Hi, work for a small IT company in the UK who look after the needs of several local companies, mostly small businesses of 20 people or less.
I’ve been having a lot of support calls regarding backups lately and was wondering what other people in this situation would recommend, any advice is welcome to stop the worry of incomplete backups!
A large proportion of our customers use Windows 2003 server (some with SBS2003) and usually have a DAT72 backup tape drive. A lot of them have reached the capacity limit of a 72GB tape cartridge and are now having backup errors due to full tapes.
They tend to like it simple so it’s a case of “here, put this tape in the slot once a day every work day” ie. they are not up to the job of sitting there and managing the backups. That is to say, expecting them to look after a monthly full then daily incrementals without missing a day is asking too much.
A daily full server backup is preferred, if that’s not possible then at least a full “data” backup each day is OK. On some sites I have put in USB2 external hard drives to supplement the tape backup but only as an emergency work-around.
Obviously there are bigger tape drives about but the next logical step up is an Ultrium 200/400 which would work very nicely but a cost over £600 (close to £1000 with a SCSI card and installation) is asking too much in this climate. For a while DAT160 looked like a possibility but no drives seem to have come out yet. Several portable USB2 hard drives (one per day) could be used but I have had problems with powering the laptop derived drives and the customers do not like lugging about larger ones.
The small companies tend to be a bit old fashioned in that they like to “have” their data rather than upload it to some Internet service and many have to have it off site for insurance purposes.
With all that in mind can anyone give me some pointers for reliable, portable, and cheap(ish) backup solutions for up to 400GB? Many thanks.