Best Backup Solution for A Small Network?

[bluegreenturtle]

Hi all - not sure if this is the right place for this question, but I'm hoping so.

I'm consulting for a small company and I think their backup solution is pretty sucky, so I would like to suggest a new one. Hopefully you guys will have some better ideas than I have had!

Office is a Workgroup - about 15 nodes, 10 users.

2 file servers, 1 w2k, 1 NT4. Total capacity of the fileservers is between 300 and 400 gigs (it's 300 now, probably going to drop another disk in.), - 4 17 gig, 4 37 gig, 1 73 gig. all SCSI.

Current backup is a SCSI tape 20/40 gig that is manually run each night by one of the people there, I think he rotates the drive that he backs up each night, using the NT4 backup tool.

I want to set them up something that is both automatic and covers more than one drive.

My thought was to build a cheap IDE RAID server and using the cheapness of IDE drives, get 4 big ones or something and have it do automatic backups, and then they can manually tape backup each week for archival purposes.

I'm not married to that idea at all and will throw it out in a heartbeat for a solution that is any of better, cheaper, more reliable, or just makes more sense.

Costs to the minimum, please.

What's the normal approach, best approach?

Thanks!

 

[Daniel]

There are a few ways to do it, one thing to remember though is a hard drive on the network is not backup, redundancy maybe but I'd imagine the data is important so I'd be backing up to something removable more than once a week.

 

[reicherb]

Sounds like you proably want to look at 40/80 (maybe larger) DLT options maybe will an autoloader, or possibly even LTO.

You can get an 8 tape 40/80 SDLT autoloader for around $4000 which is probably more than you want to spend, but is going to be a pretty good answer to backing up all of that data.

 

[mboy]

You can also look into off site backup vendors. Install a client on one of your PC's, it compresses the data and is sent thru the pip (encrypted in most cases I have seen), to there data center. You can usually restore with a click of a couple of buttons on the client software. Most places charge by the Gig.
Yeah, backing up to a media that still resides in the same building isnt a very good means of disaster recovery.

 

[Fuzznuts]

Originally posted by: mboy
You can also look into off site backup vendors. Install a client on one of your PC's, it compresses the data and is sent thru the pip (encrypted in most cases I have seen), to there data center. You can usually restore with a click of a couple of buttons on the client software. Most places charge by the Gig.
Yeah, backing up to a media that still resides in the same building isnt a very good means of disaster recovery.

this is why 99% of companies will always take the previous backup off site at night just pray you dont have a fire on the first nights full backup

 

[mboy]

Yup, I take my tapes home with me every nite. I hope the building doesnt blow up and my house doesnt burn down the same nite,lol

 

[mcveigh]

http://www.ecrix.com/products/vxa-2.cfm?pc=specs

can do 160gb.