- Mar 6, 2006
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O.K. I have no idea what Im doing...Ive only played with personal computers, but I was asked to look into software for a network/server type setup. I guess you could say its a small business or something, they have probably 20 computers or so all networked together. Im not 100% sure what all software theyre using, just that they have a single PC acting as a "server" that stores primary files or some such...theyve got some freeware program doing the backups now, but in combination with that the PC itself is like a pentium 2 and it literally takes over 20 hours to backup 60GB of data. They were interested in getting a new "server" PC and software to go with it. I think the server PC is running MS Server 2003 and they have some sort of hot swap hard drive bay they do the backup onto. Then pull the drive and lock it up. If they have any problems they can insert the backup drive and boot to it and keep running.
So I need a little help with the hardware too, what makes a hotswap hard drive? Can I use any hard drive and buy some sort of hot swap bay? Or would it be better to build a newer system with like esata and use a simple external drive? And what do you really need for such an aplication, harware wise? Im thinking just build it as cheap as I can, but will processor speed RAM or anything else factor into backup times?
And a RAID array isnt going to work for this aplication because they need to remove the disk and lock it up for security reasons. And sorry the info is so vauge, I dont have allot of details yet, and asked to just get a general look into it. I dont know if there is another free program out there that can do what we need or if they need to purchase software or what. As far as I can tell they need to only backup information sent to this one central pc, but they may need or want the ability to backup/copy files from networked drives as well. This needs to be as simple as possible because they dont have any computer professionals and I dont have any networking experience. This is just like a campground kinda thing and not really a business...they dont have any real money or anything for "professional" software at a thousand dollars per machine or whatever or even a true server...this is all gehto style that needs to work well and reliably. What theyve got now has been working for like 10 years maybe more, and its just not able to handle everything as well as it should anymore.
So yeah...thanks for reading this far.
So I need a little help with the hardware too, what makes a hotswap hard drive? Can I use any hard drive and buy some sort of hot swap bay? Or would it be better to build a newer system with like esata and use a simple external drive? And what do you really need for such an aplication, harware wise? Im thinking just build it as cheap as I can, but will processor speed RAM or anything else factor into backup times?
And a RAID array isnt going to work for this aplication because they need to remove the disk and lock it up for security reasons. And sorry the info is so vauge, I dont have allot of details yet, and asked to just get a general look into it. I dont know if there is another free program out there that can do what we need or if they need to purchase software or what. As far as I can tell they need to only backup information sent to this one central pc, but they may need or want the ability to backup/copy files from networked drives as well. This needs to be as simple as possible because they dont have any computer professionals and I dont have any networking experience. This is just like a campground kinda thing and not really a business...they dont have any real money or anything for "professional" software at a thousand dollars per machine or whatever or even a true server...this is all gehto style that needs to work well and reliably. What theyve got now has been working for like 10 years maybe more, and its just not able to handle everything as well as it should anymore.
So yeah...thanks for reading this far.
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