Backup Stratagey

[techmon]

I am looking for an alternative means to backing up my file server than using a tape drive with the NT backup utility? What kind of products would you recomend?

I heard of EasySync and Norton Ghost.

Looking to see what kind of methods everyone is using to backup there systems.

Currently I am using a Colorado Travan tape drive but that is old and slow. It taks a very long time to catalog and browse the tape to restore and individual file.

I am looking to try and backup to another partition and maybe burn to disk or maybe DVD but I am not sure what is a good program to use for backup.

[Thunderwind]

Josh,

You could try a combination of Easysync & a DVD burn. You could sync the file server to your PC (room permitting), then burn to DVD.

Depending on your routine, this may become cumbersome because the burning is not automated. Unless there is a way to automate the DVD burn.

[Gabriel]

First - Ghost is not backup - Its an Image Soft.
Put all documents in one (or few) specific directory (which make it easier to work around).
Use backup Exec.

P.s. What kind of GB are we talking about...

[Ahcoraj]

I've been thinking of backup strategies myself lately, and have tried to start thinking outside the proverbial box of traditional, tape based systems. It started with a customer who asked why we couldnt just put another hard drive in the machine, a removable one he could take home with him. At the time an 8.6gb hdd was 100$, but was still more cost effective than say DLT. It all seems to come down to a matter of how valuable is the data to you. In the event of a failure on your main hard drive, and failure of your backup medium, how much will it cost you to get it back. For my personal use, i chose to buy another 60g hard drive, and ghost an image of the entire disk to it, then remove the drive and place it in storage. There are various disk syncing softwares out there also. I'm willing to take the chance that if my main hard drive fails, the backup drive won't, and if it does, only then will I have to pay hundreds of dollars for data recovery software services (although this would only be necessary if the disk wouldnt even spin up, as there are several excellent recovery utilities out there as well). If this is a personal file server, CD DVD Or IDE based solutions may be your answer. In a corporate environment, I stick with the tried and true DLT. Unfortunately, if you go out of your way to innovate in business and it fails, you lose your job. If the DLT fails, youre still screwed, but it will be looked upon as following SOP and and act of god rather than Your fault for trying somthing different

[celeste9519]

I just recently realized that small tape backup units for smaller companies are no longer sold at retail stores (CompUSA, Frys, MicroCenter).
My problem with adding more drives to put images on, is that if you are using 98, primary partitions are always assigned drive letters before extended partitions. I ran into this the other night when the new HDD was added, it was assigned D:, but shortcuts in the startup menu that pointed to D: could not run (because that partition was now called E
What is a small company with constantly changing, critical, 20gb or less of data supposed to do? Even backing up to DVD isn't enough space to do it all on one disk? On the other hand, I think that a DLT is a little too much for small (less than 10 employee or peer-to-peer) companies.
As far as software goes, I really like Backup Exec.
Just my thoughts on the topic.....