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Backing Up Laptops In a Small Business?

Posted by kdawson on from the against-disaster-the-gods-themselves dept.

Bithmus writes "I have been tasked with finding a way for our company to handle our laptop backups. We currently have nightly backups of our servers, but no backups of laptops. In our business we develop, implement, and sell another company's software; I guess that makes us a Valued Added Reseller. During development our consultants will create copies of a customer's database on MSDE on their laptops. If a hard drive crashes, all of the work done on that laptop is lost. There are other files that need to be saved, but the databases are really the important items. Ideally these databases would be stored on the SQL servers and the other files stored on the file server, but this is not happening. What do Slashdot readers do to protect data on laptops or computers outside of a local network?"

3 of 293 comments (clear)

  1. Mozy by Alcimedes · · Score: 3, Informative

    They have a corporate and individual client. The individual offers unlimited backups for $5 per month. The corporate is something like 50 cents per gig, plus $5 per month. The nice part is it's a very intelligent backup client, will run from anywhere, and encrypts the data as you go. (you can use their key or generate your own.)

    www.mozy.com

    You should check them out. I've been very happy with them.

  2. Re:Clone 'em by iluvcapra · · Score: 3, Informative

    1) Security. If I can steal one of your backup drives, datawise, I just stole the notebook.

    It is regrettable that SuperDuper doesn't support encrypted backup targets.

    2) Efficiency. While I don't know SuperDuper, I assume it clones the entire drive. This seems like a waste of time for a few changed files. An incremental backup would be much faster and more efficient with maybe full backups weekly.

    FYI, it does do incremental backups, but they can be a bit slower than rsync, mainly because it does a bunch of tests when copying. The main appeal of SuperDuper! is that it copies everything, including alternate data streams on files (a big deal for us OSXers sometimes), extended FS attributes, and files that OS X would otherwise not allow you to, making the backup drive fully blessable and essentially indistinguishable from the original.

    I am a happy SuperDuper! user as well, my only gripe is that it lack the encryption and the ability to do "snapshots" of different versions of the filesystem -- though the latter is likely to be addressed by Time Machine.

    --
    Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
  3. iFolder by invisik · · Score: 4, Informative

    Novell's iFolder is great for laptops that travel in and out of the office. Has an open-source version as well as a commercial--so management can pick their comfort level. Clients run on Windows, Mac (better support coming soon), and Linux. Setup some automated methods of dumping your MSDE data.

    Check it out: http://www.novell.com/products/ifolder/

    -m

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    http://www.invisik.com