How do you backup your "out of office" employees?

[Vini]

Those employees who spend 99% of their time on the road, and don't connect via VPN... How do you back them up?

[Moby-Dick]

depends if they connect via t'internet or not ?

[dirky]

Portable hdd and a good slap if they don't do it. More recently they have started using a box.net business account to share/backup information. Not much use if its more than documents that is being backed up though..

[OilSheikh]

How do they access emails then? No VPN = no corporate connection, right?

[Splash]

How do they access emails then? No VPN = no corporate connection, right?

That depends, RPC over HTTPS in Exchange allows you to connect to your Exchange server from any internet connection.

That said... why no VPN? Holding the business data on a non-backed up machine with no corporate connectivity is way too big a risk for my liking - these things need to be covered by policies.

[chrestomanci]

You could sign up for an Internet based backup service, and create accounts for your out of office employees.

https://secure.backblaze.com/business.htm

The first time they install the software the full backup will take a long time, so it might be an idea to get them to come into the office and leave the laptop connected to your fast connection overnight, but after that it should not take to long on their home broadband connection. (unless they are in the habit of copying DVD rips to their laptops to pass the time on long haul flights or suchlike)

[Vini]

Portable hdd and a good slap if they don't do it.

This is how our American colleagues work... Not ideal, but better than nowt. Working on the principal that if their machine does die and they haven't got a backup, it's their fault and not IT's.

Our UK guys, don't really do anything in the way of backups. 99% of their working day is on the road, jumping from customer to customer.

Most of the guys have internet at home, so I guess a connection back to the office, from home, would be ideal, but would result in them needing to leave it connected overnight probably/presumably... and even then what software to use?