Backup 26 remote location !!!! what is the best solution ???

[azev]

The company I currenty working for has about 35-40 employee. 10-15 of them works at the corporate office, and the rest of them work from their home office in 18 different states. The corporate office has a complete network from file server, dc, etc. We have T1 connection and dsl for backup. Most of our field employee has broadband either cable, dsl, or satellite. Only about 4 person still have dial up because broadband is not yet available in their area. The corporate office has file server which backup all the files on the server daily. Just recently someone from the field has a broken hardrive, and lost of their very important file, and no way to backup. This has brought the attention to me to figure out a backup plan for these field people.
The solution should not cost an arm and leg for the company and should be very easy to implement because all these field users are computer illiterate. Currently I was looking at a software called backup manager by geniesoft. The software will backup everything on their computer; my document, outlook.pst, favorites, etc and write it in a blank disc. Everyone have to send their backup disk to the corp office every month before they will receive their expense checks I am not so sure this will be the best solution though. If any of you have experienced the problem I have, and would like to share their solution please do so, or if you might have a better solution please just write it down

Thank you guys.

 

[Goosemaster]

1. Give everyone Zip drives

OR

2. Set them up as VPN clients so they can save their work on your network.

 

[Garion]

When I did this, I found a product (kind of like MS Briefcase) that allowed for a synchronization of files. Once per hour, the program would copy all updated files from the users' hard drive to a network drive mapped back to a server. Simple, easy, and quick. That was on a LAN, however - I don't know what your WAN performance is and how big your files are so that might or might not be an option. You might try to find something similar that can zip the files and transfer them on a scheduled basis (IE, midnight each night) to avoid conflicts with normal traffic.

- G

 

[azev]

Well, zip drive doesnt work because they are going to need plenty of disk to backup all their files.
Just their outlook personal folder file sized from 250MB up to 1.5GB. We have plenty of other big files in presentation or pagemaker files (20MB max) and other file are just normal word, excel documents. I really like the ideas of centralize backup, but most of these home office only connect using broadband with max upload speed of +- 128KB. Even we have T1 and DSL, uploading 30MB files from 128KB line is ridiculous, and some of our users still on 56k dialup. To have them backup everything to a cd looks like my only solution now. Unless anyone has a better idea ????

 

[gaidin123]

If your main office has no way of accessing these remote users at a decent speed then centralized backup is pretty much out of the question. I would think that sending the users CD burners and a stack of blanks along with any number of single machine backup software packages would work great. You just teach them how to use the backup software and put the responsibility in their hands. I would just have them use CDRs and do full backups every night/week. If you need it with more frequency maybe CDRWs for the differentials would be more cost effective.

If the backups start outgrowing a single CD then maybe you'll have to start thinking about DVDRs or external firewire/usb2 hard drives...

Gaidin

 

[owensdj]

azev, NovaStor has some software called NovaNet-WEB that might be what you need. NovaNet-WEB would let one of your corporate office servers act as a backup server for your employees' computers. You'd install the server end of the software on the corporate server and they would install the client end of the software on their computer. They can backup their data to the backup server over the Internet or over the LAN. NovaNet-WEB software provides many great features such as data encryption and compression.

 

[cmetz]

rsync - rsync.samba.org. It's a UNIX tool, but there's a Win32 version available too. It ain't pretty, but it's a very good and fast and scriptable/batchable tool that incrementally synchronizes directory X with directory Y, including support for doing so remotely over ssh.

 

[vortix]

How bout Retrospect?