Windows NT and USB.

There seems to be some third party support for using USB with NT 4.0. However, I cannot seem to find anything for what I would like to do.

Our network is currently not being backed up on a regular basis. Essentially, all that needs to be backed up is a handfull of files on our NT 4.0 server, and we want to keep costs to an absolute minimum. The best suggestion that I got, was to add an external drive and back up to that. I have looked and it is questionable whether this is doable, as currently there doesn’t seem to be products manufactured (with NT support) to add USB ports to an NT server.

Can I do this, is there something that I have missed that makes this easily workable? If it isn’t possible what other inexpensive options are there for backups?

Try to get a firewire card for your PC. I beleive that firewire (IEEE 1394) is supported by NT and you can get external firewire drives.

Install a CD burner (an IDE one should be inexpensive enough.) Use CD RWs, and rotate them like any other backup medium.

Use the command line CD tools from Jörg Schilling and write a batch file to back up your stuff periodically.

This is assuming you really have “a handful” of files. If you’ve got gigabytes of stuff, then this obviously won’t help.

Another possibility is to do a “cross” backup. You have the server do its backup to one of the PCs on the net. If you set things up right, you could have it do daily backups to different directories on different PCs for different days and distribute things so that losing a PC or the server won’t endanger your data.

Better still is to consider the importance of the data on your server. If losing the files will cost you more than a couple of thousand dollars in lost work time or contracts, then damn the cost and spring for a real backup system and software. A SCSI adapter and streaming tape drive (with a set of good tapes) and good software will set you back that much, but when the crunch comes your data is safe.

A company that I help out with their PC stuff learned this the hard way a year ago. The first time I looked at the system, I told them they needed a good backup system, and what it would cost to buy the components and for me to install it.

They wanted to save money, so they didn’t do it. Well, what had to come, came. They had a power failure one day, and the primary partition and the second partition they were using for “backup” suffered a head crash. Loads of data toasted.

I spent about forty hours recovering all of the data that could be gotten back and reinstalling the server and all of their software. Then they bought the hardware I’d recommended and the software and had me install it.

End result:
The system recovery cost them as much as buying and installing the backup system (with UPS) so they effectively bought and installed two backup systems (as far as cost goes) and had lots of down time while I was putting shit back together.

If your company depends on the server, then do yourself a big favor and have a good backup system (with UPS and automatic power down) installed. It will pay for itself in the long run.