Network Guru question

[The Dad Fisherman]

How big are your backups? You could get a second tape Drive and then split them onto 2 different tapes or you could replace the one you have with a larger capacity one.. You could also backup to disk...get an external hard drive and run backups as a file (not the greatest but would work).

Do you run a 7 day rotation on tapes or a 5 day. If a 5 day then you could run incremental backups....a full on friday and then incrementals on mon-thurs.

Depends how much you want to backup and how fast you would need to recover in a crisis.

Online backups are good....but pricey. I use to use a company called Amerivault to do those....it was awesome and I could restore files onto the fileserver in the UK before the chuckleheads over there could figure out what tape they needed to put in.

[Bob Thomas]

TDF,

We're backing up about 49gb each night. I run a 5 tape system with weekly, monthly and yearly backups on separate tapes.

I am hesitant doing incremental backups. If we have a crash right now, we'd need everything from yesterday due to the records management. I.e. if we arrested Joe Smith yesterday and crash today, we'd need those records.

Are tapes still the way to go now or should we be looking at CD/DVD's? We replace daily tapes each year by rotating the weekly and monthly up.

[striperman36]

I would look at a hosted option for Outlook.
Given the cost to replace the hardware/expand it hosting it makes more sense.
We hosted out our parish exchange at rackspace, about the same size
for less money per year that the hosted site than the 3 year amortization cost of a new server
We don't have have the archive retention requirements you may have, however that can be addressed with the vendor.

If you still wish to have it locally hosted, TDF's hosted archive solution is the way to go.

[RI Plugger]

The cheap way: Use your current backup system and use 2 tapes or delete some data that is getting backed up and is not needed.

The fast way : Buy a SNAP server and connect it to your network for RAID 5 Disk to Disk backup, Then the SNAP can archive to tape for you. (This is what I use.) If you can connect with Gig Ethernet then your backup should run faster and restore faster.

The expensive way: Buy a new tape library system from IBM.