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Backup for Business?

I

iCzMan

Junior Member
Mod: Please move this thead if it belongs to another better category, thanks!

I'm currently helping a friend to setup backup for his small business and I need some advice on how what hardware to purchase and what software to use for backup.

They have roughly 10 boxes running Windows XP. One of the box is acting as a server hosting intranet website and project management tool dotProject. This server also hosts pdf and design files that employees regularly produce on weekly if not daily bases.

I know in order to have a well rounded backup scheme in place, they'll need redundant files to be copied onto a different physical drive and as well as to a another medium off site away from the company in case of a natural disaster.

This is what I'm thinking to implement the backup:

Hardware:

* Purchase a RAID card and hard drive, and run Raid 1 on the server to insure constant uptime for the server in case one of the drive fails. This however will not prevent virus attack and corrupt partitions since all Raid 1 does is mirror the drive.
* Purchase another hard drive and install into server. This drive will store daily, weekly, and monthly backup of the main hard drive in the server.


Software:

* Use Acronis True Image to setup daily, weekly, and monthly backup.


Off site Backup (use one or more of the following):

* Use one of the online backup service to store files.
* Burn weekly / monthly DVD and store them off site


What is the best practice in turns of small business backup? Will my solution be robust enough?
 
So you have 1 server. You are going to back this server up to itself every day but only burn a DVD once a week to actually move these backups off site?

I've never used Acronis, I don't have much small business experience. But I'd deffinitely be quoting ArcServeIT for a standalone server and buying a real tape drive and doing daily offsite backups.
 
Yes I will definitely do a daily off site backup probably using the online backup service.

I've never heard of ArcServeIT, let me try to Google it. In the mean while, that's the main advantage going with ArcServeIT?
 
I wish I could compare ArcserveIT to Acronis but I can't. ArcServeIT is just very easy to manage backup policies and scripts that run before and after the backup. It also manages a database of everything you've backed up so you can find the files you need and have it tell you what tape it's on.

It looks like Acronis is more like ghost than like traditional backup programs. IE ArcServeIT backs all your files up to tape so you can go restore a directory or what have you. Acronis creates an image file of the disk / partition. I guess both methods work, we tend to use Ghosting as a workstation solution and not a server solution.
 
ArcServIT is a good one for smaller solutions. I prefer Tivoli Storage Manager for our enterprise stuff.
 
A harddrive is not a backup solution.

How much data are you trying to back up? You can get a DAT tape drive for 500-1000, and the tapes are cheap.
 
Thanks for the quick replies!

Tape drives for off-site backup sounds much better than using online backup service especially when we don't have fast bandwidth. Some people suggested using LTO2 for this purpose, but I think the capacity (200GB) and price ($3500+) is out of the range for their needs and budget. Currently they have at most 2GB of data to backup, which is very minimal but might subject to increase as the company grows. DAT solution that tfinch2 suggested might be a good fit for them. How about Iomega REV Drive? Does anyone have any experience on using it has a cheaper tape solution?

On a side note, I'm now thinking of investing in Windows Small Business Server 2003 to use Active Directory to sync profiles between every XP box and the 2003 server. However, what are some other benefits of using SBS 2003 in their current situation as opposed to just regular Windows XP?
 
XP has a limit to samba users (shared files)
SBS premium has a good enterprise level firewall
SBS has Exchange, you could buy a domain and have true email
SBS has support and is designed for what you are doing, XP does not


 
Image backups are good, but only limited, I would do file backups using ntbackup daily and then some sortof image backup once a week or even once a month.

SBS or small business server from microsoft fits this setup perfectly
 
and.. using harddisks are perfectly fine, just dont use a single one for all your backups, you could get a few external usb ones and offload the backup files to that.

Disks fail just as tapes do.
 
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