Cheap Backup for an NT Server

[PurpleDoc]

I'd go the hard drive route. With how inexpensive they are you could set up a mirrored set and do a ghost on top of that if you wanted.

[SoJo]

Go with a Jazz or Orb drive (Orb will handle 2.2 gigs)thier both reasonablely priced. This way the customer can rotate the media in case of a fire or flood or something.

Second or spare hard drive is a good ideal as long as nothing happens to the system (See Above)

My .02

[tk421]

well now that i know that nt CAN support usb, i will probably do something like a jaz drive. do you know if jaz drives have good support for nt server?

[KCHowler]

Mirroring with NT or 2K server is very easy and cheap. The nice thing is if your hard drive crashes you can still boot off the mirrored drive, no down time! Make sure you get an identical drive for mirroring. In case of a fire or other disaster the tape backup is the best.

[MacGyver]

While mirroring is good to guard against physical failure of the hard drive, nothing beats a tape backup. Especially when your boss comes to you because he accidentally overwrote an important document. A mirror setup will do nothing for you in that case. Hence the need for tape backup and offsite backup data storage.

Any business that is too cheap to backup their data is CRAZY

[PurpleDoc]

We do alot of Data recovery here, and I can tell you that tapes have their downfalls as well. The two most common things that we get that is associated with tapes is; people will fail to see if the backup was successfull or tape breakage because the person is too cheap to buy more than 1 tape for a given amount of time. I hear from the customer, " Well the computer told me the back up was good." Wrong. People need to check their backup and see with the orbs in their head and make sure the data is good. With the mirrored set you can make the one of the drives in a removable chassis and take it home each night. but what ever the backup, check it.

[tk421]

[quote]Originally posted by MacGyver:
<strong>Any business that is too cheap to backup their data is CRAZY</strong><hr></blockquote>

You are right about that.

[Antimatter]

Rewritable CDs are a good budget option as you can fit a half decent amount of data on them(for a smaller business anyway). Selling a CD-writer to the client is fairly easy as well.
Travan IDE tape drives are a good budget tape option.