My girlfriends father just moved into his new office for his new 2-employee business. He asked me to suggest method of performing backups of the data across the work machines, which consists of a fixed PC and a laptop (for the time being). He works on the laptop and the other guy works on a crappy Packard Bell he took from home :undecided
Anyway, both have thousands of documents on each, in all sorts of formats. Both machines aren't exactly new, the laptop (having just being upgraded to 768mb memory by myself) now runs a lot better than it used to, but still only has an Athlon XP-M processor and probably a 4200rpm HD. Access times are shoddy to say the least but alot better since I got rid of Norton and replaced with NOD32.
Anyway, I need to suggest some backup strategies and implement them. I could show them how to backup to DVD, but that is hardly ideal. A tape drive in the PC could be an option, though I've never set one up before, I can't see it being complex. However, that would still leave the work on the laptop vulnerable, unless USB ones are available; but my god they must be slow. My only other idea is NAS. Could get a cheapo Freecom 80gb job but I have no idea something like that would last, and it would probably be left on 24/7 as no-one would remember to turn it off. At the end of the day, its still another HD. Alternatively, the Thecus YES Box N2100 in a RAID array would be great. However, they aren't particularly cheap (but then how much does their data mean to them? The pair aren't the kind of people that think like that though).
I need to get an idea of what they budget for this, obviously. But are there any other alternatives you guys can think of?
Many thanks :)
