Musings of a West Texas Business Venture

Small Business Lesson One: Use Backups

Consider this: The average desktop-grade computer fails once every three (3) years.

Hard drives fail. Power supplies fail. Fans inside the machine will break down over time (and a dirty environment will only accelerate this process), causing CPU's and motherboards to overheat and fail. High powered video cards now come with fans and heat sinks, and they can fail too.

Depending on your requirements, your backup strategy could be CD or DVD media, an external hard drive, a dedicated backup storage solution, or tape backups. Your backup strategy could be local (at which point you need to make sure that you occassionally take backups offsite, in case the building burns down, etc...), or remote.

Backing up your data is only the first part of your backup strategy. The more important step is the restoration of your backups. Without the ability to restore backups, backups are useless. Make sure that restoration works.

SOHO operators should take a look at Carbonite backup. For a flat-rate ($5 / mo), and available for purchase online or at Staples, Carbonite will backup and restore an unlimited amount of data. It is not very fast, but it does work. On a recent trial that I did of the software, it took almost four days to backup about 20GB of data and about the same amount of time to restore it.

Another possibility for SOHO operators is JungleDisk, a great, free utility that is built on Amazon.com's S3 data service. Keep in mind that Amazon's S3 data service is not free (but quite affordable).

Small businesses (under 20 - 30 employees) should look at either an external large hard drive or a single tape drive. One good option is a Western Digital's NetCenter Network Drive. This $400 solution comes with EMC backup software and should be able to backup a small network with no problem. This product could be used in combination with Carbonite or JungleDisk (backing up the actual backups to their remote service) for a complete backup solution.

Larger backup needs can be solved using backup servers and tape auto-loaders. A custom server with six (6) redundant, large hard drives can be assembled for under $2,000. One possibility would be to backup the network onto this type of server, and then store these backups on a tape auto-loader. One of the best tape auto-loaders on the market is the Exabyte VXA-172 PacketLoader, which can handle more than 1TB of data without having to switch tapes.

For those who are interested, a great resource for advanced storage needs is StorageMojo.

posted by Anthony Presley @ 7:00 PM