backup/recovery.<br>Good Luck