Disaster recovery advice

[Tobeman]

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

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

[Moby-Dick]

what about an online backup solution ?

do both laptop have access to the web ?

eg. http://www.clunkclick.net/

[Splash]

While online backups are an option there's the fact that they can (will) be slower than a tape backup, and if you need to restore 1Gb of data across a half meg line it can take time. Personally I'd have a look into a couple of large USB2 hard drives - backup to one, copy from one to the other (less tech-savvy than a RAID, but has the advantage that you can leave one onsite and take the other offsite once the data has been copied for a little more redundancy.

All in all you have to figure out how much data they're backing up, and how it's to be done. For the laptop something like Acronis True Image Corporate Workstation would probably be ideal (it's what I use at work for the important guys. I take a backup to a hard drive in a machine daily, this drive is then backed up to an Ultrium tape drive on the main fileserver but this is most likely out of your budget)

[Moby-Dick]

Actually Online backups are only slow for the 1st backup , and for a restore ( althoguht many companies will provide you with your backups burnt to Disc for a more rapid restore )

day to day backups only send up the changed portions of changed files so are usually pretty quick. They also require less interaction than discs / tapes , so would suit a small business better ( gives the client less to worry about ! )

It does boil down to the nature of their data , and its ammount and more importantly how much they have to budget.

[EtheAv8r]

External USB drive(s) (can be taken offsite each night) and SyncToys... a free microsoft PowerToys utility that is absolutly brilliant and just perfect for this task

It is fast, free, reliable, free, easy to use, free, has great options - automatically keeps track of renamed files, can keep files on backup that are deleted from original source, and did I mention it is FREE?

Check out SyncToys.

[Tobeman]

what about an online backup solution ?

do both laptop have access to the web ?

eg. http://www.clunkclick.net/

I like the idea of the online backups. They've got an 8mb BT Business Broadband line which is handy (though was a complete chore; I tried steering them away due to my own and others (eg. here) experience of BT, but they'da lready agreed a contract ), and from when I checked, it was running at full speed. Are there any other services you'd recommend, similar to clunkclick, that I can take a look at?

[Moby-Dick]

yep - theres another one which is pretty good called carbonite.

http://www.carbonite.com/