I have to arrange for a company to backup our servers online during out of office hours.

Currently we have 2 servers, 1 running SBS and the other 1 running our Works System software and main file storage drive.

At the moment we use external hard drives everynight to backup our Works System software and main storage drive. But not SBS.

For extra saftety, due to a recent inccident, we need to garantee our system is recoverable if the worse happens.

Does anyone know of any companies or what questions i should be asking them regarding online backing up, any suggestions would be great ?

Matt.

I assume you mean doing backup to an online storage facility thats offsite, allowing for recovery.

This approach is very expensive, and is out of reach even for our 400+ employee organisation, and is targeted more at multinationals who can pour the money required into the highspeed data links required.

I would do as you are already with the other server, backup to an external device overnight. The next day someone in the office takes this device offsite, and keeps it at home. The next night backup to another device, and the following day do a swap. For night number 3, you overwrite the first one again and so on...

I assume you mean doing backup to an online storage facility thats offsite, allowing for recovery.

This approach is very expensive, and is out of reach even for our 400+ employee organisation, and is targeted more at multinationals who can pour the money required into the highspeed data links required.

I would do as you are already with the other server, backup to an external device overnight. The next day someone in the office takes this device offsite, and keeps it at home. The next night backup to another device, and the following day do a swap. For night number 3, you overwrite the first one again and so on...

Yes i did mean offsite backup.

We currently backup evernight so we have 5 backups, 1 for each day. These stay on site in a firesafe.

I think we are better taking them home, but they want me to look into getting it setup.

Cheers for your input.

A decent tape drive and storing them off site is the way to go

We use a company called DRS who collect our tapes everyday and store securely.. they can have predefined rotas for returning tapes, or you can use their web-interface to order tapes back to site.. we also have a contract with a 3rd party company who would provide a few bare-metal servers and rackspace for DR purposes.

A decent tape drive and storing them off site is the way to go

And by decent, I'm sure Alex includes encrypted if you're sending random people home with them...

And by decent, I'm sure Alex includes encrypted if you're sending random people home with them...

Not only that, but you need to make sure that the employees nominated to take the tapes home with them have somewhere safe to put them. One of the bosses at my last works had his house broken into, and his briefcase (holding the tape) nicked. The tape was password-protected, so whoever nicked it couldn't have read what was on it, but more to the point, the tape was no longer available to do a system restore if required...

We use one of these:

SonicWALL Online - Continuous Data Protection (CDP)

Whilst tied to there datastorage, there is talk of it talking to any ftp server in time.

It comes with baremetal recovery.

But not nessecarily the exact fit your after, but tapes etc work...besides offsite over the wires only works if you can get it back of the web, e.g. disastor and lets say you've lost your comms...

Tapes really do have a best of all worlds feeling.

A number of our clients use a company called Clunk Click & I have heard good things, including a successful DR using them. Never used it myself as we use an LTO & 2 DLTs & use a local company who get the tapes off site for us.

You can get removable media backup drives from dabs pretty cheaply, why pay someone else for it?

Edit: Online Data Backup specialists and Onsite Backup for UK business

It's going to be pricey, that's for sure. You also need to ask some pretty searching questions about the management and protection of your data. If the company go down the pan (and this is a very new field, and the streets are littered with companies who didn't make it work!), your data could be lost.

I'd still prefer a local backup method, and rotate the tapes offsite. The one thing you don't want to do is just backup to a local device and keep your tapes locally. If you do move tapes around, be aware delicacy of modern tape media, so make sure you know how they're handled. You also need to do regular test restores, to make sure your backups are good.

Phil

Just been in a meeting about it and mentioned about taking the storage home.

They are looking into this now. With a view to having 2 personell who take the storage home with the correct home safety devices in place.

We were looking at