Backup of user files at work - Storage solution?

[evilspoons]

Hello everyone,

I'm looking to improve the backup system I have at work. Right now we have a server with a 2 TB RAID array. It runs a program that is probably a glorified Windows version of rsync; you point it at a directory (in this case, a network share on every PC in the building). On a schedule (nightly), it looks at the directory for any changes and copies the altered files over (the entire file, even if only 1 kb changed in a 1 GB file).

My boss likes this because it dumps the 'real' files onto the server's file system instead of compressing them into an image file or whatever. I don't like this for approximately the same reason - it can't do any compression/deduplication, especially a problem when half the people in our company have the same 2 GB blob of engineering files for a project!

Now we're butting up against a bit of an issue. The RAID array is getting full and the server doesn't have very many SATA ports for more drives.

I was looking at the Drobo units, and they look very nice, but I'm not sure if they're the right solution. Ideally I'd have some sort of amazing centrally-managed deduplicating super-efficient backup system that would put data on an "appliance" like a Drobo... but then Drobo's web site starts talking about Symantec Backup Exec and iSCSI and virtual machines and I get lost very quickly.

Can anyone recommend a good way for us to structure our backup system?

I think the boss would be willing to spend a few thousand bucks on a solution, but we can't start hitting "Enterprise" level costs.

We have between 20 and 30 PCs that need backup on a nightly basis. They're all Windows XP or newer boxes attached to an active directory with a single Windows 2008 R2 server.

Thanks!

 

[Chiefcrowe]

are you allowed to use crashplan? That does deduplication but i'm not sure if they have a version that runs on a server.

 

[Ken g6]

Sounds like the two of you would agree on a deduplicating filesystem. A quick Google indicates that Windows Server 2012 has this built in, if you want to upgrade. There may be other options of unknown reliability.

 

[evilspoons]

Thanks for the replies. CrashPlan does almost what I want it to, but in a professional environment it costs $5000/year with the amount of data we need... a hard sell when our current backup solution is $0/month... and our internet connection is miserably slow (15 down 1 up), so cloud storage sucks.

If we could use CrashPlan Pro without the online storage that would be fantastic, but as far as I can tell they don't offer this option.

As for the Windows Server 2012 business, that is awesome. Unfortunately we upgraded to 2008 R2 barely a year ago and convincing the boss to upgrade again will be tough. I will give it a shot though.

Upgrading to 2012 gives us deduplication, but it doesn't solve the crummy backup software we're using, though. There's got to be something that's basically Apple Time Machine for Windows for multiple computers, right? I just want to locally back up one or two folders per PC on a schedule with versioning and deduplication... sigh.