The time has come to get our backup system into place properly at our firm - and I have the job of making a decision. :suspect:

We have 5/6 PC's in 3 locations, all with fast internet access. Tape is messy, and I like the idea of internet backups that can be automatically scheduled from each PC whilst people work.

I previously implemented a fairly ropey backup for my PC using SecondCopy2000 and the hard drive of another networked PC. Works fine until the deleted copies get lost :confused: I don't think it is robust enough for the firm though.

In short, I want an internet backup system with no regular human input! :) And of course we don't want to pay the earth either.

Any recommendations on any providers / systems?

what volumes are you talking about?

full machine backups, or just data.

If it's full machine, you can forget doing over the net, it'd probably take 24 hrs to transfer everything.

My opinion, for what it's worth. Stop users saving things to their local drives, implement a disk server with user space allocated to each user.

Put a robust backup system on this one machine, backing up all the users data in a single shot.

A nightly backup to a an external harddrive at least, once a week change the drive and take the 'spare' off site. If you have the budget for it, get multiple devices and backup each day to a different one, allowing you to recover files from upto 5 days ago. You could also take a monthly backup that is also kept offsite.

With regards to the machines, rather than the data, create a standard image which will allow you to quickly and painlessly reinstall the operating system and apps in the event of a hard drive failure.

Do you have any kind of domain server or even office fileserver?

When you say fast internet access, do you have DSL (i.e same upstream speeds as download speeds)?

Without DSL I think you will find it incredibly slow.

I would suggest equipping yourself with a couple of USB2.0 or firewire external drives and a few editions of Vice Versa Pro.

Attach the USB drives to your server, set up Vice Versa Pro on each persons computer to perform a synchronisation of their critical data once a day to a USB drive on the server.

On the server, set up Vice Versa Pro to mirror one USB drive to another.

This can all be scheduled in XP (and 2K IIRC)

Every night, take the 2nd USB drive home with you.

You might also like to invest in a copy of symantec ghost to make disk images to store computer setups. I've heard its very good.

Nooooo, you see this is all too complicated. :confused:

We aren't PCboffins, and frankly nobody would ever bother to do proper backups. I thought about giving everyone a Maxtor One Touch, but I liked the idea of it all happening in the background and it being off site, and one less piece of distracting kit on everyones desk.

All I'm bothered about saving is files created using MS Office and the like (we really are simple souls :)). The file sizes wouldn't be much of a worry TBH because once the first biggie is done, the incremental changes will be quite small.

Soooo... being able to dump My Documents , or the latest compared files, is the sort of thing we are after.

You may already no, but something like 90% of small business that suffer a bad computer failure go bust within 6 months.

I'd make it your business to either become or temporarily hire on contract a pc boffin to sort out backups properly. This includes testing that the backups are restorable.

If a one touch device is the simplest and most likely to be used solution, then go with that. I'm sure you can schedule them to run transparently in some way.

I'd ensure that you take them off site though. If your office burns down then anything onsite will go with it, which will render backups pointless.

Originally posted by Tony
Nooooo, you see this is all too complicated. :confused:

We aren't PCboffins, and frankly nobody would ever bother to do proper backups. I thought about giving everyone a Maxtor One Touch, but I liked the idea of it all happening in the background and it being off site, and one less piece of distracting kit on everyones desk.

All I'm bothered about saving is files created using MS Office and the like (we really are simple souls :)). The file sizes wouldn't be much of a worry TBH because once the first biggie is done, the incremental changes will be quite small.

Soooo... being able to dump My Documents , or the latest compared files, is the sort of thing we are after.

How much data (in gigabytes) are you after backing up?

If nothing else check out Vice Versa Pro (http://www.tgrmn.com/) - its not expensive and allows you to back up multiple locations to a single or multiple locations in a variety of ways (mirror, archive, fully synchronised with history etc). You then schedule these copying operations just like a virus scanner.

