backup systems

[fusiongraphix]

Ok so ive never been good about backup's I have never had any major problems but im starting to not sleep good at night knowing my server could go any minute and I could lose my whole business. lol

I have 4 computers running on a domain and of course my server that holds the shops data. I have tried multiple ways of backing up as far as different hdd, external drives. etc.. as of right now I bought a WD Terabyte with USB, Firewire, and eSATA. and i planned on just backing up my data to that, but ive been having non stop trouble. not sure why, i have acronis backup server and it always freezes during the backup. I thought maybe it was the speed of the USB, so i bought a eSATA adapter card for the server thinking the transfer rate would be faster and maybe get it to work, well i installed the card in the server and it wont bootup with it in. so now im stuck with a card that doesnt work..lol

anyways I dont want to have to spend 3-4,000 bucks on a crazy backup system, but if I do, i will.. I dont even know what people are using, external drives like me, tape drives? im not very knowledgable in this area.

Any help on this subject would be awesome. different ideas, what other guys are doing would also help. i figured the terabyte would work fine, just run the backup once a week, or month. it could be the drive or the software that causes it too freeze too.

Well thanks and look forward to any suggestions!

 

[Jet Fast Printing]

I have nearly the same setup as you.... with the exception that I have a few more computers than you. We use Symantec Backup Exec v12.5 with a SCSI tape backup drive. Now before you say "eeeewwwww" tape backup, the tape holds 800GB of data. And can span between tape drives\auto loaders.

I will post the name of the drive if you like, just let me know.

 

[SignBurst PCs]

What type of domain are you on?

2003, 2003SBS, 2008, 2008SBS, etc?

 

[Jet Fast Printing]

Who me? 2008SBS

 

[choucove]

The way we have our backup set up is really quite primitive compared to a lot of larger businesses, but it works quite well. We have two external hard drives, always swapping one in the shop and one off site. The backup performs each night, using a simple $25 application called Backup Magic. All this tool does is basically say, "Copy everything from this folder to that folder" and works tremendously well and incredibly fast. It copies over only new or changed files eliminating a lot of data transfer. The best thing about this application in my view is it doesn't compress and combine all of your files and folders into one file which you need to have that exact program installed to open and do anything with the data. It is just copying the file from one place to another. This means that if for some reason the computer doing the backup of all networked shares dies, we can still put the external drive onto a different computer and recognize all the data.

Being so far away from anywhere we can get service or parts for a server, if our server does completely die it could take up to a week to get replacement parts and get the server going again. I know, not the best situation, but it's the reality of being where we are with what we have. That is also why the network is not set up on a domain. But if the server does die, we can hook up the external hard drive to a computer and use that computer as a temporary server. Viola, you're running in a matter of minutes again.

Now, there are a TON of options out there for data backup, but this was the cheapest and simplest setup that we could come up with at the time.

 

[Dice]

Primary File Share is 1 TB with 4 drives on RAID 5.

I have an external 1.5 Terrabyte drive plugged into the server that does an incremental backup every night.

We use, Genie Backup Server Edition and it works great. I have about 12 days of incremental backups

 

[SignBurst PCs]

If you are using one of the SBS solutions, the SBS Backup is actually pretty good if you set it up correctly. There are a tone of third party solutions as well.

 

[Dice]

I put everything together for under $1500.

Good article on building your own here. http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30922/79/

I would go the easy route and getting a cheap baseline system from Dell to start with first though. Building your own system completely is not for the faint of heart. Dell makes it margins by charging customers crazy prices on extra items like DVD drives, Harddrives, Ram. So if you don't get those and put them in yourself you can save a ton of money.