Iomega REV drive - Opinions?

[ddeder]

I am working for a small company that has 6 computers plus a server running Windows 2000 Server. The server recently crashed with a dead hard drive and unfortunately we did not have a RAID array (It was really just a regular workstation running Windows 2000 Server). Recovery of our data from tape was something of a pain, and of course we lost all of our network settings so it took a tech person nearly a whole day to configure the server again.

I am now looking at an alternative way to back up our server. The REV drive looks appealing as it uses removable hard drives instead of tapes so it ought to be much faster. Also, hard drives don't wear out like tape drives so we ought to save money in the long run on media.

What I would like to do is mirror the hard drive in the server every night to the REV drive so that should the internal hard drive die again, we can simply boot from the REV drive and then mirror the data back once the internal drive is replaced. I realize that the computer would have to have the ability to boot from the REV drive.

I just wonder if this will work or not... It is my understanding that files that are in use cannot be backed up. There are alway some Windows files running in the background. Will these not be backed up even with a mirroring program (such as Norton Ghost)?

Has anyone else had any experience with this drive?

 

[bob4432]

not knowing anything about the REV drive, why don't you just add another drive and use something like acronis drive image and create a new image every day to the other hdd? that is what i do at home for my 3 machines and it works very well. the nice thing about it is you don't need to turn off the machine, it can work while the machine is still on and maybe you could, if space permits, backup the server to a shared workstation drive too?