In article <1110487529.607538.131750@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups. com>,
rick.huby@e-connected.com wrote:
>I am looking for a general backup solution for my company. We will be
>backing up less than 4 GB for the foreseeable future.
>
>Offsite backups seem great for a few reasons:
>1 - No hassle of checking tapes every day
>2 - No need to take tapes home every night
>3 - 100% automated
>
>So whats the catch? They seem both cheaper and lower in administration
>time than using a tape system and set of tapes. Is the cost just down
>to the amount of data invovled?
>
>Any reasons or recommendations on why NOT to go for offsite backup
>systems (eg backupdirect.co.uk)
>
>Any good recommendations for company's out there doing this?
>

The limiting factor IMO is your upstream and downstream data rates.
If you have a T1 (1.5Mb/sec) figure 150KB/sec and it's 500MB/hour to
backup. Upstream speed is frequenty less than downstream. Do the
math. This puts a hard limit on how fast you could recover and use the
data when you need it. You also don't want your backup process to run
into the business hours the next day.

One way to do this is to add a big disk (or, better, a mirrored pair)
on your own network and set up your backup software to backup
disk-to-disk over the LAN to daily saveset files. Say that process
runs at 10 PM and takes 2 hours. Set it up so that when it's done it
kickes off a process that copies the backup to the Internet backup
service. It can take as long as necessary to complete, even running
into business hours the next day without affecting any users (except
maybe slowing down their internet browsing a little.)

If you need to recover some or all of your data it's there locally
and easily accessable. No tapes or CDs to find. If, heaven forbid,
you have a fire your latest data will be offsite but you'll
need to download it.

This isn't rocket science but you do have to think things thru and
test test test.

Read this:

http://www.taobackup.com/

--

a d y k e s @ p a n i x . c o m

Don't blame me. I voted for Gore.

> I am looking for a general backup solution for my company. We will be
> backing up less than 4 GB for the foreseeable future.
>
> Offsite backups seem great for a few reasons:
> 1 - No hassle of checking tapes every day
> 2 - No need to take tapes home every night
> 3 - 100% automated
>
> So whats the catch? They seem both cheaper and lower in administration

Internet bandwidth is an issue.

Cost is also an issue if you have non-flat-rate payment for you Internet
connection.

For such amount of data, I would suggest the detachable (1394 or USB2) hard
disk to be the backup media. It is cheaper then tape drive + tapes, and by far
more reliable (and I think faster) then DVDs.

--
Maxim Shatskih, Windows DDK MVP
StorageCraft Corporation
maxim@storagecraft.com
http://www.storagecraft.com