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Small-Office Windows Based Backup Software?

Posted by Cliff on from the small-scale-disaster-recovery dept.

Billhead asks: "My boss purchased a Quantum SDLT220 tape backup drive for our few computers in the office, and I have been put in charge of maintaining the backups. The only prior backup experience I have is with my home networks using Python scripts. We don't have any special needs, just encryption and scheduling. Our original backup software isn't compatible with the SDLT220, and other backup software we have tried have been horrible (unable to decrypt backups, memory leaks, unstable network backups). What does the Slashdot community use for small office backups?"

3 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. Gonna sound horrible, but... by reklusband · · Score: 0, Insightful

    I'm fond of Veritas/Symantec for windows based backups. A pain to initially configure, but the support has gotten MUCH better and it's pretty flexible about what media you can backup to and from. It's been pretty good to me for disaster recovery and it's easy to set up media rotation (which is a very important thing to a small business owner that doesn't want to go crazy creating and maintaining media libraries.

  2. Backup Exec by Silicon+Mike · · Score: 2, Insightful

    http://www.backupexec.com/ version 11 moved totally in the right direction

  3. Re:Acronis... by Jhon · · Score: 2, Insightful

    My experience with small shops (ones that don't have an in-house IT department) is that they wont back up regularly if too many steps are involved.

    I haven't done contract work in about 5 years -- but I used to set up servers to backup to tape, spit out the tape when finished -- and send out nag SMB messages to change the tape if it hadn't been changed by noon. The owner or some designee would just swap tapes and pocket the most recent to take home. This requires next to no effort.

    Again, this is just my experience, of the "emergency" calls I was contracted to handle, most loss of data issues were due to the shops practicing exactly what you suggest. There was never more than 1 day of data loss with tape. Why? The drive wasn't regularly hooked up and backups performed. Playing with plugs or cables or drive-drawers is a quick way to get a small shop lazy.

    So... you can suggest that using tape is being "anal retentative", I would disagree. But I do agree with you on one point... external drives MIGHT work for small businesses -- providing they don't get lazy.

    In summary, if you don't require a backup solution that involves as little human intervention as possible, then using an external USB HD is fine.