Network Guru question

[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.