Backup options

[lemonstar]

The school network has about 32 machines (16 in the suite) and currently there is about 50G of data that needs to be backed up. The LEA are suggesting we should install a 250G tape drive and possible upgrade the server. We currently backup using a tape drive. I wondered what the other options are - to hard drives, to a remote server using a BB connection - one company I worked for used a system of removable drives. I'm on the periphery at the moment. I don't know how the server is setup, I don't know what the RAID configuration is, etc. Apologies if this is too general a question but what are the most cost effective options to support a system that can backup weekly? A 250G drive shouldn't cost much but until I enquire further (this week) by talking to the ICT co-ord I don't know what is being proposed - frankly I doubt the co-ord will really have a very clear understanding either. When the school is experiencing financial difficulties that are now affecting job security I'm obviously interested to know that money is being spent wisely. How do we establish what the most cost effcetive solution is for our system - I imagine it is a fairly familiar situation.

[chrbb]

Sounds very similar to my setup, in one school I have two separate external hardrives - backup up entire server each week on alternate drives, one stays in school safe as it is shared with admin network the other, purely curric, goes home with me.
In my other school I have one external hardrive that is used weekly and stays in the school safe (admin and curric network) and a backup done weekly to the second server, which has wsus on it. I do the backup to the other server as I don't want to just rely on the external hardrive.

The external drives cost about £60.00 ish.

[PEO]

I think the most cost effective way would be nas server raid 5 1TB daily fullbackup. drives and tapes cost a fortune, pluss tapes need to be replaced every year to avoid backup failures, again can be alot of coin.

you can use free software such as openfiler, freenas, bacula etc to achieve this.

[dhicks]

The school network has about 32 machines (16 in the suite) and currently there is about 50G of data that needs to be backed up.

Put the data on an external hardware RAID-1 box, then whenever you want to "take a backup" you simply yank one of the harddrives out and shove another in, letting the RAID-1 array rebuild itself. This is what I do at home. RAID boxes are around £150 each, plus however much you want to spend on harddrives (£65-odd each for 500GB drives). Just did a quick search and found this:

LaCie 2big Dual 301251EK - PC World Business Online Store UK - Buy The Best Deals Online.

Which would seem to be quiet-running and come ready with two 500GB harddrives.

--
David Hicks

[eean]

We do the same as chrbb - keep it simple. 2 external hard drives and use windows backup.
Full backup on the weekend then incremental backup on week days. Swap the hard drive at the end of the week and one remains off site.
The only thing is that in windows you can't encrypt AND compress the backup - just one or other. So we use a little program called FireStreamer-RM ~£30. This allows you to do backup to file but Windows Backup thinks it's using a tape drive. It lets you encrypt and compress the file and will do other little things like email you if there are problems.

[PEO]

I love threads like this everyone on edugeek have diffrent ideas adn solutions.

I too have an external Hard drive for secondary backups. primary been tape