This will allow you to back up onto any shared folder on any visible network drive.

This http://www.handybackup.com/features.shtml would let you back up onto an FTP server, that you could rent solely for that purpose. Not sure if it supports SSL though, which you'd want.

Tony I wouldn't recommend it as it is too unreliable.

For example our previous IT manager at work decided to backup our network here in Sheffield over the net to the faster backup server in Sidcup and stopped doing the backup locally. This worked fine until we had a power cut here in Sheffield which cut the link and for some reason the backup server created a new ID and session when it restarted therefore effectively blocking out any access to the backed up files. This continued for about 6 week when we had another power cut (due to a cable fault that has only just been found after 18 months) and it created yet another ID and session. When they tried to restore the data there was nothing there for them to restore because it hadn't been backing anything up for that 6 week period. If tapes had been done locally this wouldn't have happened.

Most of my colleagues lost about 6 weeks work. I was then exception as it didn't seem to have affected the drive I use.

Unfortunately the IT Manager found out to his cost that this is an unreliable method. Use with extreme caution I would say Tony.

The best practices are pretty much a mixture of above.

Writing all data to a server (or servers) instead of local machines is a start. As somebody else said this is easier if the machines are configured under a domain but you can still set up clients to do this if they are under a workgroup (its much more of a hassle though).

You want a decent RAID configuration on the file server(s). RAID 1 or RAID 5 as a minimum. RAID 1+0 or RAID 0+1 is better and much more afforedable now prices on drives are relatively low.

Having a RAID configuration only helps if one of the drives dies (which happens alot!), if somebody accidently deletes an important file or you have a fire you are still going to suffer data loss.

Backing up to another location over the net is only really an option if it can be done during non working hours. So if the office is in use from 9am - 6pm everyday then it leaves you 15 hours to put a backup somewhere. This of course depends on the size of the backup and your upload speed. Remember though that backups will get bigger and you will almost certainly have failures some days. As backups increase in size it means you will have to start increasing your upload speed (which is expensive!).

Backing up to high capacity tape drives during the night and alternating the tapes is the more standard way of doing it. Have a minimum of 3 tapes. 1 tape is backing up during non-working hours, 2 are off site.

From a software point of view Veritas software is probably the industry leader in backup software. Not cheap and not very intuative to use to be honest.

If this sounds too daunting then hire somebody to do it.

The only bit of advice I would add is this: TEST YOUR BACKUPS. Which ever backup method you go with make sure you test them regularly. You dont want to find out you have only been writing appended data to one drive when the rest are charcoaled :)

Originally posted by punk
If this sounds too daunting then hire somebody to do it.


Definetly. It may seem like an unnecessary expense but when you've lost your data, you'd probably wish you could pay ten times that to get your data back.

We use a number of HP Ultrium tape drives. They're worth their weight in gold. Forget DVDs, hard drives or web based backup - that may be ok for home but a business shouldn't do anything as shoddy.

Backup is one area you should NEVER economise on.

And when you have a system in place - test it. I worked for one place which did daily backups. When the server failed they checked the tapes and found them all blank!

I can sort this out for you with the company I work for...

After an initial heavy upload to our server of your original data further uploads are incremental. So the software will only transfer files that have changed, thus transfers are not massively time consuming / bandwidth hogging.

Our server will maintain up to a month of older versions of files in addition to the latest version of each file.

(have PM.d you my work email address if you want to go any further with this)

I've been looking at a few related things recently.


There's a service a backup data provision service that a friend and colleague in Canada is putting together but it's still in development so I can't recommend it at the moment.

The alternative is a utility called "Super Flexible File Synchroniser" which allows you to do FTP backups to a FTP server but I'll be honest it's a bit of a clutzy User Interface and it takes a fair while to get to grips with it...

Once it's setup though it works great...


All in all though I'd recommend it ONLY as an additional string to your data backup "bow", not the main one.