Backup Solution

[boogster]

Going to be installing new server on curric over the summer and did not want to go down the route of expensive tape drive/backup exec to do backups. I was thinking of removable USB HD's, say a couple that can be switched weekly and the other one left in safe, anyone gone down this route or would a NAS be better. The only thing with NAS is that it would be stored locally and if the school went up in smoke so would the backups.

 

Anyone use this kind of setup and does it work fine or do you have any other ideas. It is a smalll primary school and data is around 40GB at present.

 

If you could recommend a NAS or external HDs that would be great

[dhicks]

If you could recommend a NAS or external HDs that would be great

 

Our planned new setup involves both - a backup file server to hold "live" backups that users can restore from as they need, and removeable USB3 harddrives that will live in the fire safe. USB 3 looks good - should be much faster to transfer data than USB 2. You can probably upgrade an existing machine with an expansion card to handle USB 3 devices.

 

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David Hicks

[maniac]

Have you thought about subscribing to an on-line secure backup service - this removes the need for drives to be swapped etc. and holds your data securely off-site. 40GB is a relatively small amount of data, so should be possible to back this up over your net connection overnight - once one full backup has completed, differential backups after this should be relatively quick.

 

Our LEA offers this service, they backup our SIMS server for us as it was cheaper than buying the SQL addon for Backupexec.

 

Might be worth looking at.

 

Mike.

[boogster]

Thanks Mike

 

Have looked into online backups in the past and found this to be very expensive, dont know if prices have dropped since.

[sted]

ive done both i find that nas is easier (esp as one site uses backup exec and it forever says the disk isnt in when it is with usb hdds)

 

as a 3rd idea lg do a nas box with built in blueray writer so you can backup to nas then get that to dump to blueray disks to take off site

[k-strider]

if you have a select/schools agreement agreement DPM might be worth a look